If critique could kill, neoliberalism would long be dead. So far, however, neither decades of intellectual opposition from the left and right nor the past decade of populist politics has done more than erode some measure of neoliberalism’s ideological preeminence. Talk from the right of “pro-family” policies, such as tax breaks and subsidies for having children, or moves by the Biden administration to secure domestic manufacturing of critical high-technology goods may hearten neoliberalism’s foes (even as they further blur the ideological map of American politics). Neither, however, offers anything like a consensus to replace the vision that, since the crises of the 1970s, has, with whatever degree of discontent, guided our collective thought and action.
Half a century ago, as the OPEC oil embargo and an unprecedented combination of inflation and unemployment disrupted the shared understanding of economics and politics that had oriented Western elites after World War II, neoliberalism became identified with a range of tactics for restoring economic growth. Understanding what neoliberalism is, and what its relation to liberalism might be, has been a central task for intellectuals ever since. Perhaps the first major thinker to undertake it was the French theorist Michel Foucault. In a series of lectures delivered at the Collège de France, in 1979, and originally intended to account for what he called “The Birth of Biopolitics,” he sidestepped the ostensible topic in favor of a study of the historical roots of neoliberalism and the philosophical essence of liberalism—and the relationship between the two.
He intended to demonstrate that neither neoliberalism nor the crisis of the 1970s was new. Many of the ideas that so-called neoliberals offered as solutions to the problems plaguing Western economies had antecedents. Most notably, they could be traced back to the work of the participants in the Walter Lippmann Colloquium (1938), a gathering of twenty-six prominent thinkers who had come to Paris to discuss Lippmann’s recent book, An Inquiry Into the Principles of the Good Society. Variously divided on the question of the New Deal and the more general principle of state interventions in the economy, all were concerned to preserve liberal democratic politics and market economics amid the Great Depression and rise of totalitarianism.
As political scientist Gary Gerstle observes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022), a book that draws directly on Foucault’s insights, one might take the argument a step further. Both the progressive reforms of early-twentieth-century America associated with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (championed by a young Lippmann before he became a critic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s more far-ranging reforms) and those of the New Deal in the 1930s were understood by proponents as offering a “new” liberalism, updating the latter for the industrial era. Foucault himself raised that point about the New Deal in his lectures, arguing that it had been seen by its originators as “a means, in a dangerous situation…of producing more freedom.” (All translations here are my own.)
FDR, Foucault implied, was truly a “liberal,” as the president called himself. We might go a step further than Foucault here and suggest that Roosevelt could be dubbed a neoliberal, following Gerstle’s observations, given that Roosevelt sought not only to preserve the functioning of the economy and the stability of our political system in the face of a global crisis but also to structure his policy changes in terms of increasing freedom (as he understood it) within the framework (however reimagined) of the already-existing regime. Rather than being dogmatically “liberal,” he and his advisers re-evaluated existing political and economic arrangements, seeking to modify those that had been established by previous generations of liberals but had become obstacles to the realization of liberal ideals at the current historical moment. Those gathered around Lippmann in the 1930s and 1940s who were critical of the New Deal for what they saw as its excesses and infringements on liberty appear, from this perspective, quite similar to FDR and his supporters. Both groups, despite their mutual hostility, could be considered heirs of the “new” liberalism of the 1900s and 1910s once championed by Lippmann, insofar as they saw the practices and theories of political economy as provisional, modifiable means of fulfilling liberalism’s emancipatory potential in the present generation. By the same measure, both groups could be said to be ancestors of the neoliberals of the 1970s. All of them shared a sense that liberalism periodically needs to be set right through new economic policies that, whether framed as an extension or retraction of “government” into “markets,” are understood as protecting “freedom,” which depends on the timely readjustment of the dynamic, inherently unstable relationship between politics and economics.
Sibling Rivalries
The attempt to set “neoliberalism” in a broad historical context, whether undertaken by Foucault in the late 1970s or Gerstle in the early 2020s, thus confronts phenomena that are recurrent, multiple, and conflictual. Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism, breaking apart its presumptive unity and showing how “new” liberalisms, in relations of sibling rivalry with one another, have continually emerged, remains valuable to historians. But, although Foucault stressed a commitment to historicism, he was nevertheless, at certain moments of his lectures (and throughout other texts), open to making more essentialist statements about what liberalism, as such, is like, and how its enduring features express themselves, again and again, through apparently revisionist strains. He asked, in other words, what must liberalism be, such that it regularly produces both crises and new—or neo—liberalisms in response to them?
As he attempted to account for liberalism as a mode of politics out of which supposedly “new” liberalisms repeatedly arise, Foucault developed an arresting interpretation of liberalism. His account focuses on liberalism as a matrix of affect—that is, as a means of generating, sustaining, and translating into action specific emotional states—rather than as a set of beliefs (about, for example, human rights or the division of powers in a government). Neoliberalism as it arose in the 1970s, in his understanding, is a particular anthropology (an account of what human beings are like) congruent with what we might call the basic, and historically much older, template of liberal feelings since the eighteenth century, as well as the historical experience of intellectuals in Western societies in the past half century.
While Foucault evinces a combination of excitement and dismay about this anthropology, he provides an almost wholly sympathetic examination of liberalism’s emotional life, which, he suggests, fulfills the conjoined projects of critique and utopia. These two terms are more generally understood as the core of illiberal ideologies such as Marxism (particularly in its variant of critical theory), but in Foucault’s revisionist interpretation, it is within liberalism that they can be best realized. Or to put it in negative terms, he warns that liberalism at its best inspires such projects. It enters into crisis, however, whenever these projects are no longer rightly pursued or, worse, come to be seen as incompatible not only with a particular local, historically contingent form of liberalism (to be updated with an appropriate “new” liberalism) but with liberalism as such.
The Anthropology of Neoliberalism
Foucault’s “Birth of Biopolitics” lectures trace how particular policy proposals, models of economic activity, and other pieces of conceptual work that came to cluster in what, from the 1970s on, has been known as neoliberalism were developed in distinct times and places. These include the University of Chicago’s postwar economics department, the circle of pre–World War II German ordoliberalismus associated with the University of Freiburg, all the way back to the speculations of the original proto-liberal economists such as Adam Smith and François Quesnay in the late eighteenth century. Through such investigation, many features that might be taken to be distinct to the neoliberalism of the past half century—the emphasis on policies of deregulation, the moral valorization of entrepreneurship, the acceptance of greater inequality, or the promotion of market-based solutions—are seen to be rather traditional, long-standing components of liberalism. They manifest themselves with a particular (and comprehensible) intensity at moments when other such components of liberalism, of equally good historical standing (such as aspirations to equality and stabilized economic growth, or a wariness of uncontrolled international trade), are tested by trying circumstances.
What Foucault took to be unique to the neoliberalism of the 1970s—the neoliberalism that has become so hegemonic that it has, outside the work of scholars such as Gerstle, largely occluded the existence of other “new” liberalisms—was not its policies but rather its view of humanity, its anthropology. Analyzing the work of economists like Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, Foucault argued that at the center of their thought was a notion of the individual as a Homo economicus who pursues his rational self-interest (this point itself was nothing new) and who is, therefore, “manipulable” and “governable” through modifications of his incentives. The shaping of the latter, it was reasoned, can replace, to a great extent, other forms of governance that rely on explicit norms of conduct, moral appeals to shared values, or plans articulated by central authorities. It is in its peculiar anthropology, advocating the use of economic incentives as the primary instrument of governance, that neoliberalism distinguishes itself from its historical antecedents.
While the rational, self-interested agent had long been a part of Western economic thought, he had existed alongside many other figures by which observers interpreted and tried to manipulate human action. The vain, self-flattering poseur skewered by early-modern French moralists; the sentimental man on whose sympathies melodramas played (and which Adam Smith analyzed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments); the capricious consumer to whom merchants and advertisers appealed; even the moral agent invoked by preachers and political reformers—all of these types existed alongside, and in tension with, “economic man” in the collective repertory of moral reasoning. This repertory was part of how liberals (and their opponents) understood and tried to govern their fellow men. What is remarkable about the 1970s, and the subsequent half century, is, from Foucault’s perspective, not that a “new” liberalism emerged (as, he implied, “new” liberalisms are continually emerging) through a reshuffling of economic policies, but that its ideological dominance was established through, or amid, the narrowing of this formerly expansive repertory down to a single, minimal figure of “economic man.”
If Foucault is right, then we are by no means approaching an end to neoliberalism, even as both neoliberalism and liberalism more broadly come under frequent attack. Many of the policies enacted or proposed in recent years for reorienting America’s economy and society are squarely within the past half century’s anthropological paradigm. Seeking to shape the incentives of individuals, families, and corporations in ways that align their self-interest with national goals, for example, through reforms aimed at increasing the number of American babies or semiconductors, resembles nothing so much as late-twentieth-century policies widely characterized as neoliberal.
Administrations at the height of late-twentieth-century neoliberalism, like politicians and intellectuals today, saw, on the one hand, many apparently non-economic aspects of American society as amenable to manipulation through the repatterning of economic incentives. A few thousand dollars a year more or less, for example, will bring “welfare mothers” into the workforce, neoliberal Democrats once reasoned—or, as supposedly post-liberal conservatives today argue, will encourage mothers to stay out of the workforce and have more children. JD Vance seems to share with Bill Clinton (whose trade and industrial policies did so much harm to the white working class Vance purports to represent) the sense that people make decisions about getting married, having children, and getting jobs largely in response to financial rewards and penalties. By altering the latter, the government can reshape the collective pattern of such decisions in socially desirable ways, without having recourse to the sort of measures characteristic of authoritarian states (such as China’s former one-child policy, or Communist Romania’s natalist program). Such a reshaping can even be imagined as instilling values in those whose behavior is thereby altered, and it can be accordingly accompanied with a certain amount of pious exhortation. What is critical, however, is that the work of governance is carried out not by talk about values, however noisy, but by the manipulation of incentives appealing to self-interested, rational subjects.
Clinton’s “reform” of welfare policies to refashion working-class families’ relationship to work (and thus, it was reasoned, transform their character to make them more responsible and dynamic members of society and of the economy), like the supposedly new “pro-family” policies of today’s right, imagine the subject of governance, in fact, not as a family—a unit bound by biological, emotional, religious, and other bonds—but as a set of individuals maximizing their interests as they react to shifting financial incentives. In other words, as a contract among neoliberal subjects. That the terms of the contract can be altered is a premise of neoliberalism—not an exit from it.
In a similar vein, it was by no means a break with neoliberalism when, for example, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush supported the domestic production of semiconductors while they oversaw the offshoring of other manufacturing sectors deemed less essential. Paradigmatically neoliberal presidents have been flexible in both their extensions and pragmatic non-applications of the template of policies often misunderstood as a coherent, highly ideologized set of inflexible “neoliberal” commitments. These administrations revealed in their policies (if not always in their statements) that they saw certain domains, even of economic life, as requiring the suspension or reversal of “free market” policies in order to maintain their proper functioning within the national economy.
We might see these presidents’ flexibility as exemplifying the open-endedness of neoliberalism. The latter, after all, appeared as a style of thinking amid the economic woes of the 1970s and observers’ concomitant worry, across the political spectrum, that ideologies no longer seemed capable of assuring economic growth and orienting political action. Neoliberalism became central to our vision of society because, as the self-evidence of other kinds of political and economic belief collapsed, its ways of thinking about human beings as rational, self-interested, and therefore manipulable through changes to economic incentives resonated—and continue to resonate—both with our own experiences (themselves, of course, the product of a particular kind of society) and what we might call the folk beliefs of late-capitalist society.
Shifting tax and benefit structures to nudge families toward desired patterns of labor, reproduction, and parenting, or to nudge corporations toward making goods at home rather than abroad, both represent a different way of acting on neoliberalism’s characteristic anthropology rather than turning away from it. Many critics have observed that this anthropology limns a notion of humanity that may strike us as dispiriting, one-dimensional, and otherwise problematic. Yet it continues to function as the practical basis even of political agendas that purport to break with neoliberalism. It provides actionable assumptions about what people are like and how they can be made (that is, incentivized) to do what political actors wish them to do. A meaningful transition from neoliberalism, thus, would require not only changes in particular policies but also a change in the imagined basis of policymaking, a change in anthropology such that the figure of the manipulable “economic man” is no longer at its center, or, at any rate, alone onstage. It will not be enough to boo and hiss at him—we must imagine for him new companions, new figures in the moral repertory of post-neoliberal governance.
From Economic Man to Liberal Man
Neoliberalism, understood in such terms, seems at once embattled and, possibly, quite secure. Alternatives to the manipulable “economic man”—such as the good citizen, the family man, the Christian, the communitarian, the ecologist, the aesthete, or the schizoid—may strike even those who wish to escape neoliberalism (or liberalism altogether) as more likely to remain themes of moralizing sermons than to become central conceptual instruments of a new order of governance. It can be right and good and joyful to insist that people are, or ought to be, more than “economic men,” but it is quite another thing to elaborate a set of motives to which policy can appeal, and on which it can act, that would be more effective than those of the manipulable, self-interested subject.
It is not obvious that liberals—or those who describe themselves as having moved beyond liberalism—have the imagination for such a challenge. As it stands, illiberals of the right and left seem to present us with, on the one hand, powerful claims that the ills of our current iteration of neoliberalism can be overcome only by overthrowing liberalism entirely. On the other hand, they offer policy proposals that fail even to take us beyond the anthropological horizon that Foucault saw as the defining characteristic of contemporary neoliberalism. In order to actually escape—rather than merely rage against and slightly tinker with—the latter, we will need to expand our anthropology. We might begin to do so by seeing how Foucault adumbrates (without making explicit what he is doing) a distinctly liberal anthropology, or a sketch of liberal man, an individual with a system of motives notably more complex than those of neoliberalism’s “economic man.” This liberal vision, older and more capacious than the post-1970s neoliberal one, may not be recoverable in the present. Yet it offers, if nothing else, a reminder that the episodic crises of liberalism require regular reassessments not only of economic policies and theories (to ask if they are serving the goal of human freedom) but also of our governing assumptions about what people are like, what they desire, and how they can be motivated.
Foucault characterizes liberalism by a few fundamental nonideological features, chiefly affective in nature. This sort of analysis may appear disturbingly nonempirical or arbitrary for those accustomed to definitions of liberalism as a political regime or system of belief (or even as a “way of life” or ethics) rather than as a set of feelings. It has, nevertheless, a pedigree in the history of liberal thought. In The Spirit of Laws, the eighteenth-century French political philosopher Montesquieu revised Aristotle’s account of the differences among various forms of government to emphasize that despotic, monarchical, and republican states depend on and engender various emotional climates. Their political cultures, and the characters of their citizens, vary insofar as different affective mechanisms (e.g., fear, honor, virtue) circulate among rulers and ruled as the primary motivators of action. Montesquieu argued that despotism, the unlimited rule of a single tyrant, was a political form in which fear predominates. Foucault, however, complicates Montesquieu’s analysis by arguing that liberalism—which emerged in no small part out of Montesquieu’s critiques of despotism—is itself driven by a particular kind of fear, as well as concomitant or counterbalancing hopes.
Liberalism, Foucault notes, is often identified with “a fear of the state.” Although by no means committed consciously to the idea that any activity on the part of the state will tend toward potentially frightening overreach, liberals do, Foucault argues, approach the state as if the latter possessed a “specific dynamism” by which it is likely, whenever it takes up some new project, to keep extending itself in an “indefinite expansion” throughout civil society. Any government initiative, therefore, is met by liberals with some initial hesitation or wariness, and requires justification in terms of how it will be limited, temporary, etc., or how it is necessary (for instance, to protect some hitherto insufficiently realized human right) rather than merely desirable.
Foucault traces, albeit vaguely, this fear back to the early-modern tradition of critiques of despotism, developed notably by Huguenot exiles from Louis XIV’s absolutist France, and, in the following century, by Montesquieu. Fear that a monarch (especially a Catholic one) might seek both to override the limitations on his power embodied in the privileges of nobles, concessions to minorities, feudal law, etc., and to extend his rule throughout Europe and the world, seemed to many early-modern observers an obvious and rational concern. It animated much of political life, particularly in the Netherlands, Great Britain, and what became the United States. In modern times, this inherited fear has remained central to our political culture, not least because our historical experiences of, for example, Nazism and Soviet Communism have lent themselves to being interpreted as the latest guise of our old enemy: ideology-driven tyranny in pursuit of global empire.
Fear of despotism depends not only on the notion that this is a particularly bad form of government but also on the suspicion (itself informed by a continually refreshed historical experience) that it is an aggressive and expansionist one that activates the latent potential of any form of government to grow beyond limits. Contemporary critics of liberalism, such as Adrian Vermeule and Eric Posner, rightly observe that what they call (and pathologize as) “tyrannophobia” is central to what we might call the affective, if not the conceptual, foundation of liberalism. Thus to identify liberalism with a fear of the state, as Foucault does, may seem indeed to characterize liberals as paranoid, needing a dose of anti-tyrannophobia. (Progressives who scoff or shudder at Vermeule, after all, might recall their own frustrations with conservatives who see public health care or restrictions on gun sales as tyrannical.) But Foucault more appreciates than deprecates this fear, and finds in it a way out of a conceptual impasse.
In a series of lectures titled “Society Must be Defended,” given three years before his course on neoliberalism, Foucault seemed to give a rather fearful account of the history of the state, by which the apparently benign programs of social democracies—the New Deal and the Great Society, among others—could be compared to the totalitarian projects of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. All of them sought to act on the level of “life” itself, remodeling human beings in their most intimate dimensions of “health” and sexuality. He ended this course by suggesting that traditional liberal concepts of “human rights” as enumerable, specifiable norms valid throughout time, which, once declared, can limit the scope of state action, have proven inadequate to restrain modern states invested in improving our “welfare.” These states have suspended supposedly inalienable rights both for occasional “emergencies” and unending campaigns against all sorts of dangers. It is therefore necessary, Foucault concluded, to reimagine political life in terms that no longer rely on fixed, rigid conceptions of rights but instead mobilize something more fluid and adaptable. It was in this sense that Foucault came to consider the affordances of affects rather than the discourse of rights. The latter, no matter how clearly enumerated, or cogently proved to be essential to any proper concept of humanity, are always insufficient to restrain modern governments concerned with the ‘health’ of those they rule. Against the pressure of claims to protect the well-being of ourselves and others, rights are of little use, except insofar as they serve as emblems around which impassioned masses can rally their fears—and hopes.
Liberalism Needs Utopias
Toward the conclusion of “The Birth of Biopolitics,” Foucault defines liberalism as driven by a fear that one is “governing too much,” that the state is already too much with us, that we are not free enough. This suspicion, of course, can manifest itself in counterproductive refusals to be governed at all, and in paranoid overinterpretations of even the smallest acts of government as portents of tyranny. But it is also a spur to “critique,” a kind of self-reflexivity more often identified in modern thought with members of the left (such as the Frankfurt School) than with liberals. For Foucault, the latter ought to recognize themselves as continually summoned by their own suspicions about state power to ask, “Why should we govern?” This keeps open the question of not only whether a given policy is working as it should (or might be more efficiently carried out by non-state actors) but also whether it is aligned with the mission of government, which should always be imagined as existing in the service of (and as a possible threat to) some extra-governmental domains of activity.
Liberalism, Foucault implies, is a critical theory. Like the critical theories of the left, it could be castigated for having an essentially negative or skeptical character, for giving undue importance to minor events, and for preventing us from appreciating what is working well in the present. But it has the advantage, when confronted with a crisis, of having within itself a powerful habitude of self-reflexivity by which liberals are accustomed to revising political and economic policies and redefining even central concepts like freedom.
This nondogmatic reflexivity—as is the case for the critical theories of the left—is inseparable, too, from a capacity for imagining utopias, which, Foucault argues, liberals see as spaces outside of state power. Foucault warns liberals of the 1970s (ranking himself implicitly among them) that “we” have for too long considered utopian thinking as the exclusive domain of the left. “Leaving to the socialists the concern for making utopias,” liberals have allowed the left to capture “vigor and historical dynamism,” an ability to project into the future and visualize a space after and outside of politics. But “liberalism, too, needs utopias,” and has needed them more than we typically might recognize.
Somewhat frustratingly, Foucault does not elaborate this point. One way to make sense of it might be to observe—as critics of liberalism often do—that liberals can seem to assume many features of our contemporary society—such as “free markets” and “the nuclear family,” or “bodily autonomy” and “gender and sexuality”—exist outside of the political activity that sustains and shapes them. Of course, some liberals may be so naive as to forget that, for example, housing policy shaped the suburbs and the norms of heterosexual domesticity that operate within them, or that male homosexual culture and identity arose out of specific economic arrangements in an urbanizing America. When middle-class homeowners or urban gays—or any of the other demographics that constitute our civil society—express that they just want to be “left alone” with their varied pursuits of happiness, one might well observe that no one is ever left alone. We are all continually influencing one another.
But liberalism functions, in no small part, through utopian yearnings by which we understand significant portions of our lives (or significant portions of the lives we would like to live) as taking place outside the crush of politics and its attendant conflicts, as belonging to a “natural” realm that deserves, precisely because it is natural and therefore apolitical, to be left alone. It is for the sake of these utopias and the hopes we invest in them that we tolerate what we perceive as necessary (if regrettable) interventions by politics into markets, families, or religious institutions when the latter seem too obviously to be failing. Our hopes, however, are balanced by fears that such interventions, if excessive, will destroy the apolitical domains of freedom for the sake of which we accept the practice of politics.
The utopias of some regimes are in the future. There is a glorious new day, and a new human being, for which the present may be sacrificed, say the illiberalisms of the left and right. By contrast, liberalism’s utopias, like its fears, are close at hand. They are not separated from our current way of living by an epochal chasm to be violently leapt over. Rather, they lie in a kind of seeing, a utopian gaze by which, for example, buying and selling goods, loving and living together with a romantic partner (or in a free-love commune), worshipping God (or not) in the manner of one’s own choosing appear as free acts in accordance with a pre-political nature, as being already an ideal life. Liberalism’s utopias reside in liberal subjects’ capacities (themselves instantiated by a wider culture and its pedagogical institutions, such as schools, media, and the political process itself) to imagine themselves as the agents of their own lives, which are most intensely and happily lived where the shadow of politics least falls.
Much of illiberal critical theory works in the sense of disabusing us of these utopias, showing that they are not, in fact, free, apolitical, or “one’s own.” The work of the liberal imagination, in its varied manifestations from the conservative family to the queer polycule to the free market, has been to enchant everyday life such that it stands in meaningful, plausible contrast to liberal fears of political domination. Fear and hope, critique and utopia, compose, as Foucault understood it, the emotional system of liberalism. In light of his analysis, we can see crises of liberalism as an unbalancing of this equilibrium, or a slackening of the imaginative power that animates both ends.
Is Liberalism a Spent Force?
Liberalism, Foucault argues, periodically generates political and epistemic crises in which actors are no longer sure how they can continue to achieve fundamental social goals within a liberal framework. These crises should not be mistaken for or conflated with “crises of capitalism,” the sort of economic panics, depressions, or recessions (but notice how, even here, we often use the language of feeling and imagination!) that have punctuated modern history. To be sure, economic crises can precipitate political ones—perhaps most clearly, the Great Depression brought about the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany. But, Foucault insists, there are often significant gaps or surprises in the relationship between economic and political developments.
In our own day, we can observe that the political consequences of deindustrialization, offshoring, and the erosion of wages and living standards for many members of the working and middle classes in the United States were not politically articulated as a “crisis” (at least, not by more than a few marginal voices) while these processes were underway in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. That last decade witnessed the quixotic and ultimately ineffective anti-globalization, pro-industrial-policy presidential campaign of Ross Perot. It also saw more morbid symptoms of social unrest (militias, cults, riots, and pervasive moods of nihilism and violence across popular culture). By the turn of the millennium, however, neoliberal elites might well have congratulated themselves for reordering the American economy without a “crisis.” Only a generation later, after the interlude of the War on Terror, and through such initially bizarre-seeming phenomena as the Tea Party and the “Birther” movements, did right-wing opposition to the federal government, Barack Obama, and all things related thereto begin to shape itself, temporarily and unsteadily, during the first Trump campaign, into an indictment of constitutive elements of the contemporary neoliberal order such as massive immigration and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs.
The rise of Donald Trump on the right—like the apparently less-enduring impact of Bernie Sanders or Black Lives Matter on the left—expresses pervasive discontent with long-standing economic conditions and a desire, across the political spectrum, that the latter be transformed (even if this is by no means the primary content of these movements). But there is no direct and immediate translation of economic malaise into political outrage. Nor, when that outrage comes, is it necessarily targeted at economic problems. It is often turned to apparently unrelated issues of, for example, identity, gender, sexuality, race, and nationality. While much analysis has been devoted to the ways in which economic conditions find perverse political expression, Foucault was, in his lectures on neoliberalism, concerned rather with how these political crises can be understood not as distortions of a more fundamental economic situation but as moments of instability within liberalism’s own balancing of a set of affects and affect-laden projects.
Liberalism’s crises, Foucault suggests, are related to but distinct in both timing and content from the economic crises of capitalism. In the latter, liberals weigh against each other, in changing ways, their desire to preserve the economy as a domain distinct from (and acting in some fashion as a check on) state power and their awareness that state action of some kind is needed to reorder the crisis-struck economy such that it can regain its apparent “autonomy” from the state. Western societies have seen, again and again, liberals respond to such crises by “intervening” in the economy either by extending governmental controls to regulate markets (as in the New Deal) or by lifting controls in order to stimulate them (as in the era of deregulation during the 1970s and 1980s).
Political crises of liberalism, in a related but distinct process, see liberals concerned that civil society, including its moral and cultural dimensions, will lose its ability to, as it were, “self-regulate.” What had hitherto appeared as its various domains of self-sustaining freedom (romantic and sexual love, the intergenerational transmission of values and identities, etc.) can no longer be believably imagined to possess an apolitical, natural, and utopian character but appear instead as frighteningly dependent on politics for their very being. Such traditional liberal utopias as the family and small business—or alternative spaces for self-creation—may have become, in our time, too minoritarian and divisive to generate broad social consensus as the goods for the sake of which political struggle must be waged. It appears the utopia of one group of Americans becomes viewed by their self-understood enemies as a frightening imposition on their own freedom, with, for example, “family” looming as a euphemism for clerico-fascism, “lifestyle” as a code word for contagious degeneracy, and so on. Is it possible to imagine utopias capacious enough to appeal to a decisive majority of Americans, or to articulate the search for such possible forms (the pursuit, that is, of happiness) as an end around which our fellow citizens can rally? Is it possible to imagine, alongside them, new moral figures to whose motives new policies can appeal, whose desires new utopias can satisfy?
Foucault’s warning that liberalisms have too often abandoned their responsibility for utopian thinking to the socialist left resonates differently in the present moment. Now, we might rather say, illiberalisms of both the right and the left threaten to arrogate to themselves the utopian function (the affects of hope and enchantment) that ought to be one half of the affective engine by which liberalism maintains itself. Illiberalisms offer their adherents—and terrify their opponents by means of—“utopias” such as racial purity, racial retribution, or other catastrophic remakings of the world. Embattled liberals too often seem to respond to these extensions of the imagination merely with scolding, petulance, and fear-mongering, forgetting the utopian function that Foucault set alongside a fear of the state as the essence of liberalism.
Perhaps only a revival of liberalism’s particular, self-concealing history of utopian thinking—and thus of liberals’ ability to generate new utopias and an expanded moral repertory—can overcome what the illiberalisms of the right and left fail to overcome: contemporary neoliberalism and its anthropology of manipulable economic man. This thin, paltry figure emerged out of liberalism and continues to be the pivot around which supposedly alternative and radical political ideologies turn. He alone appears to satisfy, however minimally, the basic affective and conceptual requirement of liberalism (and still even of its ostensibly anti- or post-liberal enemies) to posit the existence of a pre-political domain on which, and for the sake of which, politics operates. It is our tragedy that this domain has shrunk to the smallest imaginable space (at least so far): individual self-interest. To escape the confines of contemporary neoliberalism—to reformulate yet another “new” liberalism successfully amid our own political crisis—means reviving liberalism as a critical theory capable of finding believable utopias (and actionable strategies for protecting them) within our imperiled world.
Foucault lamented that liberals had abandoned their own utopian tradition, as well as the complex repertory of motives (and associated moral figures) that had characterized modern Western thinking about subjectivity. If liberals do not recover these traditions, they—and the vitalizing energies of political life—may pass wholly over to their enemies, who may be able to appropriate for themselves, on the one hand, all our longings for a natural, normal, quiet life outside of politics, and, on the other, all our desires to be something greater (larger and more estimable) than a self-interested individual calculating his potential gains.
Left with no decent passions at its command, liberalism would be—and perhaps is—a spent force. But even illiberalism seems trapped within the specifically neoliberal anthropology, narrower and meaner than the expansive, polyvalent vision of humanity at the heart of the liberal tradition. And what comes may be still worse. The rational, self-interested individual, however base we consider him, possessed at least a certain coherence. Contemporary technologies of distraction seem to act increasingly on fragmented, disconnected parts of a splintering subject, while contemporary political rhetoric, in its systemic and transparent falsehoods, bypasses the minimal conditions of instrumental reason. If there is a subject of governance after neoliberalism, rather than transcending self-interest, he may be too psychically scattered and disoriented to be considered a self. The alternative to a recovery of the liberal imagination in its true political dimensions (and not merely as the false charms of an aestheticized inner life) may be neither illiberalism nor the neoliberal status quo but a new barbarism.