Vervoort, T.
How Does Neoliberalism Form Our Lifes? A Praxeological Approach with Jaeggi and Foucault (2024) Critical Horizons
DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2024.2390335
Abstract
Michel Foucault’s work has immensely enriched the way critical social theorists understand power. Beyond his work on disciplinary normalisation, Foucault’s genealogy of the modern state has discussed governmental power as the conduct of conduct of subjects and populations. Foucault reserves his understanding of norms and normalisation for explaining the prescriptive force of disciplinary power. Accordingly, he hardly uses the language of norms to explain how neoliberal policies interfere in social conduct. In this paper, I aim to elucidate what kind of normative intervention neoliberal governmentality encompasses. By mobilising Rahel Jaeggi’s understanding of forms of life as ensembles of normatively imbued social practices, I suggest that neoliberal governmentality introduces the rationality of market competition into the problem-solving horizon of social conduct, thereby creating and instituting a “neoliberal form of life”. Hence, I argue that neoliberal governmentality is a form of domination that intervenes in ethical norms and social practices that build everyday forms of life. © Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2024.
Author Keywords
critique; forms of life; neoliberalism; norms; power
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