Foucault News

Magnus Paulsen Hansen, Foucault’s Flirt? Neoliberalism, the Left and the Welfare State; a Commentary on La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault and Critiquer Foucault, Foucault Studies, No. 20, pp. 291-306, December 2015

Foucault Studies is an open access journal.

Extract

You have been read as an idealist, as a nihilist, as a “new philosopher,” an anti-Marxist, a new conservative, and so on… Where do you stand?

I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, neoliberal, and so on. […] None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

[I]f all the writers are claimed to have meant to articulate the doctrine with which they are being credited, why is it that they so signally failed to do so, so that the historian is left reconstructing their implied intentions from guesses and vague hints? The only plausible answer is of course fatal to the claim itself: that the author did not (or even could not) have meant after all to enunciate such a doctrine.

As the first quote above indicates, it is not a new task to try to politically position Foucault. However, recently, the wish to make tactical use of this position to promote or denounce a particular political programme seems to have intensified. The debate especially concerns Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism. Two recent books interpret the lectures as tokens of Foucault becoming “seduced” by neoliberalism. Both books draw upon this ‘insight’ in order to renew the left. However, the conclusions with regards to the role of the left we get from each book are almost diametrically opposite. Whereas Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault: Sur le néolibéralisme, la théorie et la politique proposes that the left should embrace Foucault’s endorsement of neoliberalism as a necessary step towards reinventing the left; Daniel Zamora’s edited volume Critiquer Foucault : Les années 1980 et la tentation néoliberale sees it as Foucault’s betrayal of the left and defection to the dark side, resulting in a contribution to the left’s current state of decay. We are thus located in the midst of Star Wars: Did Foucault remain the innocent Jedi knight capable of using the force of the enemy to rebel against him or was he finally, as Anakin Skywalker, in that same act, seduced by the almightiness of the empire and the persuasive skills of Emperor Palpatine (who else but Hayek?), finally turning into the incarnation of evil as Darth Vader?

Lars Thorup Larsen & Deborah Stone (2015): “Governing Health Care through Free Choice: Neoliberal Reforms in Denmark and the United States”, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 40(5): 941-70.

doi: 10.1215/03616878-3161162

Abstract
We compare free choice reforms in Denmark and the United States to understand what ideas and political forces could generate such similar policy reforms in radically different political contexts. We analyze the two cases using our own interpretation of neoliberalism as having “two faces.” The first face seeks to expand private markets and shrink the public sector; the second face seeks to strengthen the public sector’s capacity to govern through incentives and competition. First, we show why these two most-different cases offer a useful comparison to understand similar policy tools. Second, we develop our theoretical framework of the two faces of neoliberalism. Third, we examine Denmark’s introduction of a free choice of hospitals in 2002, a policy that for the first time allowed some patients to receive care either in a public hospital outside their local area or in a private hospital. Fourth, we examine the introduction of free choice among private managed care plans into the US Medicare program in 1997. We show how policy makers in both countries used neoliberal reform as a mechanism to make their public health care sectors governable. Fifth, on the basis of our analysis, we draw five lessons about neoliberal policy reforms.