Marius Gudmand-Høyer


99 

 

 
 

© Marius Gudmand-Høyer & Thomas Lopdrup Hjorth 2009 

ISSN: 1832-5203 

Foucault Studies, No 7, pp. 99-130, September 2009  

 

REVIEW ESSAY 

 

Liberal Biopolitics Reborn 

  

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-

1979. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell (New York: 

Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ISBN: 978-1403986542  

Marius Gudmand-Høyer & Thomas Lopdrup Hjorth, Copenhagen Business School   

 

Introduction 

 
What interest is there in talking about liberalism, the physiocrats, [Marquis] 

d’Argenson, Adam Smith, *Jeremy+ Bentham, the English utilitarians, if not be-

cause this problem in fact arises for us in our immediate and concrete actuality? 

What does it mean when we speak of liberalism – when we, at present, apply a lib-

eral politics to ourselves, and what relationship may there be between this and 

those questions of right that we call freedoms or liberties [libertés]?1 

  

There is something uncannily familiar about Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège 

de France in the spring of 1979.  This twelve-lesson lecture course, intriguingly entitled 

Naissance de la biopolitique, was published posthumously in French in 2004 and trans-

lated into English as The Birth of Biopolitics in 2008,2 and it now seems that Foucault 

was already then describing the nativity of an imminent future in remarkable detail. 

                                                      
1  Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979.  Translated  

by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 22  [Michel Foucault, Naissance 

de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France 1978-1979.  Edited by Michel Senellart (Paris: 

Gallimard/Seuil, 2004), 25].  Throughout the essay the English translations are consulted 

with – or, as in this case, modified with references to – the (more) original French text ver-

sions. References to the French original texts are provided in brackets after the reference to 

the English translations. 
2  An informative overview of the editorial conditions of the lecture course is found in Mike Gane, 

‚Foucault on Governmentality and Liberalism,‛ Theory, Culture & Society 25: 7-8 (2008): 353-

363.  Cf. also Michel Senellart, ‚Course Context‛, in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, 

Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78.  Translated by Graham Burchell (New 

York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 369-401 *Michel Senellart, ‚Situation des cours‛, in Michel 

Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population.  Cours au Collège de France 1977-1978.  Edited by 

Michel Senellart (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004), 379-411].  



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 100 

Covering topics such as the art of government, population, liberalism and neo-

liberalism, the state, civil society, political economy, sovereignty, enterprise, liberty, 

security, governmentality, and, not least, biopolitics, Foucault’s account truly seems to 

provide what he later called ‚an ontology of the present.‛3  The lectures seek to dis-

close the ‚domain‛ *champ+ in which several of our ‚currently possible experiences‛ 

come about as something we must engage in or relate to.4  But while Foucault had 

previously explored more specific areas of modern experience – madness, the clinical 

gaze, the rise of language as subject, delinquency, sexuality, etc. – the experiential do-

main at the center of Foucault’s attention in 1979 is of a much more extensive nature.  

In fact, The Birth of Biopolitics addresses nothing less than one of our greatest common-

places, that is, the experience of the social order that we currently take for granted, 

which Foucault, characteristically, prefers to describe through the history of the do-

mains in which this experience has taken shape as well as place.  Certainly, this is not 

the phenomenological experience of society without calendar or geography, nor is it a 

theoretical reconstruction of political philosophy; rather it has to do with the critical 

experience of society after it has become the privileged site for ‚the government of 

men insofar as it appears as the exercise of political sovereignty.‛5  Foucault’s lectures 

address a situation where the primary field of intervention for the arts of government 

materializes as a civil society inhabited by a population that is somewhat self-

regulating and at the same time somehow juxtaposed to both the super-institution of 

the state and the global environment of the market.  It is in this context that Foucault 

in 1979 studies the ‚rationalization of governmental practice in the exercise of political 

sovereignty‛ as it has been worked out by different variants of liberalism.6  

Compared to Foucault’s other works, The Birth of Biopolitics has a relatively 

simple outline.  After a short review of classical eighteenth-century liberalism (Lec-

tures 1-3), Foucault presents his investigations of two forms of neo-liberalism of the 

twentieth century: the German neo-liberalism associated with the ordo-liberals in the 

1930-50s (Lectures 4-7) and the American neo-liberalism associated with the Chicago 

School of Economics in the 1960s (Lectures 9-10), linked by a short reflection on French 

liberalism in the 1950-70s (Lecture 8).  After that, Foucault returns to a small selection 

of related problematics of classical liberalism, including the creation of homo 

œconomicus, the question of the invisible hand in Adam Smith, and the rise of civil so-

ciety in Adam Ferguson (Lectures 11-12).  Yet, even if the subject of liberalism appears 

to occupy most of the space in these lectures, the societal experience in question is not 

reducible to the ‚lack‛ of society typically associated with neo-liberalism.7  The lec-

                                                      
3  Michel Foucault: ‚Qu’est-ce que le lumières‛ (1983), in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits IV. Ed- 

ited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 687-688.  
4  Ibid., 688. 
5  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 2 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 3].  
6  Ibid., 2 [4]. 
7  Cf. e.g., Margaret Thatcher: ‚There is no such thing as society.  There are individual men  

                  and women, and there are families.‛ (Margaret Thatcher, ‚Interview‛, Women’s Own (1987), 

 October: 8-10). Cf. also Sverre Raffnsøe, Alan Rosenberg, Alain Beaulieu, Sam Binkley, Jens 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

101 

tures do not address an experience we can simply distance ourselves from, be it his-

torically or academically, critically or ideologically, although this has often been the 

case in the one-sided debate on neo-liberalism with reference to Foucault’s work.  The 

lecture course also contains a philosophical exploration that runs in some way beneath 

or parallel to the mainly sociological elaborations carried out from the ‚governmental-

ity perspective,‛ the existence of which is the main reason why the content of The Birth 

of Biopolitics is not unknown even though the full text version has only been generally 

available within the last few years.8  While The Birth of Biopolitics is obviously required 

reading for anyone who aspires to advance and widen the studies of governmentality, 

it is by no means exhausted by this perspective.  The lecture course also demonstrates 

how the societal experience has grown under our skin and is partaking of our every-

day working and private lives, whether on the margins or at the centre of the social 

order.  It has become the other face of our own governmentality, and in order to study 

it a question such as this must be asked: ‚What is then this ever so fragile moment 

from which we cannot detach our identity and which will carry this [identity] along 

with it?‛9  The immediate answer might simply be that it is a ‚biopolitical moment.‛  

However, in order to corroborate such a reading it is necessary first to take account of 

the allegedly very limited reception of the role of biopolitics in The Birth of Biopolitics.  

Even though the concept of biopolitics has received enormous attention in 

modern research over a great range of societal and economic problematics, both in 

conjunction with the governmentality perspective and more independently, there 

seems to be an incompatibility between the title of The Birth of Biopolitics and its actual 

content.  On this ground a number of commentators have emphasized that the lectures 

in fact do not deal with biopolitics, but rather represent a long digression into the his-

                                                                                                                                                                  
Erik Kristensen, Sven Opitz, Morris Rabinowitz, & Ditte V. Holm: ‚Neoliberal Governmen-

tality,‛ Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 1-4. 
8  This familiarity is not least due to Colin Gordon’s introductory overview of Foucault’s 1978  

and 1979 lectures in the seminal work published by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon & Pe-

ter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of 

Chicago Press, 1991).  Informative reviews of the reception of governmentality comprise 

Jacques Donzelot and Colin Gordon, ‚Governing Liberal Societies – the Foucault Effect in 

the English-speaking World,‛ Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 48-62; Nikolas Rose, Pat O'Malley 

and Mariana Valverde, ‚Governmentality,‛ Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2 (2006): 

83–104; Sylvain Meyet, ‚Les trajectories d’un texte: ‚La gouvernementalité‛ de Michel Fou-

cault,‛ in Sylvain Meyet, Marie-Cécile Naves and Thomas Ribemont (eds.), Travailler avec 

Foucault: Retours sur le politique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005); and Thomas Lemke, Eine Kritik 

der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität (Berlin/Hamburg: 

Argument, 1997). 
9  Michel Foucault, ‚For an Ethics of Discomfort‛, in Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of 

Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 3. Edited by James D. Faubion (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 443 

*Michel Foucault, ‚Pour une morale de l’incomfort‛ (1979), in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 

III. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1994), 783] (transla-

tion modified). 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 102 

tory of liberalism.10  Even Foucault himself seems to be of this opinion.  In the course 

summary of the 1979 lectures he writes that this ‚year’s course ended up being de-

voted entirely to what should have been only its introduction,‛11 and during the lec-

tures he almost apologizes for himself: ‚I would like to assure you that, in spite of eve-

rything, I really did intend to talk about biopolitics, and then, things being what they 

are, I have ended up talking at length, and maybe for too long, about neo-liberalism.‛12 

However, although there might be good reasons for such a reading, the central argu-

ment of this review essay is that such a conclusion underemphasizes the extent to 

which these lectures on liberalism and political economy actually do deal with biopo-

litics in a fundamental way.  This review argues, not only that political economy al-

ready in its modern conception is biopolitical by nature,13 but also that Foucault’s ac-

count, much more than a mere prelude to biopolitics, represents an exposition of bio-

politics analyzed in the register of liberal governmentality.  

In order to substantiate this argument, the essay begins with (1) a brief account 

of how the concept of biopolitics found in Foucault’s 1979 lectures both differs and 

concurs with the assorted characterizations of the concept he had previously pre-

sented.  Here it is also demonstrated how The Birth of Biopolitics should not be re-

garded as a mere parenthesis in the history of liberalism, but as Foucault’s most com-

prehensive analysis of modern biopolitics, situated within the framework of what he 

in 1978 designated ‚the history of governmentality‛14 and in 1979 ‚the general disposi-

tive [dispositif] of governmentality.‛15  Having established a more comprehensive con-

                                                      
10  Mark Kelly, ‚Afterliberalism,‛ Radical Philosophy 153 (2009): 46-49; Mike Gane, ‚Foucault on 

Governmentality and Liberalism,‛ Theory, Culture & Society 25: 7-8 (2008) : 353-363; Thomas 

F. Tierney, ‚Review Essay: Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the 

Collège de France, 1977-78,” Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 90-100; Diogo Sardinha, ‚Le découverte 

de la liberté,‛ Labyrinthe: La Biopolitique (d’)après Michel Foucault, 22:3 (2005): 89-99; Jeanine 

Hortoneda, ‚Sécurité, territoire, population et Naissance de la biopolitique de Michel 

Foucault‛, Empan, 59:3 (2005): 61-70; and Michel Senellart, ‚Course Context‛, 369-401 

*Michel Senellart, ‚Situation des cours‛, 379-411].  Cf. also Lars Gertenbach, Die Kultiverung 

des Marktes: Foucault und die Governementalität des Neoliberalismus (Berlin: Parodos, 2008), 

158-164; Laurent Jeanpierre, ‚Une sociologie Foucauldienne du néoliberalisme est-elle 

possible?‛ Sociologie et Sociétés 38:2 (2006): 87-111; Didier Fassin, ‚La biopolitique n’est pas 

une politique de la vie,‛ Sociologie et Sociétés 38:2 (2006): 35-48; and Bernard Andrieu, ‚La 

fin de la biopolitique chez Michel Foucault,‛ Le Portique: Foucault: usages et actualités, 13-14 

(2004): 1-20. 
11  Foucault, ‚Course Summary‛ (1979), in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 317 [Foucault, Nais- 

sance de la biopolitique, 323]. 
12  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 185 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 191]. 
13  Cf. Lars Thorup Larsen, ‚Speaking Truth to Biopower: On the Genealogy of Bioeconomy,‛  

 Distinktion 14 (2007): 9-24. 
14  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 108-109 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 111- 

 112]. 
15  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 70 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 71] (translation mo- 

dified). Here Foucault himself uses the French word “dispositif”, which we choose to trans-

late not with the common, yet inaccurate, ‚apparatus‛, but with the old, now rather rare 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

103 

cept of biopolitics, the next three sections review Foucault’s studies of (2) classical lib-

eralism, (3) German neo-liberalism, and (4) American neo-liberalism, with special em-

phasis on how biopolitics is deeply involved in these liberal arts of government.  As a 

conclusion, the review (5) recapitulates the different accounts of liberal biopolitics and 

outlines Foucault’s analysis of French neo-liberalism in the 1970s. 

 

1. Governmental Concepts of Biopolitics  

 
And this ‘bio-politics’ must itself be understood on the basis of a theme developed 

since the seventeenth century: the management of state forces [la gestion des forces 

étastique].16 

 

The reason why it is difficult to resolve whether Foucault’s lectures of 1979 do or do 

not deal with biopolitics is that such judgments presuppose that the meaning of 

'biopolitics' is both clear in itself and in Foucault’s work.  The judgment becomes even 

more difficult since the notion of biopolitics, which was not originally invented by 

Foucault, has a history that both precedes and succeeds his writings considerably.  It 

stretches from an eugenic kind of biopolitics, which was primarily advocated by Ger-

man and Swedish scholars of a National Socialist orientation in the early twentieth 

century, to a biologically oriented biopolitics, which was originally delineated as a 

subfield of political science focusing on biological factors involved in political behavior 

by a group of American and French researchers in the 1960s.  After Foucault, the con-

cept has been expanded even further to include not only a well-known biopolitical 

distinction between ‚bare life‛ (tò zôon) and political existence (ho bíos) in relation to 

sovereignty, but also a biopolitical mode of production in the world of postmodern 

capitalism, although the most prevalent use of the concept is perhaps to be found in a 

sizeable literature having as its critical target the biopolitics that is related to new in-

ventions of biotechnology and bioeconomy.17  None of these delineations of biopolitics 

match Foucault’s, although many have found inspiration in his work.  

                                                                                                                                                                  
and obscure English word, ‚dispositive.‛ As a noun this word has the connotation of 

‚something that disposes or inclines,‛ but in accordance with the adjective form, also ‚dis-

positive,‛ which is more precisely designating: first, being ‚characterized by special dispo-

sition or appointment;‛ second, having ‚the quality of disposing or inclining: often op-

posed to effective, and so nearly [equivalent to] preparatory, conducive, contributory;‛ and, 

third, ‚having the quality or function of directing, controlling, or disposing of something; 

relating to direction, control, or disposal‛ (cf. Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online, 2009, 

s.v.).       
16  Foucault, ‚Course Summary‛ (1978), Security, Territory, Population, 367 [Foucault, Sécurité,  

 territoire, population, 377]. 
17  Informative studies of the history of biopolitics include: Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics  

and Philosophy (2004). Translated by T. Campbell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneso-

ta Press, 2008); Thomas Lemke, Biopolitik – zur Einfürung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag GmbH, 

2007); A. Somit and S.A. Peterson, ‚Biopolitics After Three Decades – A Balance Sheet,‛ 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 104 

It is not enough, however, to disentangle the relationships between the various 

types of biopolitics and Foucault’s use of the concept, since he does not employ the 

notion of biopolitics with a stable set of connotations over time.  When he first intro-

duced it in 1974, in the context of social medicine, he only loosely indicated that biopo-

litics had to do with a political regulation of the biological aspects of human beings 

insofar they were members of given cities, nations or other groupings of people.18  In 

the closing section of The Will to Knowledge (1976), meanwhile, in which sexual matters 

from the eighteenth century and onward are described as a kind of contact point be-

tween a disciplinary anatomo-politics of the human body and a regulative biopolitics of the 

population, the concept becomes more distinct.19  While the first dispositive or major 

social technology of discipline works by atomizing a multiplicity of people into indi-

viduals in order to organize, monitor, utilize or cultivate them as discrete bodies, the 

latter dispositive of biopolitics works by amalgamating the same multiplicity of people 

into a population in order to stimulate, assist, regulate or manage them as a living re-

source residing in a particular environment.20  In Foucault’s work, therefore, the notion 

of biopolitics soon begins to designate a societal dispositive which is not only different 

from the classic juridical dispositive of law and sovereignty that originates in medieval 

times but also from the modern dispositive of discipline and surveillance established 

at the beginning of the eighteenth century.21  It is also in continuation of this new regu-

latory dispositive of the late eighteenth century that Foucault can call attention to what 

he regards as a decisive transformation in the general economy of power, from the 

sovereign’s right to take life and let live to the biopolitical capacity to foster life or disal-

low it to die, also described in 1976.22  Biopolitics now comes to involve a new set of 

political techniques that situate human life at the center stage of the political order, but 

also the effects of these techniques upon other political notions, phenomena and insti-

tutions such as sovereignty, the state, democracy, law, economy, civil society, etc.23  In 

the second part of the eighteenth century, biopolitics thus came into view as a kind of 

‚threshold of political modernity,‛24 at the same time as the ‚population‛ appears as a 

                                                                                                                                                                  
British Journal of Political Science 28 (1998): 559-571; and Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, 

‚Biopower Today,‛ BioSocieties 1 (2006): 195-217.  
18  Michel Foucault, ‚La naissance de la médicine sociale,‛ in Foucault, Dits et écrits III, 210.  
19  Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality 1 (St. Ives: Penguin Books,  

 1990), 139 [Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir. Histoire de la sexualité 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 

 1976), 173]. 
20  Michel Foucault, ‚Les mailles du pouvoir‛ (1976/1982), in Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 188-193. 
21  Ibid., 194. 
22  Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 139-143 [Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 178-182]. Cf. also  

Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976 (New 

York: Picador, 2003), 240-241 [Michel Foucault, “Il faut défendre la société:” Cours au Collège de 

France 1975-1976 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997), 220].  
23  Cf. R. Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, 13.  
24  Lars Thorup Larsen, ‚Biopolitical Technologies of Community in Danish Health Promotion.‛  

Unpublished paper presented at the conference ‚Vital Politics: Health, Medicine and Bio-

economics into the Twenty-first Century,‛ London School of Economics, September 5-7, 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

105 

‚machine of production‛ for the actualization of prosperity and welfare by use of its 

own resources and potentials.25  

So it is true that The Birth of Biopolitics does not deal directly with these more 

familiar instances of the concept.  It does not address the mentioned biopolitics of so-

cial medicine, of sexuality, or of power of death versus power of life, nor the well-

known biopolitical war of races and state-racism in the nineteenth century, or even the 

famous shift during which the Aristotelian human being, ‚a living animal with the 

additional capacity for political existence,‛ becomes modern man, ‚an animal whose 

politics places his existences as a living being in question.‛26  This is so because the 

understanding of the concept of biopolitics that is at stake in Foucault’s study of libe-

ralism in 1979 passes through the comprehensive history of governmentality he em-

barked upon in the previous lecture course of 1978 known as Security, Territory, Popu-

lation.  Here many of the connotations of biopolitics are integrated into Foucault’s re-

conceptualization of ‚the ugly word ‘governmentality’,‛27 but without leaving the bio-

political scope behind.28  In addition to referring the concept to the governmentaliza-

tion of the state, and to the historical conflict between this major social technology of 

government and the dispositives of law and discipline, Foucault thus defines govern-

mentality as:  

 
the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures analyses and reflections, calcula-

tions and tactics that allow the exercise of a very specific, albeit very complex, 

power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of 

knowledge, and dispositives of security as its technical instrument.29  

 

It is through and in continuation of this historical triangulation that Foucault 

develops the biopolitical framework in which he begins to study the liberal arts of 

                                                                                                                                                                  
2003. Other important reviews and critical studies on Foucault’s biopolitics include: 

Bernard Andrieu, ‚La fin de la biopolitique chez Michel Foucault,‛ Le Portique: Foucault: 

usages et actualités, 13-14 (2004): 1-20; Michael Dillon & Luis Lobo-Guerrero, ‚The 

Biopolitical Imaginary of Species-Being,‛ Theory, Culture, & Society 26:1 (2009): 1-23; Didier 

Fassin, ‚La biopolitique n’est pas une politique de la vie,‛ Sociologie et Sociétés 38:2 (2006): 

35-48; Lars Thorup Larsen, ‚Speaking Truth to Biopower: On the Genealogy of 

Bioeconomy,‛ Distinktion 14 (2007): 9-24; and Yves Charles Zarka (ed.), ‚Michel Foucault: 

de la guerre de races au biopovoir (dossier),‛ Cités 2 (2000): 8-96. 
25  Michel Foucault, ‚Les mailles du pouvoir,‛ in Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 193 (translated by  

the authors). 
26  Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 143 [Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 188].  
27  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 115 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 119]. It 

was Roland Barthes who, in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), originally coined the term ‚gou-

vernementalité‛ to indicate an ideological mechanism presenting the state as the effective 

originator of all social relations. Cf. also Thomas Lemke, ‚An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, 

Governmentality and State Theory,‛ Distinktion 15 (2007): 43-64. 
28  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 3]. 
29  Ibid., 108-109 [112] (translation modified; emphasis added). 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 106 

government in The Birth of Biopolitics, which is also why a short summary is appropri-

ate here.30 

First, Foucault considerably expands his conception of the population as a bio-

political target of government in 1978.  When describing the emergence of ‚the human 

species‛ *l’espèce humaine+ as an alternative to ‚mankind‛ *le genre humaine] in the 

eighteenth century, he is not only referring to the integration of this new species of 

living beings with biology, but also to the opening up of ‚the public‛ *le public].31  Rep-

resenting the population when it is seen from the perspective of its opinions and be-

liefs, ways of doing things, customs and habits, forms of conduct and behaviour, re-

quirements, fears and prejudices, this is the field where the population becomes man-

ageable, but in a positive line of attack by way of campaigns, education, promotion, 

alteration of attitudes, or assurances.32  So even if Foucault designates this new field of 

biopolitical intervention as the natural ‚environment‛ or ‚milieu‛ of the population, 

this environment does not match a biological habitat.  Rather it is a particular biosocial 

domain in human history, in which different series of events produced by the popula-

tion itself interconnect with the more circuitous natural events happening around the 

living beings that constitute this population. For that reason, the population is not 

merely a biological species, a group of legal subjects, or individual bodies of discipline; 

it also represents its own natural or intrinsic logic, constituted as it is by different 

probabilities, by uncertainties and temporalities, by dangers, risks, and contingent 

events, in the same ways as this population varies with the climate, the material sur-

roundings, the intensity of commerce, the circulation of wealth, laws and traditions, 

etc.33  Hence, in 1978 Foucault conceptualizes the governmental target of the popula-

tion as a new collective focus of biopolitics, representing a ‚political object‛ insofar the 

population is that on which and towards which the acts of government are directed, 

but also a ‚political subject‛ insofar as it is the population that is called upon to con-

duct itself in a particular way.34  

                                                      
30  Informative studies on this triangulation include: Michael Dillon, ‚Governing Through Con- 

tingency: The Security of Biopolitical Governance,‛ Political Geography 26:1 (2007): 41-47; 

Charles Ruelle, ‚Population, milieu et normes: Note sur l’enracinement biologique de la 

biopolitique de Foucault,‛ Labyrinthe: La Biopolitique (d’)après Michel Foucault 22:3 (2005): 27-

34; Anault Skornicki, ‚Le ‘biopouvoir’: détournement des puissances vitales ou invention 

de la vie (L’économie politique, le pian et le peuple au XVIIIe siècle),‛ Labyrinthe: La 

Biopolitique (d’)après Michel Foucault, 22:3 (2005): 55-65; Ute Tellmann, ‚Foucault and the 

Invisible Economy,‛ Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 5-24; and Thomas F. Tierney, ‚Review Essay: 

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78,” 

Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 90-100. 
31  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 75 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 77]. 
32  Foucault, ‚Course Summary‛ (1978), in Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 367

 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 377].  
33  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 20, 70 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 22,  

 72].  
34  Ibid., 42-43 [44-45]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

107 

Secondly, in Foucault’s account the surfacing of a population being both self-

regulating and regulated in this way is incomprehensible without the second compo-

nent in the triangulation, that is, political economy.  Here Foucault departs in a seminal 

transformation from a mercantilist to a physiocratic problematization of scarcity and 

the circulation of grain in the eighteenth century.35  While the mercantilist policy had 

worked for the protection of the wealth of the state by preventing scarcity from occur-

ring by various disciplinary restrictions on the cultivation, pricing, storage and export 

of grain, the physiocrats advocated for an opposite strategy that was based on the free 

circulation of grain, both within and between nations.  Instead of working to prevent 

the one singular event of scarcity, this new approach allowed for spontaneous fluctua-

tions in a free circulation, being composed of various series of plural events – of          

pricing, supply, demand, and production; of the behaviour of producers, consumers, 

buyers, importers, and exporters; of weather conditions; and of the world market – 

which were now all being analyzed as processes not to bring under control but to 

grant their natural course.36  According to Foucault, the activation of the physiocratic 

agenda thus entailed that economic government should not so much aim to prevent 

something in advance in accordance with the logic of the established ‚juridical-

disciplinary system‛ as to be ‚working within the reality of fluctuations between 

abundance/scarcity [or] dearness/cheapness.‛37  Parallel to widening the concept of the 

population, Foucault also expands the relevant form of governmental knowledge rele-

vant for biopolitics to include not only such disciplines as social medicine, public hy-

giene, statistics and demographics but also political economy, constituting a science 

that analyses and reflects upon ‚the production of collective interest through the game 

of *individual+ desire‛ along with its circulation within the household of society.38 

Thirdly, Foucault stresses that the art of government requisite for the economi-

cal perception of the population’s self-regulation is not that of the prototypical disposi-

tives of law and of discipline, the former working by prohibitions in relation to legal 

subjects in a territory of sovereignty, and the latter by prescriptions in relation to indi-

vidual bodies in a coordinated space of surveillance.39  Instead, this government works 

in accordance with ‚the dispositive of security‛ [“le dispositif de sécurité”], which seeks 

to regulate the open series of events produced by the population in its natural envi-

ronment, not by ‚assurance‛ and ‚safety‛ *“sûreté”+, but by ‚taking into account that 

which can happen‛ *‚sécurité‛+.40  As such, security could oftentimes ‚make use of 

some instruments of prescription and prohibition,‛ but then as means to an end and 

not as goals in themselves, and this end would be ‚to respond to a reality in such a 

way that this response cancels out the reality to which it responds – nullifies it, or lim-

                                                      
35  Ibid., 29-53 [32-56].  
36  Ibid., 45 [47]. 
37  Ibid., 37 [39]. 
38  Ibid., 72 [74]. 
39  Ibid., 4-9 [6-11].  
40  Ibid., 21 [23]. Cf. also Mariana Valverde, ‚Genealogies of European States: Foucauldian 

 Reflections,‛ Economy and Society 36:1 (2007): 159-178. 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 108 

its, checks, or regulates it.‛41  Therefore it is not the case that security lets anything 

happen at random or arbitrarily, but that it allows things to happen exactly at the level 

where certain things are able to regulate themselves naturally.  In other words, securi-

ty works by  

 
allowing circulations to take place, controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, 

ensuring things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually 

going from one point to the other, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of 

this circulation are canceled out [through] a progressive self-cancellation of phe-

nomena by the phenomena themselves.42  

 

The basic principle that is set up for state government by this logic of security is that 

government must in some way constrain itself in respect of the natural processes of the 

population and not intervene too much by prohibitions and prescriptions.  In its place, 

the government will have ‚to arouse, to facilitate, and to laisser faire, in other words to 

manage [gérer] and no longer to control through rules and regulations [réglementer].  

The central objective of this management [gestion] will be not so much to prevent 

things as to ensure that the necessary and natural regulations work, or even to create 

regulations that enable natural regulations to work.‛43  

Consequently, what Foucault establishes in the lectures of 1978 is an indisso-

luble triangulation of security, political economy and population, which should be 

regarded as genuinely biopolitical insofar it does not dismiss his earlier conceptualiza-

tions but rather adds to or adjusts them.  This adjustment is carried out within the his-

torical framework of governmentality, whose new ‚fundamental objective < will be 

state intervention with the essential function of ensuring the security of the natural 

phenomena of economic processes or processes intrinsic to the population.‛44  Yet, it is 

also in this historical development of the eighteenth century that Foucault discovers 

how the questions of ‚freedom‛ and ‚liberalism‛ arise as internal problematics for the 

new governmentality to handle.  For the freedom that surfaces here is neither the old 

aristocratic question of exceptions and privileges to be granted to certain individuals 

nor the juridical question of legitimate individual rights as opposed to the abuses of 

power of government or sovereignty.45  What arises is the problem of managing an 

element of freedom that has become indispensable and vital to government itself, and 

without which the government will fail to govern not right but well, that is, in accor-

dance with the self-regulation of the population.  Thus Foucault corrects his earlier 

claim that the establishment of liberal policies and demands for freedom in the eigh-

teenth century should be seen on a background of disciplinary observations and in-

                                                      
41  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 47 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 48].  
42  Ibid., 65-66 [67-68]. 
43  Ibid., 353 [360-361]. 
44  Ibid., 353 [361]. 
45  Ibid., 48-49, 353 [49-50, 361-362]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

109 

structions, concurrently restricting and guaranteeing the exercise of this freedom.46  In 

the biopolitical history of governmentality the major social technology against which 

the conduct of free conduct should be analyzed is now security, according to which 

‚freedom‛ becomes nothing other than ‚the correlative of the development of the dis-

positives of security,‛ which cannot ‚operate well except on condition that this free-

dom is given to the circulation of things.‛  What Foucault discovers in this history is a 

modern form of freedom, that is, ‚the possibility of movement, change of place, and 

processes of circulation of both people and things,‛ which is also what the liberal arts 

of government began venturing to secure and bring into play by acting on the actions 

of the population.47  

It is on the background of all this that Foucault launches his biopolitical explo-

ration of liberalism and neo-liberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, which is clear from the 

following note found in the manuscript for his first lecture in 1979: 

  
With the emergence of political economy, with the introduction of the limiting 

principle into governmental practice itself, an important substitution, or doubling 

rather, is carried out, since the subject of right on which political sovereignty is ex-

ercised appears as a population that a government must manage [doit gérer+ < This 

is the point of departure for the organizational line of a ‚biopolitics‛.48  

 

‚But who does not see,‛ Foucault continues, ‚that this is only part of something much 

larger, which *is+ this new governmental reason?‛  And then formulates the general 

aim of the lectures: ‚To study liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics.‛49  So 

while liberalism and biopolitics are by no means equivalent constructs, they are not 

entirely separable in Foucault’s work of thought either.  Rather they present them-

selves as major overlapping circles partly covering each other in a comprehensive 

study of ‚the way in which the specific problems of life and population have been 

posed within a technology of government which, although far from always having 

been liberal, since the end of the eighteenth century has been constantly haunted by 

the question of liberalism.‛50  

 

 

 

 

                                                      
46  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 48 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 49]. Cf.  

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (London: Penguin Books: 1991) 221-224 [Michel 

Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 223-225].  
47  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 48 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 49]. 
48  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 22n* [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 24 n*] (transla- 

tion modified). Foucault did not present this point at the lecture but only in the manuscript,  

 which is found in a footnote in the published edition.  
49  Ibid.  
50  Foucault, ‚Course Summary,‛ (1979) in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 323-324 [Foucault, 

 Naissance de la biopolitique, 329] (tranlation modified). 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 110 

2. Classical Liberalism  

 
[S]tarting from the end of the eighteenth century, throughout the nineteenth cen-

tury, and obviously more than ever today, the fundamental problem is not the con-

stitution of states, but without a doubt the question of the frugality of govern-

ment.51 

 

In Foucault’s reading, the birth of liberalism is inseparable from the notion of ‚frugal 

government‛ by which the question of ‚the too much and too little‛ develops into the 

central criterion around which the art of government will revolve.52  However, in    

order to understand how this principle attains the importance it does, it is necessary to 

consider first Foucault’s study of liberalism in the context of the governmental practice 

and rationality associated with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century raison d’État or rea-

son of state, which was the topic of several of his lectures from 1978.  Because this type 

of government had the maximizing of the state’s strength as its primary objective and 

therefore was relatively autonomous in its workings, Foucault links it to mercantilism 

regarded not only as proto-economical doctrine, but also as a particular organization 

of commercial production and circulation, according to the principles that the state 

should enrich itself through monetary accumulation, strengthen itself by increasing 

the population, and uphold itself in a state of permanent competition with foreign 

states.53  While this last principle was the permanent objective of an external military-

diplomatic technology of the state, Foucault finds the other two to be organized by an 

internal technology of the police, also described in the 1978 lectures.  Seeing that this 

police technology, which represented a set of administrative techniques and statistical 

knowledges concerned with maximizing the volume, productivity and health of the 

inhabitants within the state territory in order also to maximize state power, was prin-

cipally exercised by means ‚of permanent, continually renewed, and increasingly de-

tailed regulation,‛ Foucault also links the birth of liberalism with the ‚breaking up‛ of 

this ‚over-regulatory police‛ being unable to deal with the ‚spontaneous regulation of 

the course of things.‛54  

Yet, what Foucault in 1979 locates in the tradition of classical liberalism is first 

of all an ongoing reflection on the question of how to rationalize that exercise of      

government that was already established between state reason, mercantilism and the 

police.  Taking this existing governmental practice as a point of departure, the liberal 

critique problematized and embarked upon correcting the rationale and practice of 

reason of state from the inside.  Rather than overthrowing the established order, the 

                                                      
51  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 29 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 30-31].  
52  Ibid., 28 [30]. 
53  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 5 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 7]; Foucault, 

 Security, Territory, Population, 285-310 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 293-318]. 
54  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 340, 354, 344 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire,  population,  

 348, 362, 352]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

111 

critique pointed to ‚an internal refinement of raison d’État,‛55 being principally op-

posed to the continuously expanding government of state reason.  An incessant and 

indefinite government of this self-sufficient type, the liberal critique objected, would 

never be able to give any comprehensive account as to why it was governing in the 

first place, or how it was to govern in the best possible way.  In opposition to the prin-

ciple of maximizing government, the liberal critique pointed to the principle that gov-

ernment should recognize and take account of the self-regulation of the governed, 

which also implied that not just any type of government would be an appropriate 

government.  The regulation of government should take hold of this self-regulation of 

the governed by imposing on itself what Foucault describes as a work of ‚auto-

limitation.‛56  Accordingly, classical liberalism established itself as an art of govern-

ment that was to economize with its interventions on a scale between minimum and 

maximum, almost by the same logic as the dispositive of security mentioned above, 

but always prioritizing the minimum as the optimum, as long as this was possible and 

appropriate with regard to the self-regulation of the population.  

This is why Foucault suggests that this biopolitical and liberal art of governing 

of the late eighteenth century is describable as the emergence of a new ‚frugal gov-

ernment‛ within the governmentality of raison d’État; it was the entry into the art of 

government of the problematics pertaining to the question of the necessary amount 

and extent of governmental intervention.57  Here a good government is no longer au-

tomatically equal to a detailed and comprehensive government.  Rather, a good gov-

ernment is a government that takes into consideration, reflects upon and fine-tunes its 

operations according to its overall goals, as well as the nature of what it governs.  As 

such, good government also reflected the answer that a group of merchants, in Mar-

quis d'Argenson’s famous account, should have given to a mercantilist minister asking 

them what he could do for commerce: Laissez-nous faire.58  

In this period of time, when Europe began to gain the position of a particular 

and privileged region of unlimited economic development in relation to a world mar-

ket, Foucault also identifies two interrelated problematics of primary importance for 

the formation of the new art of government.  The first of these is the installation of the 

market as a place and instrument for the formation of truth.59  From the Middle Ages 

to the eighteenth century, the market was essentially ‚a site of justice,‛60 in the sense 

that it was characterized by an extreme and thorough regulation pertaining to what 

                                                      
55  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 27, 20-22 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 29, 23-24]. 
56  Ibid., 10 [12]. 
57  Ibid., 28 [30].  
58  D’Argenson, ‚Lettre à l’auteur du Journal économique au sujet de la Dissertation sur le commer- 

ce de M. le Marquis Belloni, Journal économique, April (1751): 107-17; quoted in Foucault, The 

Birth of Biopolitics, 25 n16-17 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 28, n16-17]. D’Argenson 

was also the originator of the related expression pas troup governer (‚do not govern too 

much‛).  
59  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 29 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 31]. 
60  Ibid., 30 [32]. 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 112 

products were to be sold, their origin and manufacture, and not least their price.  This 

price had to reflect ‚the just price, that is to say, a price that was to have a certain rela-

tionship with work performed, with the needs of the merchants, and, of course, with 

the consumers’ needs and possibilities.‛61  Adding to this, the market was a site of jus-

tice, tightly organized in order to prevent fraud and theft.  Overall, the market could 

thus be seen as ‚a site of jurisdiction‛ in the sense that it functioned as ‚a place where 

what had to appear in exchange and be formulated in the price was justice.‛62 Mean-

while, what happens in the eighteenth century is a fundamental transformation of sig-

nificant importance for the formulation of a liberal art of government.  By way of 

eighteenth-century political economy the market is reconfigured as a place that has a 

certain naturalness, which one has to be knowledgeable about.  From being an ordre 

artificiel, established and regulated through the mercantilist policies, the market now 

becomes an ordre naturel.  From being a site of jurisdiction, the market becomes a site 

for the formation of a ‚normal,‛ ‚good,‛ ‚natural‛ or ‚true price‛; that is, a price that 

‚fluctuates around the value of the product‛ and is determined by the interplay be-

tween the costs of production and the concrete demand.63  Thus, to the extent prices 

are formed through ‚the natural mechanisms of the market they constitute a standard 

of truth which enables us to discern which governmental practices are correct and 

which are erroneous.‛64  In this sense, the market becomes a site of the formation of 

truth, a ‚regime of veridiction‛ as to the governmental practice.65  Not because politi-

cal economy as such tells the truth to government, but because political economy 

points to the site where government will have to look ‚to find the principle of truth of 

its own governmental practice.‛66  

Foucault associates the second problematic of importance for the formation of 

the new art of government with nineteenth-century English radicalism and utilitarian-

ism.  Here a new critique of the proper limitation of government was established based 

on an estimation of the utility versus the non-utility of governmental actions and in-

terventions.67  Being less directed at the question of whether government had the legal 

                                                      
61  Ibid. 
62  Ibid., 31 [33]. 
63  Ibid. 
64  Ibid., 32 [34]. 
65  Ibid., 36 *38+. With his neologism of ‚the regime of veridiction‛ (which is later on also called an  

‚alethurgia‛) Foucault aims at studying ‚under what conditions and with what effects a 

verdiction is exercised, that is to say, < a type of formulation falling under particular rules 

of verification and falsification‛ (ibid., 36 [38]).  Therefore Foucault does not seek to study 

what truth is as such, but rather how something has come to work as truth in particular 

ways.  In connection with this he can also retrospectively point to his earlier work on the 

psychiatric institution, the penal system and the sexual confessional, to some degree in-

cluded in the same formation of specific ‚veridictional regimes‛ with ‚political signific-

ance‛ (ibid., 36 *37-38]).  
66  Ibid., 32 [34]. 
67  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 51 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 53]. Cf. also Fou- 

cault, Security, Territory, Population, 74 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 76]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

113 

right or not to interfere as is does, this critique considered instead government in 

terms of its concrete objectives and whether the exercise of government was in accor-

dance with these objectives or if it was governing too much or too little.  This critical 

question about the appropriate and desirable way to limit governmental practice was 

therefore also a question regarding what kind of auto-limitation government should 

impose on itself given that it was to regulate in agreement with the self-regulation of 

the governed and with their natural environment and actual conditions.  With          

reference to the general utility of the governmental practice the critique was to con-

front cases where regulation would be unreasonable, counterproductive or simply 

futile, and for that reason it would seek to define the limits of governmental compe-

tence on the basis of what it would be useful or useless for government to do or not to 

do.  It is from this position that the radical limitation-critique can persistently raise the 

question to every single governmental action: Is this useful and for what?  Within 

what limits is it useful?  When does it stop being useful?  And when does it become 

harmful?  But even if these questions are very close to what Jeremy Bentham sought to 

distinguish as the agenda and the non-agenda, designating the economic actions of gov-

ernment with regard to whether or not they increase general happiness according to 

the utilitarian principle of maximizing happiness and minimizing pain,68 Foucault is 

cautious not to reduce English radicalism to a mere projection of utilitarian theory or 

ideology onto the field of political practice.69  Instead, it is utilitarianism that could be 

regarded as more than a philosophy or science, since it is first and foremost to be con-

sidered a technological attempt to define the competences of the art of government, 

with a more or less direct reference to what Foucault regards as ‚the fundamental 

question of liberalism‛: ‚What is the utility value of government and all actions of 

government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things?‛70  

These two central elements – the market as a site of veridiction operating 

through the principle of exchange and the limitation calculus by which the utility of 

government is measured – Foucault understands as tied together by the category of 

interest.  The new art of government is not organized around a self-referring state, 

seeking the maximization of its power, men and wealth, but must deal with the com-

plexities of interests as they become manifest in the complex and delicate ‚interplay 

between individual and collective interests, between social utility and economic profit, 

between the equilibrium of the market and the regime of public authorities, between 

basic rights and the independence of the governed.‛71  From directly interfering with 

                                                      
68  Jeremy Bentham, Method and Leading Features of an Institute of Political Economy (including fi- 

nance) considered not only as a Science but also as an Art (1800-1804); quoted in Foucault, The 

Birth of Biopolitics, 24, n9 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 26-27, n9]. Besides the agenda 

and the non-agenda Bentham also works with the third category of sponte acta, designating 

the economic activities spontaneously developed by the members of the community with-

out governmental intervention.  
69  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 40 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 41]. 
70  Ibid., 46 [48].  
71  Ibid., 44 [46]. 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 114 

and regulating things, men and wealth with the aim of maximizing the strength of the 

state, as in the logic of state reason, government should now only deal with these inso-

far as they are of interest to somebody.  Hence, as Foucault states, government ‚is only 

interested in interest.‛72  But at the same time government ‚must not obstruct the in-

terplay of individual interest,‛ not only because of respect for freedom of circulation 

and self-regulation of the population, but also because it is impossible for government 

to have full knowledge of the logic of this multiplicity of interests it seeks to encour-

age.73  This is why Foucault accentuates the ‚invisibility‛ rather than the ‚hand‛ in the 

famous analogy of Adam Smith.  In addition to the existence of something like a 

providence bringing together the multiple threads of individual interests, the analogy 

also refers to the fact that the connection between individual pursuit of interests and 

profit and the growth of collective wealth and welfare is essentially imperceptible.74  

Both to facilitate the formation of individual interests for the collective good and to 

allow this invisible formation to self-regulate thus becomes another exigent balance for 

the liberal art of government to work with again from the standpoint of too much or 

too little.   

It is in continuation of this liberal and biopolitical art of governing, which re-

volves around the balancing of individual and collective interests, that Foucault re-

turns to the question regarding the relation between security and freedom that he initial-

ly raised in the 1978 lectures.  According to Foucault, it is futile to state that a liberal 

mode of governing is more tolerant and flexible than previous modes of governing, 

because it is founded on and utilizes freedom in a particular way.  Such an idea should 

be avoided, since it presupposes that freedom is a quantitative measurable entity, but 

also because it implies that freedom is a universally given that is progressively rea-

lized over time.  Foucault instead proposes that freedom ‚is never anything other – 

but this is already a great deal – than an actual relation between governors and go-

verned, a relation in which the measure of the ‘too little’ existing freedom is given by 

the ‘even more’ freedom demanded.‛  When Foucault employs the term ‚liberal,‛ he is 

therefore not referring to an art of government that is content to respect or guarantee 

particular forms of freedom.  Instead he is referring to a governmental practice that ‚is 

a consumer of freedom‛ since ‚it can only function insofar as a number of freedoms 

actually exists: freedom of the market, freedom of discussion, possible freedom of ex-

pression.‛75  This entails that liberalism is an art of government that constantly has to 

manufacture and produce freedom, just as it must make sure that there is a sufficient 

amount of freedom in order to benefit from the natural capacities inherent in the self-

regulation of the population and the market.  The actual freedoms called for and en-

tailed by this governmentality are not first and foremost established according to ju-

ridical principles.  Rather, they are balanced according to the dispositive of security 

                                                      
72  Ibid., 45 [47]. 
73  Ibid., 280 [282]. 
74  Ibid., 278-282 [275-284]. 
75  Ibid., 63 [65]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

115 

that functions as a counterweight and ensures that the wellbeing of the population is 

not endangered by an overflow and excess of freedom.  According to Foucault, liberal-

ism’s production, consumption and utilization of freedom is thus inseparable from the 

establishment of a variety of limitations, interventions and controls that show up in 

limiting the freedom of the market through anti-monopoly legislation, for example, or 

special taxes on import:  

 
In short, strategies of security, which are, in a way, both liberalism’s other face and 

its very condition, must correspond to all these imperatives concerning the need to 

ensure that the mechanism of interests does not give rise to individuals or collec-

tive dangers.  The game of freedom and security is at the very heart of this new go-

vernmental reason.  The problems of what I shall call the economy of power pecu-

liar to liberalism are internally sustained, as it were, by this interplay of freedom 

and security.76  

 

The emergence of this type of governmental activity also contributes to Foucault’s 

more formal re-conceptualization in 1979 of governmentality, now being ‚the way in 

which one conducts the conduct of men,‛77 where the latter notion, la conduite in 

French, has a twofold meaning for Foucault: (a) the activity of conducting [conduire] 

and of conduction [la conduction] and (b) the way in which one conducts oneself [se 

conduire], lets oneself be conducted [se laisse conduire], is conducted [est conduit] – that 

is to say, the way in which one finds oneself to behave [se comporter] as an effect of a 

conduct [une conduite] that represents an action of conducting or of conduction.78 

When the law prohibits certain acts and legitimizes certain rights, and when discipline 

prescribes an obligatory behavior under supervision, the economy of power associated 

with this new formal governmentality approaches the modern freedom of liberalism 

insofar as both the ‚political‛ conduct of others and the ‚ethical‛ conduct of oneself 

actively presupposes and seeks to regulate a freedom that is always already at hand 

but  equally in need of security measures in order not to deteriorate or be led astray.79  

The intrinsic challenges for this economy of biopolitical power are clearly discernable 

in the two adaptations of neo-liberalism that Foucault also studies in the 1979 lectures.  

 

 

 

 

 

                                                      
76  Ibid., 65 [67]. 
77  Ibid., 186 [192]. 
78  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 193 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 196- 

 197]. 
79  Cf. Michel Foucault, ‚The Subject and Power,‛ in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,  

Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd Ed. (Chicago, IL: University of 

Chicago Press, 1983); and Foucault, ‚Un système fini face à une demande infinite,‛ (1983) in 

Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 374. 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 116 

3. German Neo-Liberalism 

 
The German model which is being defused, debated, and forms part of our actually, 

structuring it and carving out its real shape, is the model of a possible neo-liberal  

governmentality.80  

 

The 1979 course gives considerable attention to German neo-liberalism, primarily in 

the form of the ordo-liberals of the Freiburg School.  Central figures in this School are 

the economist Walter Eucken and the jurists Franz Böhm and Hans Grossmann-

Doerth, but Foucault also analyses the work of Alfred Müller-Armack, Wilhelm Röpke 

and Alexander Rüstow, who were not part of the Freiburg School but still played im-

portant roles in shaping neo-liberal thinking and policies in Germany in the twentieth 

century.81  Foucault focuses on these thinkers not just because of their historical prece-

dence in regards to American neo-liberalism, which was inspired by the Germans, but 

also because the ‚governmental style‛ that marks the specific form of German neo-

liberalism is something that we are ‚immersed in‛ – ‚the contemporary neo-liberalism 

which actually involves us.‛82  

Foucault begins his analysis of German neo-liberalism by considering the wide-

spread contemporary ‚state-phobia‛ that united otherwise discordant groups all 

across the political spectrum.  He does this in order to show how the phobia of the 

state is actually caught up in a much more fundamental and important ‚crisis of gov-

ernmentality,‛83 manifesting itself in a number of re-evaluations of the liberal art of 

government: 

 
Everyone is in agreement in criticizing the state and identifying its destructive and 

harmful effects. But within this general critique < through and in the shadow of 

this critique, will liberalism in fact be able to bring about its real objective, that is to 

say, a general formalization of the powers of the state and the organization of so-

ciety on the basis of the market economy?84  

 

                                                      
80  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 192 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 198]. 
81  Cf. Viktor J. Vanberg, ‚The Freiburg School: Walter Eucken and Ordoliberalism,‛ Freibur- 

ger Discussionpapers on Constitutional Economics, 04/11 (2004): 1-21. Informative studies on 

Foucault’s reading of American neo-liberalism include: Lars Gertenbach, Die Kultiverung 

des Marktes: Foucault und die Governementalität des Neoliberalismus (Berlin: Parodos, 2008); 

Laurent Jeanpierre, ‚Une sociologie Foucauldienne du néoliberalisme est-elle possible?‛ 

Sociologie et Sociétés 38:2 (2006): 87-111; Mark Kelly, ‚Afterliberalism,‛ Radical Philosophy 153 

(2009): 46-49; and Thomas Lemke, ‚‘The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at 

Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality,‛ Economy and Society 30:2 (2001): 190-

207. 
82            Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 133, 101 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 137, 105]. 
83            Ibid., 76 [78]. 
84            Ibid., 117 [121]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

117 

Alongside or below the ‚state-bashing‛ efforts and the incautious, imprecise and mis-

leading accusations of the state becoming fascist,85 Foucault thus identifies a more 

fundamental and relevant problem which turns on the re-evaluations and proposals 

on renewing the art of government in Germany immediately before and after the   

Second World War.   In the same way as Discipline and Punish had illustrated how the 

humanization of the practice of punishment was caught up in a more general discipli-

narization of the social corpus,86 and The Will to Knowledge had shown how the repres-

sion-hypothesis was bound up in a more wide-ranging transformation marked by a 

proliferation of discourses on sex,87 Foucault here links the wide-spread contemporary 

critique of the state with a more fundamental transformation emerging as a crisis and 

reformulation of governmentality.  In doing so, he marks out some important shifts 

that distinguish German neo-liberalism from the preceding classical form, especially 

when it comes to the principle of laissez-faire and the extension of the associated biopo-

litics. 

First of all, Foucault emphasizes that German neo-liberalism brings with it a 

reversed relationship between the state and the market.  Where the problem for clas-

sical liberalism was how to make room for a market given an already existing and legi-

timate state, the problem for the German neo-liberals is the opposite: ‚given a state 

that does not exist, how can we get it to exist on the basis of this non-state space of 

economic freedom?‛88  The space for this renewal is cleared by the way in which histo-

ry ‚had said no to the German State,‛89 and from the neo-liberals’ reevaluation of   

historical events in light of their experience with Nazism.  All the supposed ills of capi-

talism (one-dimensionality, standardization, uniform mass society, etc.) are according 

to neo-liberals actually not the result of the market and its allegedly inherent failures. 

Rather, they are the result of a set of interventionist ‚anti-liberal policies‛, which the 

neo-liberals locate as invariant components employed and utilized in a wide set of 

government-programs ranging from the Beveridge Plan and the New Deal to the poli-

cies of the Soviet Union and Nazism.90  Since all the dangers and problems hitherto 

associated with capitalism and the market’s mode of functioning have their origin in a 

set of more or less radical interventionist anti-liberal policies, the solution, according to 

the German neo-liberals, will be to ‚adopt the free market as organizing and regulat-

ing principle of the state, from the start of its existence up to the last form of its inter-

                                                      
85  In connection with protests against the arrest, incarceration and extradition of the German 

lawyer of the Baader-Meinhof Group, Klaus Croissant, Foucault had refused to sign a peti-

tion circulated by Félix Guattari because it described West Germany as being ‛fascist.‛ Cf. 

Senellart, 393.  
86  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 104-131 [Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 106-134]. 
87  Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 15-49 [Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 23-67]. 
88  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 86-87 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 88]. 
89  Ibid., 86 [88]. 
90  Ibid., 111 [115]. 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 118 

ventions.‛91  In other words, a state supervised by the market, rather than the other 

way around. 

Yet, this neo-liberal proposal of adopting the market as organizing and regulat-

ing principle does not imply a subscription to the naturalness inherent in the classical 

liberal conception of the market; in fact, the German neo-liberals find it both erroneous 

and counterproductive to believe in the virtues of laissez-faire and a naturally free mar-

ket.  Instead, the market is conceptualized as a ‚political-cultural product, based on a 

constitutional order that requires careful ‚cultivation‛ for its maintenance and proper 

functioning.‛92  But, although Adam Smith’s invisible hand is in need of a helping 

hand to function, this helping hand need not interfere directly in the market or with its 

outcomes.  Rather, it should only work on the conditions allowing it to function, which 

first and foremost means setting up the necessary preconditions for the flourishing of 

competition.  In this prioritization of competition over exchange as the distinctive es-

sence of the market, the neo-liberals diverge from classical liberalism, but in doing so 

they accentuate what a range of nineteenth century economists – like Leon Walras and 

Alfred Marshall – had already attributed so much importance to. 

Furthermore, since government should not prioritize redistributing wealth, but 

instead seek to establish the conditional rules under which competition will flourish, 

this also entails a radical reversal of social policy as traditionally understood.  It is no 

longer a question of compensating for the unfortunate effects of a market economy. 

Instead, what is to be established is a government that is not against but for the mar-

ket.93  And since this necessitates ‚an active, intense, and interventionist social policy,‛ 

aspiring to nothing less than the government of society, it is an exaggeration when 

Foucault apologizes for having spoken for too long about German neo-liberalism in-

stead of addressing the biopolitical problematic head on.94  Instead of opposing the 

two, Foucault’s examination of the social policy proposed by the German neo-liberals 

should be read as an analysis of biopolitics par excellence, since the neo-liberal pro-

posals imply interventions that would govern everything but the economy, including 

the population, its conditions of life and social surroundings.  

This social policy is a far-reaching and widely encompassing form of biopolit-

ics, geared towards governing society by reference to and in accordance with the mar-

ket. While this could sound like the reappearance and intensification of the commodi-

fication process already denounced by Karl Marx,95 Foucault emphasizes the singulari-

ty of German neo-liberalism by stressing its difference from a society of commodities, 

‚in which exchange value will be at the same time the general measure and criterion of 

elements.‛96  It is not the man of exchange or man as consumer who provides the idea-

                                                      
91  Ibid., 116 [118]. 
92  Vanberg, 9. 
93  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 121 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 125]. 
94  Ibid., 160 [165] 
95  Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Buch I: ‚Der Produktionsprozeß des Kapitals‛ (1867-1890); men- 

tioned in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 147. 
96  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 146 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 152]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

119 

lized figure of the German neo-liberals, but rather the competitive and productive 

creature of enterprise:  

 
The individual’s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise 

like the firm or, if it comes to it, the State, but within the framework of a multiplici-

ty of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other, enterpris-

es which are in some way ready to hand for the individual, sufficiently limited in 

their scale for the individual’s actions, decisions, and choices to have meaningful 

and perceptible effects, and numerous enough for him not to be dependent on one 

alone. Finally, the individual’s life itself – with his relations to his private property, 

for example, with his family, household, insurance, and retirement – must make 

him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.97 

  

In programming this new art of government, the multiplication and dissemination of 

the enterprise form within the societal body plays a crucial role.  Not merely to be un-

derstood as a particular institution, it is the mobilization of a special social êthos mark-

ing out a whole competitive and enterprising way of being and behaving in terms of 

personal plans and projects and with specific objectives, tactics and agendas.98  Thus, it 

is a matter of nothing less than making the enterprise into ‚the formative power of 

society.‛99  It is a matter of intervening deeply in the very fabric, tissue or vital parts of 

society by way of a policy of life – that is, what the economist and originator of the 

term Neo-liberalismus, Alexander Rüstow, refers to as Vitalpolitik: ‚a politics of life, 

which is not essentially oriented to increased earnings and reduced hours of work, like 

traditional social policy, but which takes cognizance of the worker’s whole vital situa-

tion, his real, concrete situation, from morning to night and from night to morning,‛ 

including material belongings and moral hygiene, sense of property and of social inte-

gration.100  What is at stake here is a biopolitics that should address ‚all the factors on 

which the happiness, well-being and contentment of man truly depend,‛ and which 

should take into account what Rüstow and Röpke conceptualize as the worker’s ‚four-

fold embeddedness‛ in his community, in nature, in his property, and in his tradi-

tion.101  This is the comprehensive biopolitical and neo-liberal governmentality that is 

formulated in Germany, and it is this German model, not the ‚Bismarckian state be-

coming the Hitler state,‛ ‚which is being diffused, debated, and forms part of our ac-

tuality.‛102 

 

 

                                                      
97  Ibid., 241 [247]. 
98  Ibid., 147, 175 [152, 180]. 
99  Ibid., 148 [153]. 
100  Alexanter Rüstow is quoted from Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 157, n62.  
101  Cf. Jan Hegner, Alexander Rüstow: Ordnungspolitische Konzeption und Einsfluß auf das wirt- 

schaftpolitische Leitbild der Nachkriegszeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: Lucius, 

1999), 52-68.  
102  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 192 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 198]. 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 120 

4. American Neo-Liberalism  

 
Liberalism in America is a whole way of being. It is a type of relation between 

the governors and the governed much more than a technique of governors with 

regard to the governed.103 

 

Whereas the ordo-liberals endorsed the idea that society should be governed for the 

market, the effort of the American neo-liberals was rather to redefine all of society as 

an economic domain or form.104  Noticing this as a general background of the Ameri-

can adoption of neo-liberalism, Foucault’s examination focuses on the governmental 

and biopolitical implications of the proposed expansion of economic analysis and pro-

gramming to areas of the social field not formerly associated with economic principles 

or rationality.  This analysis is primarily based on work by economists like Henry C. 

Simons, Theodore W. Schultz and Gary Becker, whereas Foucault pays less attention 

to other famous figures of the Chicago School such as Milton Friedman and George 

Stigler.105 

In his reading of the American neo-liberals Foucault accentuates their recon-

figuration of the homo œconomicus that was already on the agenda in the works of clas-

sical economics.  But while economic man in this context was interpreted as a creature 

of exchange in accordance with his needs and wants, which implied that he repre-

sented one of two partners in a process of exchange, the economic man in the anarcho-

liberal context is, as with the German neo-liberals, recast as a creature of competition, 

whose inclination towards competing may not always be actualized by itself, but al-

ways potentially ready to be encouraged and spurred.  Accordingly, the freedom that 

is in need of security here becomes the freedom of liberated competiveness, and the 

associated competitive homo œconomicus comes into view not just as ‚an entrepreneur 

of himself,‛106 as was the case in German neo-liberalism, but also as the living being 

who is in need of being set free to freely compete.  The human creature of competition 

cannot therefore be a man of exchange for the reason that, instead of being one among 

                                                      
103  Ibid., 218 [224]. 
104  Ibid., 239-241 [245-246].  
105  Cf. e.g., Johan Van Overtveldt, The Chicago School: How The University Of Chicago Assembled  

The Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics And Business (Chicago, IL: Agate, 2007). Informa-

tive studies on Foucault’s reading of American neo-liberalism comprise: Jacques Donzelot, 

‚Michel Foucault and Liberal Intelligence,‛ Economy and Society 37:1 (2008): 115-34; Frances-

co Guala, ‚Critical Notice: Naissance de la biopolitique,‛ Economics and Philosophy 22 (2006): 

429-439; Thomas Lemke, ‚‘The Birth of Bio-Politics:’ Michel Foucault’s Lecture at Collège 

de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality,‛ Economy and Society 30:2 (2001): 190-207; Mi-

chael Peters, ‚Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self: a Foucauldian 

Perspective,‛ Journal of Educational Enquiry 2:2 (2001): 58-71; Jason Read, ‚A Genealogy of 

Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,‛ Foucault Studies 6 

(2009): 25-36; and Maarten Simons, ‚Learning as Investment: Notes on Governmentality 

and Biopoli-tics‛, Educational Philosophy and Theory 38:4 (2006): 523-540 
106  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 232]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

121 

other partners in a process of exchange, he is converted into a subject of personal en-

terprise, who not only earns his own wages, administers his own consumption and 

produces his own satisfaction, but also embodies his own assets and productivity.107  

Here even consumption becomes another entrepreneurial activity used for the produc-

tion of personal satisfaction, which also implies that the opposition between an active 

production and a passive consumption ceases to have any meaning.108  In short, man 

has become an amount of ‚human capital,‛ which may always be still further aug-

mentable with reference to his acquired and hereditary resources. ‚The distinctive 

mark of human capital,‛ Theodore W. Schultz writes in 1961, ‚is that it is a part of 

man.  It is human because it is embodied in man, and it is capital because it is a source 

of future satisfactions, or of future earnings, or of both.‛109 It is the biopolitical implica-

tions of this kind of economization of everyday life that draws Foucault’s attention.  

Through this reconfiguration of the economical man the interventional field of 

anarcho-liberal biopolitics becomes a radicalization of the Vitalpolitik of the German 

neo-liberals, as it includes not only every aspect of enterprising human conduct across 

all possible social fields but also the very genetic makeup predisposing this conduct of 

enterprise.110  But besides venturing to stimulate and ameliorate the human population 

all the way down to their hereditary equipment, and to prepare for potential situations 

where this equipment could pose a ‚danger,‛111 it is primarily on the side of the ac-

quired and acquirable factors that this neo-liberal biopolitics endeavours to have an 

indirect effect on the economy.  It is especially in regard to the making of a ‚compe-

tence-machine‛ producing a continuous surplus of human capital that Foucault points 

to how this neo-liberal biopolitics identifies the problems for which it also proposes its 

solutions.  In the case of educational investment, for example, professional and school 

education is evidently important for the development of human capital.  But this radi-

cal biopolitics also argues on an experimental basis that the very development of the 

human being acquiring competences is also relevant and includes factors such as the 

time spent by the parents on the formation of their child, the emotional atmosphere in 

the family, or the quality of the child’s social relationships.  Foucault thus locates the 

competence-machine within a comprehensive neo-liberal ‚environmental analysis‛ of 

human capital, entailing the possibility of analyzing  

 
the simple time parents spend feeding their children, or giving them affection, as 

investment which can form human capital. Time spent, care given, as well as par-

ents’ education – because we know quite precisely that for an equal time spend 

with their children, more educated patents will form a higher human capital than 

                                                      
107           Ibid., 225 [231]. 
108  Cf. Donzelot. 
109  Theodore W. Schultz, Investment in Human Capital: The Role of Education and Research (Chicago,  

IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 148; quoted in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 23 

n33. 
110  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 243 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 248]. 
111  Ibid., 228-229 [234-235]. 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 122 

parents with less education – in short the set of cultural stimuli received by the 

child: all this will contribute to the formation of those elements that can produce 

human capital.112  

 

Every subject matter on the basis of which the population is potentially inclined to 

reach an end – in childhood, in youth, at work, on vacation, in marriage, in civil life, as 

parents, in friendships, on retirement, in health care – comprises a field of economic 

analysis because it is also the ground from which human capital can be extracted and 

put into production.  Accordingly, Foucault mentions how the American neo-liberals 

also point to the potential human capitalization of assets pertaining to social phenom-

ena such as social mobility, migration, and the innovations conceptualized by Joseph 

A. Schumpeter.113  Even public hygiene, health care, criminality and the function of 

penal justice emerge as economic forms in this analysis of the Chicago School.114  

Is it in continuation of this that Foucault draws attention to the neo-liberal con-

struction of a ‚grid of economical intelligibility‛ with which it becomes possible to 

appraise a long range of human behaviours not usually deemed economic as economic 

nevertheless.115  With this grid it is not only possible to analyze all facets of the rela-

tionship between mother and child in terms of investments, being measurable in terms 

of time and convertible into human capital.  It becomes possible to invert a vast multi-

plicity of human conducts and behaviours, which were previously the objects of disci-

plines such as demography, psychology and sociology, so that they, on a certain level, 

become visible for the economic rationality at the same time as they begin to express 

an economic rationality themselves.  In this context, however, it is not only every ra-

tional aspect of human conduct and life that is amenable to economic analysis, in ac-

cordance with the classical formulation that economics ‚is the science of human be-

haviour as a relationship between end and scarce means which have mutually exclu-

sive uses.‛116  According to Gary Becker, this already very extensive definition does 

not go far enough since economical analysis can perfectly well be applied also to indi-

vidual non-rational behaviour, with the only criterion being that the conduct in ques-

tion reacts to reality in a non-random way.  Given that the irrational conduct responds 

to the modifiable stimuli of the environment in a systematic way, given that the con-

duct in spite of irrationality ‚accepts reality‛ in Becker’s words,117 it is apposite for 

economic analysis, and economics become the science of the systematic nature of re-

sponses to reality in the form of environmental variables.118  

                                                      
112  Ibid., 229 [235-236]. 
113  Ibid., 230-231 [236-238]. 
114  Ibid., 248-261 [254-266].  
115  Ibid., 246 [253]. 
116  Lionel C. Robbins, ‚Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science‛ (1931);  

quoted in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 222  [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 228]. 
117  Gary Becker, ‚Irrational Action and Economic Theory,‛ Journal of Political Economy 70:4  

(1962): 153-168; quoted in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 287, n6-7 [Foucault, Naissance de 

la biopolitique, 290-291, n6-7]. 
118  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 269 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 273].  



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

123 

Meanwhile, in conjunction with this grid of economic intelligibility Foucault 

also points to the neo-liberal construction of a ‚critical assessment instrument‛ di-

rected at the exercise of public power in terms of the market.119  Where the first con-

struction was ‚analytical‛ in its scope, because it was able to make social processes 

visible and intelligible in a generalized economic form, this second construction is 

rather ‚programmatic‛ in capacity, because it makes it possible ‚to test governmental 

action, gauge its validity, and to object to activities of the public authorities on the 

grounds of their abuses, excesses, futility, and wasteful expenditure.‛120  Together the 

two constructions form an effective analytic-programmatic technology with which a 

great part of the social field can be reconstructed so they take part in an economic real-

ity, and with which a permanent economical-political criticism of almost all political 

and public authorities can be secured and empirically substantiated in terms of the 

market.  All governmental initiatives can be met with this critical assessment accord-

ing to principles of supply and demand, cost and benefit, efficiency, and the potential 

losses due to public interventions in the field of the market.  In contrast to the ordo-

liberal rejection of a natural sphere constituting the beneficial functioning of the prin-

ciple of laissez-faire, Foucault argues that the American anarcho-liberals rather turn this 

principle upside-down by means of their analytic-programmatic technology.  ‚Here 

the laissez-faire is turned into a ne-pas-laisser-faire directed at the government, in the 

name of a law of the market that will permit each of its activities to be measured and 

assessed.‛121  This conversion of the laissez-faire principle leads to a situation where the 

market no longer functions as the veridictional regime for the self-limitation of gov-

ernment as in classical liberalism, since the market converts into something that is now 

hostile towards the government.  What emerges is ‚a sort of permanent economic tri-

bunal,‛ the truth-telling of which is no longer responsive and oracular but determined 

and antagonistic when it comes to guiding government.  Additionally, Foucault speci-

fies, this economic tribunal is not merely a private or cooperate matter, but has been 

institutionalized in a number of American organizations or think tanks, such as the 

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, the Consumer Safety Product 

Commission, and the Food and Health Administration, from whence the permanent eco-

nomic tribunal can be brought into action in an almost positivistic critique of the ‚non-

sense‛ and ‚contradictions‛ of governmental procedures and actions.122  In concert 

with this radical economization of government action, the American neo-liberals there-

fore also express a now familiar aspiration to extend the market across all social and 

political domains, thus breaking down the traditional divisions between the economic, 

the social and the political in what constitutes not a governementalization but a mar-

ketization of both state and civil society.  

 

                                                      
119  Ibid., 246 [253]. 
120  Ibid. 
121  Ibid., 247 [253] (translation modified). 
122  Ibid., 246-247 [252-253]. 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 124 

5. Conclusion: Liberal Biopolitics and the Economic Game  

 

The lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics represent Foucault’s last encounter with modern 

biopolitics.  Despite its distinctly biopolitical title, the subsequent (still unpublished) 

lecture course of 1980, On the Government of the Living, begins to trace back to Early 

Christianity the important connection between the pastoral conduct of conduct and 

another ‚regime of veridiction‛ that took the form of the specific truth-production by 

which individuals bring into being subjective evidence about themselves.123  While this 

study was a revitalization of Foucault’s interest in procedures for truth-telling (e.g., 

mesure, enquete, examen) in the early 1970s,124 it was also the beginning of a journey that 

led him further back to alternative relationships between truth and government of the 

self and of others (e.g., chresis aphrodesiôn, epimeleia heautou, parrêsia) established in 

Roman and Greek antiquity.125  But since Foucault never returned from this journey to 

the ancient world, he was unable to inaugurate that full-scale genealogy of contempo-

rary biopolitical power that he the year before his death in 1984 not only asserted 

‚could be done‛ but also ‚had to be done.‛126 Therefore The Birth of Biopolitics in fact 

represents Foucault’s very last, and most comprehensive, attempt to uncover the na-

                                                      
123  Michel Foucault, ‚On the Government of the Living‛ in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Essential  

Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. I. Edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Penguin, 2000), 81-85 

*Foucault, ‚Du gouvernement des vivant,‛ in Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 125-129]. It is also in 

these lectures that Foucault develops the substitution of power/knowledge [pouvoir/savoir] 

problems with problematics of government/truth [gouvernement/vérité] which he began in 

1979 with the concept of the ‚veridiction regime‛ of the economy (Cf. Lecture at Collège de 

France, 9 January 1980; authors’ transcription).  
124  The study of mesure, enquete and examen is summarized in Michel Foucault, ‚Penal Theories  

and Institutions‛ in Foucault, Ethics, 17-21 *Michel Foucault, ‚Théories et institutions 

pénales‛ in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits II. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald 

(Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1994) 389-393]; but see also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184-194 

[Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 186-196]. 
125  The study of chresis aphrodesiôn  is found in the lecture course of 1981, ‚Subjectivity and Truth,‛ in  

Foucault, Ethics, 87-92 *Foucault, ‛Subjectivité et vérité,‛ in Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 213-

218], in Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasures (St. Ives: Penguin, 1990) [Michel Foucault, 

L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)], and in Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (St 

Ives: Penguin, 1990) [Michel Foucault, Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)]. The study of 

epimeleia heautou is primarily found in Foucault, The Care of the Self [Foucault, Le soici de soi], 

and in Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-

1982 (New York: Palgrave, 2005) [Michel Foucault, Le herméneutique du sujet: Cours au 

Collège de France, 1981-1982 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2001). The study of parrêsia is found in 

Foucault’s last Collège de France-lectures – that is, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours 

au Collège de France, 1982-1983 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2008) and Le gouvernement de soi et des 

autre: Le courage de la vérité: Cours au Collège de France, 1983-1984 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 

2009); but see also the U.S. lectures from 1983 in Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los 

Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001). 
126  Michel Foucault, ‚On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,‛ (1983) 

in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Herme-

neutics, 2nd Ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 232. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

125 

tivity of modern biopolitics.  It is here that he for the last time studies the biopolitical 

rationalization of liberal arts of government being concerned with securing those self-

regulatory processes of the population and the economy.127  Hence, in the summary of 

the 1979 lectures, where Foucault, as touched upon, expresses some regret as to only 

having covered the introduction to the birth of biopolitics, he also maintains that by 

‚biopolitics‛ he meant ‚the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rational-

ize the problems posed to a governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a 

set of living beings forming a population.‛128 And although this summary only men-

tions such well-known phenomena of life as health, morbidity, hygiene, mortality, 

natality, life expectancy, and race, a careful reading of the full lecture course also re-

veals the manifestation of biopolitical phenomena such as competition, consumption, 

danger, education, enterprise, family life, freedom, genetic equipment, human beha-

vior, innovation, interests, limitation, nature, rights, risks, will and work.  The biopolit-

ical nature of many of these phenomena has been exemplified in the previous sections.  

Yet, in order to recapitulate more specifically it is therefore not so much on the 

backdrop of Foucault’s earlier biopolitics of social medicine, of sexuality or of the 

threshold of life and death that the biopolitical scope of The Birth of Biopolitics should 

be judged.  Instead this scope should be evaluated in continuation of the type of bio-

politics that became an important factor in the history of governmentality and in the 

ingrained triangulation of population, political economy and dispositives of security, 

which are also the starting point of Foucault’s exploration of the arts of government 

pertaining to classical and more contemporary forms of liberalism.  Accordingly, the 

biopolitics of classical liberalism revolved around the biopolitical nature of the modern 

economy and the political economists’ conception hereof insomuch as this field of ex-

change, intervention and knowledge from the very beginning was directed at a popu-

lation ranging from its biological embeddedness in the natural milieu, through the 

human species with its desires, and up to the public with its interests.129  The objective 

of this liberal biopolitics became the creation of a regulation that could assist the natu-

ral self-regulation of the population to work by way of the correlative logic of freedom 

and security.  It was also through this work of dynamic and facilitative laisser-faire that 

governmental rationality came upon the need to restrain its activities in order to give 

room for self-regulation in the new societal household.  Likewise, it was in this process 

that the auto-limitation of societal utility convened with the veridiction regime of the 

market, in the same way that the process of principally infinite economic growth   

enabling advancement in the welfare of populations convened with the interplay of 

interests between the individual and the collective.  By way of the new frugal govern-

                                                      
127  Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 106 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 109]. 
128  Foucault, ‚Course Summary,‛ (1979) The Birth of Biopolitics, 317 [Foucault, Naissance de la 

 biopolitique, 323]. 
129  If this is true, it is therefore somewhat difficult to maintain that the economy has recently be- 

come biopolitical, given that it has been so from its modern beginning in the eighteenth 

century. On this point see Lars Thorup Larsen’s important article ‚Speaking Truth to Bio-

Power: On the Genealogy of Bioeconomy,‛ Distinktion 14 (2007): 9-24.  



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 126 

mentality, all these elements have worked their way into the political rationality of the 

occidental world.  

The biopolitics of both German and American neo-liberalism revolves around 

the economical enterprization of virtually every individual agent of the population, 

but does so in different directions.  German neo-liberalism inscribes the human enter-

prise in a ‚vertical movement‛ by reversing the relationship between state and market 

in order to establish conditions under which competition will flourish, being con-

vinced that regulation of prices by the market itself is so delicate that it must be sup-

ported and managed.  For its part, American neo-liberalism inscribes the human en-

terprise in a ‚horizontal movement‛ by expanding the economic to principally all so-

cial forms in order to transform a long range of non-economic entities and activities 

into means of competition, being confident that the grid of analysis and the decision-

making criteria it offers ought to be more generally applicable.130  While the German 

conception of Vitalpolitik therefore stands for factual reconfiguration of traditional so-

cial politics focusing on enabling the individuals to become entrepreneurs of them-

selves (e.g., assistance to the unemployed, health care cover, and housing policies), the 

American conception of human capital rather takes for granted the entrepreneurial 

mode of existence and provides it instead with still new sources from which the capi-

tal of competition can be accumulated (e.g., family life, education, and genetic equip-

ment).  Thus two biopolitics of facilitation emerge, endowed with a more societal and 

a more individual proclivity respectively, but both breaking away from the natural-

ness of classical liberalism.  Here German neo-liberalism projected instead a sort of 

‚economic cultivation‛ for the safeguarding and affluent performance of the market 

by indirect governmental planning and intervention, whereas American neo-

liberalism planned for a kind of ‚economic realism‛ according to which a transversal 

level of economic reality could incorporate almost all social forms in terms of econom-

ics, but which at the same time allowed them their differences on all other levels.131  

Both strategies thus implied a massive enabling process directed at the population, but 

in such a way that the population was effectively to enable itself by way of the econ-

omy as well. Here the population was not so much to comply with legal prohibitions 

and disciplinary prescriptions as it was to vitally empower itself through economic 

forms and work out its own personal norms for this activity, within the continual in-

terchange of freedom and security.  

Meanwhile, it is on the topic of French neo-liberalism, which is presented be-

fore the anarcho-liberals in The Birth of Biopolitics but succeeding their work chrono-

logically, that Foucault most directly addresses the encounter between liberal biopoli-

tics and the question of social security.  With reference primarily to Valéry Giscard 

d’Estaing, the French minister of finance and economy from 1969 to 1974, and the two 

economists Christian Stoffäes and Lionel Stoléru, Foucault calls attention to a number 

                                                      
130  Foucault, ‛Course Summary,‛ (1979) The Birth of Biopolitics, 323 [Foucault, Naissance de la 

 biopolitique, 329]. 
131  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 256-259 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 266-269]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

127 

of features pertaining to the challenge of creating a social policy within a neo-liberal 

framework.132  D’Estaing held that government should ‚completely separate that 

which corresponds to the need of economic expansion from that which corresponds to 

the concern for solidarity and social justice,‛ because the social system can disrupt the 

economic system with negative consequences (e.g., rise of wages, increase of unem-

ployment or uneven redistributions) even if social security is deduced solely from 

earned wages.133  By introducing ‚an economic tax‛ versus ‚a social tax,‛ d’Estaing 

projects a separation of the economy as a system with its own rules and the social as a 

system with its own particular objectives, which should at once correspond to and be 

entirely impermeable to each other. This ‚decoupling,‛ Foucault argues, is part of the 

application of a seminal idea, being equally traceable in German, American and 

French neo-liberalism, according to which ‚the economy essentially is a game *un 

jeu+.‛134 This means, on the one hand, that the economy should progress as a game be-

tween partners and the whole society should be permeated by it, and that the role of 

the state in this regard is restricted to defining the rules of the game and to making 

sure that they are in fact applied. And since the rules of this game, on the other hand, 

have to ensure that the economy develops and progresses as actively and keenly as 

possible and to the advantage of the greatest possible number of players, the primary 

and categorical rule of the game should be one that also ensures that the players do 

not lose so much that they become unable to continue playing.  

It is through this ‚rule of non-exclusion‛ in the economic game that Foucault 

sees the policy of neo-liberal social security coming into view,135 which he sketches out 

on the basis of ‚negative tax‛ as Stoléru and Stoffaës outlined it in the 1970s.136 In op-

position to positive income tax where government claims a portion of income and 

where the sum paid increases as income rises, this negative tax system sends money 

back to the taxpayers if, but only if, their earnings are below a given threshold, and 

conversely reduces that payment as income rises. Through this system government 

provides social security in the form of supplementary cash benefits relative to how 

much the citizen is economically below the threshold, which is usually fixed at ‚a ’vi-

                                                      
132  Ibid., 196-197 [199-201]. 
133  Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, ‚Preface,‛ in Économie et Société humaine: Rencontres internationales 

du ministre de l’Économie et des Finances (Paris : Denöel, 1972); quoted in Foucault, The Birth 

of Biopolitics, 211, n39-45 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 218-219, n39-45]. See also 

Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 198-202 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 205-209].     
134  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 201 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 207] (translation 

modified). Cf. e.g., Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1962), 225-227.  
135  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 202 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 207]. 
136  Cf. Christian Stoffaës, ‚Vaincre“Rapport du groupe d’étude de l’impôt negative (Paris, 1973-74), 

and Lionel Stoléru, Vaincre la pauvreté dans les pays riches (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). It was 

Milton Friedman who made the negative income tax famous by proposing that all welfare 

programs should be restructured with this system as the model, so that government sup-

port for those with low incomes would be withdrawn only at a low marginal rate and 

would not distort the market; Cf. Friedman, chap. 12: ‚The Alleviation of Poverty.‛  



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 128 

tal minimum’ < of elementary needs.‛137 According to Foucault, this neo-liberal tax 

policy has a number of consequences. First, it guarantees the non-exclusion of the eco-

nomic game because it ensures that citizens who are temporarily made redundant do 

not end up below what is considered as a proper level of consumption. Second, it nev-

ertheless keeps this assured level of minimum consumption so low as to motivate, in-

centivize or frustrate the unemployed to always prefer working and participating in 

the economic system before receiving benefits, thus counteracting the well-known 

problems with the negative work incentives and benefits dependency of traditional 

welfare programs as well.  Third, the neo-liberal drift in this system is not only that it 

fully decouples the ‚economic tax‛ and the ‚social tax,‛ but also that it does not pro-

vide the social security associated with a standard policy of full employment; people 

are not forced to work if there is no interest in them doing so.  It only guarantees the 

possibility of minimum existence at a given level, essentially leaving the incentives to 

be a matter for the jobless themselves.138  

Although Foucault is perfectly aware that the negative tax system has never 

been applied in full effect or in pure form, it is nevertheless here that he maps out his 

last outline of neo-liberal biopolitics, chronologically speaking.139  Because the negative 

tax provides something like a minimal level of social security, though at the lowest 

possible level and principally substituting all welfare such as food stamps, public 

housing, farm price supports or minimum wage laws with cash benefits defined with 

regard to the threshold, it allows the economic system and the mechanism of competi-

tion to function in the rest of society.  Above the threshold the ‚enterprise society‛ of 

vibrant competition and investment in the capital of oneself is thus given free to run 

its course without any interruption from social security or inopportune citizens below 

this threshold point:  

 
Full employment and voluntarist growth are renounced in favour of the integra-

tion in a market economy. But this entails a fund of a floating population, of a limi-

nal, infra- or supra-liminal population, in which the assurance mechanism will en-

able each to live, after a fashion, and to live in such a way that he can always be 

available for possible work, if market conditions require it.140  

 

This type of biopolitics directed at a population that is dynamically divided according 

to the threshold of enterprise looks as if it rigidly resigns itself and the human beings it 

comprises to the economic order that was formerly the expression of the self-

                                                      
137  Stoléru 23; quoted and translated in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 213, n51 [Foucault,  

Naissance de la biopolitique, 220, n51]. 
138  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 207 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 212-213]. 
139  Ibid., 204, 207 [209, 212]. A review of the factual experimentations with negative tax is  

found in Robert A. Moffitt, ‚The Negative Income Tax and the Evolution of U.S. Welfare 

Policy,‛ Journal of Economic Perspectives 17:3 (2003): 119-140. 
140  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 207 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 212]. 



Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130 

 
 

129 

regulatory household of the same population.  According to Foucault, however, it is 

also a very loose-fitting and alterable economic order:  

 
[It] is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which 

legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by < 

normative mechanisms. < On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the      

image, the idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of 

systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in 

which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought 

to bear on the rules of the game rather than the players, and finally in which there 

is an environmental type of intervention instead of a internal subjugation of indi-

viduals.141  

 

This theme-program, which he also designates ‚an environmentalism open to un-

knowns and transversal phenomena,‛142 is Foucault’s last proposition of a neo-liberal 

biopolitics, concurrently regulating the population both rigidly and loosely in accor-

dance with economic principles.  

Conclusively, it is also within the framework of a neo-liberal biopolitics such as 

this that Foucault locates an imperative mutation in the general dispositive of go-

vernmentality.  Instead of finding its governmental rationality in its own strength, in 

maximizing itself, or in calculating the forces of itself and others, as was the case in the 

tradition of raison d’État in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the problem of this 

new governmentality, being worked upon since the late eighteenth century, has now 

grown to be a matter of fashioning government 

 
on the rationality of those who are governed as economic subjects < It is a matter 

of modeling government [on] the rationality of individuals insofar as they employ 

a certain number of means, and employ them as they wish, in order to satisfy these 

interest in the most general sense of the term: the rationality of the governed must 

serve as the regulating principle for the rationality of government. 143  

 

Hence, what has characterized the development of ‚liberal rationality‛ in Foucault’s 

account is ‚the rationalization of the art of government on the rational behavior of 

those who are governed.‛144  

Evidently, this is also the situation in which government as regulation of self-

regulation, as conduct of conduct, as management of self-management, or as the arti-

culation of the crossing point between political technologies of power and ethical 

techniques of the self, comes into view as imperative problematics to engage in both 

practically and theoretically.  Though Foucault’s lectures were given thirty years ago, 

the relationship between government and self-government in all its different forms, 

                                                      
141   Ibid. 
142  Ibid., 261, n* [266, n*].  
143  Ibid., 312 [316]. 
144  Ibid. 



Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics 

 130 

not only has long historical roots that need to be further sorted out, but also remains 

with us and forms our actuality as something we still have to relate to and act upon in 

our individual and collective ways of being.  With the publication of The Birth of Biopo-

litics an important milestone in this historical work on the ontology of our present can 

now finally reach a wider audience.  Additionally, being brought back to the be-

ning of one of the most elaborate explorations of how modern liberal biopolitics has 

grown into our cultural skin may also open an opportunity to bring even further our 

critical evaluations of how this biopolitical endeavor continually seems to be reconfi-

gured and reborn.