Foucault 1979 CdF, Chapter 11, 28 Mar 1979

Foucault Chapter 11:

11/7/10

Disciplinary power creates individuals through a grid of normalization and subjection via institutions, but how does Biopower individuate? It manages populations but a population is not an individual? How are individuals made into human capital exactly? What kinds of subjects does it create?

On page 272, how is it that interest is managed? If the conditions and variables for discerning interest are infinite AND the end goal or aim of these interests “the social good” cannot be known in advance, then how can we even talk about “interest”? Where do these interests come from? Who determines these interests and on what basis?

On page 117 Foucault says NeoLiberalism is not a mere recurrence of 18th cent. liberalism. But then in Chapter 11 he says that both 18th liberalism and Neoliberalism share the same problem, that the Sovereign is incapable of knowing how to govern properly. Well then, what REALLY makes neoliberalism different?

—Foucault locates a split in the concept of liberalism after Locke. For Locke liberalism while the problem of the inability or epistomological deficit of the soverign can be resolved through the law, after Locke Foucault picks up on a specifically economic resolution to the problem: the management of interests (wheather economic or social) within civil society. While 18th Liberalism created the juridical-subject, Neoliberalism created the homo economicus.

For Locke the social contract is a social/collective interest.

For Hume the social contract is based on the interests of individuals.

Neoliberalism resolves this tension by adopting the management of interests in general both social and individual.