Eric Schliesser, Bentham and Foucault on Biopolitics and Political Epistemology, digressionsimpressions’s Substack, Feb 13, 2024
Bonus Post: Foucault, the Benthamite in 1978-1979
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Today’s post is a long read. The pay-off is that I show that the state’s essential role is the production and diffusion — as a machinery of record — of knowledge for Bentham. In fact, it is the main exception to laissez-faire. And so somewhat surprisingly a certain conception of political epistemology is central to Bentham’s art of government.* Oddly, Foucault seems to have grasped this while we have no reason to believe he read the salient source, while some of the most informed readers of Bentham (Viner, Keynes, Halévy) botch the argument.
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In the first lecture of The Birth of Biopolitics (hereafter: BoB), 10 January 1979, Foucault claims that in the middle of the eighteenth century there is a change in what he calls ‘modern governmental reason.’ This change “consists in establishing a principle of limitation that will no longer be extrinsic to the art of government, as was law in the seventeenth century, [but] intrinsic to it: an internal regulation of governmental rationality.” (p. 10 in the Graham Burchell translation) He lists four characteristics of such an internal regulation.
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