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 Reviews

The end of the social

and the denigration of
democracy?
Wendy Brown, Michel Foucault and
Neoliberalism: a review essay

Angela McRobbie
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution, Zone Books, MIT
Press 2015

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-9,
translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave MacMillan 2010

Neoliberalism’s vitalism

I
f indeed it is the case that the framework for contemporary neoliberalism was
established largely by the ordoliberal economists who were based in Freiburg
in the early 1930s, and whose ideas fed into the Chicago School of the 1950s
as well as spearheading the shape of the new economy of post-war Germany, then
it is surely important that we know and understand what this influential school of
thinkers was doing, and why their ideas spread and have proved so tenacious. We
have Foucault in his lectures of 1976-77 to thank for undertaking this task. The
Birth of Biopolitics offers remarkable insight into the thinking of the ordoliberals

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 Soundings

working in Germany before and during the years of Nazi rule. Foucault comments
rather cryptically that Euken, for example, one of the leading theorists of the Ordos,
‘went silent’ during the Nazi years, but he does not otherwise follow up in detail
the pathways followed by the members of this school during the Second World War
and the Holocaust. They must have sprung back into action in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, since it is now accepted that they virtually re-invented post-war liberal
government, starting in Germany. (More than two decades later Margaret Thatcher
was keen to embrace the kinds of policies recommended to her by Keith Joseph,
who was an advocate of the ideas of the Chicago School. We can credit this process
of osmosis as influencing her famous comment, ‘there is no such thing as society’.)

What we find delineated in Foucault’s lectures - through a series of comments

and arguments, albeit abbreviated, which add up to something of great profundity
- is the emergence of the invention of a distinctively new kind of power. More
specifically I would argue that this was also a new kind of right-wing politics, which
was able to succeed by differentiating itself from fascism and from the policies of
the National Socialists, even though they were so adjacent as to be literally ‘in the
air’. Despite their apparent attempts to differentiate themselves, we can see various
lines of connections with Nazism. For example, in a fairly aggressive and surely
disingenuous aside, Roepke at one point likened the UK welfare state and the ideas
of Beveridge to Nazism; and by this means the softer side of leftism, i.e. social
democracy, was well and truly trashed, but under the guise of both anti-nazism
and anti-communism. This kind of observation could only come from someone
harbouring immense animosity to the humanist, universalist and social democratic
principles underpinning the birth of the post-war welfare state (which Stuart Hall,
not long before he died, described as one of the most humane inventions of modern
times). Roepke’s objection was to the intense role of the state and its planning
agenda. He also wanted to diminish the role of the trade unions, and saw a way to
achieve this through a kind of incessant de-proletarianisation of society, suggesting
a revival of small heimat-like craft businesses. In a further echo of nazi-type idylls
of home, hearth and local family businesses, Roepke also pointed to the need for
workers to find pleasure and deep satisfaction at an almost spiritual level (vitalism)
in what they were doing, on the grounds that this would lessen, if not invalidate
entirely, the need for any idea of collective organisation or renewed trade unionism.
The (lower) middle-classification of society, along with the idea of gratification and
autonomy in working life as a deterrent to both alienation and then, heaven forfend,

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‘combination’, came to be a cornerstone not just of the re-building of post-war

Germany but also, in particular, the business culture of 1950s America; here, the
Chicago School of economists were to pursue these ideas with such vigour that they
became part of the core curriculum for the growing number of business schools that
were setting up in prestigious universities across the US and beyond.

What Foucault shows - without necessarily overtly flagging it up - is the birth of

a new, distinctive and immensely malleable form of government which was capable
of replacing and updating old-style conservatism by injecting huge reserves of energy
and ‘vitalpolitik’ into the transformative rollercoaster that Stuart Hall presciently
called ‘the great moving right show’.1 And interestingly, Stuart Hall, in Policing the
Crisis, was observing and documenting the run-up to the Thatcher revolution during
late 1970s Britain at precisely the same time that Foucault’s attention was focused
on 1970s France under the rule of Giscard d’Estaing. Thatcherism took off in the
same year that Foucault was concluding his lecture course.2 Stuart, in the style of
cultural studies, was more attentive to forces of resistance and opposition - to the
trade unions and organised labour, and to black inner city youth - but he too was
paying attention to the ratcheting up of the forces of law and order under the new
regime. In the UK the intensification of policing was orchestrated and legitimised
by the spectre of disorder in the inner city and in Northern Ireland; and the mass
media, especially the local press and TV, also played a key role in winning popular
consent to more interventionist policing and a more adversarial culture. Writing in a
Marxist frame, Stuart Hall drew on both Althusser and Gramsci for his analysis - the
conceptual richness of the theory of ideology and the ideological state apparatus,
as well as Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, and the role of the ‘national-popular’. He
wanted to understand the ways in which hegemonic forces within society were
seeking to win consent to the instigation of a more authoritarian political culture.
In his lectures Foucault does not look in this kind of detail at the role of the French
state or at its policing infrastructure, though he does refer to ‘la grande menace
industrielle’, which in France was also provoking the political classes to implement
a new kind of ‘industrial relations’. Nor does he consider the role of the mass media,
which for Stuart Hall at the time was an exemplary instance of the Ideological State
Apparatus as theorised by Althusser.

As Wendy Brown points out, Foucault was writing in opposition to the various
strands of Marxism so dominant in French thought at the time, including the theory

119
 Soundings

of ideology developed by Althusser. Brown shows how Foucault’s idea of a new

‘political rationality’ entailed a theory of power quite at odds with Marxism, owing
a good deal more to Max Weber’s idea of instrumental rationality (as well as being
closer to Marcuse’s 1960s notion of technological rationality). Michel Foucault
and Wendy Brown both point to the historical development and the consistency
of thinking that underpins the neoliberal ‘revolution’. In addition Brown extends
Foucault’s thinking to reflect not just on contemporary austerity but also the rise
of financialisation, with its further downgrading of ideas connected to the public
good. As she sees it, the banking crisis directly feeds into the idea - and reality -
that people unable to protect and add to their own bundle of human capital are
expendable; as the net of social protection is withdrawn poor people simply go into
freefall.

However, despite this extension of Foucault’s work by Brown, there is a good

deal more that needs to be done. We need to better understand the precise ways
and means by which leftism in all of its many varieties has been so relentlessly
disavowed, demonised, and judged irrelevant, by an ever-present infrastructure of
media and popular culture. We need to understand the scale of the undoing: this
is one outcome of what Mrs Thatcher used to refer as the ‘there is no alternative’
logic. We also need to pay more attention to the means by which contemporary
neoliberalism is able to harness the power of feel-goodness and optimism - indeed
fashionability - particularly in relation to the rise of the Google-type start-up or ‘new
economy’, which partly accounts for its special attraction to young people. It is also
surely necessary to develop a fuller understanding of the power of public relations,
and the ways in which this seemingly innocuous field of activity is one of the
foundational parts of the business school education that has been rolled out across
the service sector and far beyond, with far-reaching consequences.

Political rationality and good governance

In Undoing the Demos Wendy Brown offers the most sustained response to date to
contemporary neoliberalism. Foucault’s lectures are at the heart of her own analysis,
which she uses as a springboard for the dissection of a number of specific themes
- including the economisation of politics, the hollowing out of ideas of public
culture, the rise of the entrepreneurial university, and the question of law and legal

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reason - which permits an insightful account of ‘assaults on collective consciousness

and action’, including those of ‘citizens, workers and consumers’ (p153). As the
whole field of everyday life becomes subject to the model of the ‘firm’, Brown
reflects on the consequences this has for social solidarity, as we all become subject
to marketisation - in our personal lives, our CVs, and in the calculatory grid which
must nowadays be applied to the logistics of sexuality and family life.

Underpinning Brown’s analysis is her recognition of how far Foucault was from
Marxism. This proves to be a central axis for a close engagement that is carried out
over three full chapters, and we can assume that what justifies this close attention is
that Foucault offers an account which can indeed be of great value to those critics of
contemporary neoliberalism who are self-identifiably Marxist, notably figures such as
David Harvey, and the urban geographer Jamie Peck. It is not so much that Foucault
supplants or invalidates the work of writers such as these, rather that he is able to
produce a fuller understanding through his meticulous attention to governmental
rationality, entrepreneurialism, competition and the displacement of homo politicus
with homo economicus. There is, avowedly, no theory of capitalism per se, no stages,
no dialectic, no crises of accumulation, no idea of a people or class in waiting who
are searching somehow for a more equitable and a more socially just way of living.
And, indeed, where there was within the vocabularies of liberal democracy, as Brown
poignantly reminds us in the closing pages of her book, the potential to turn around
or re-function some of its precepts for use by subordinated peoples, minorities and
abjected populations, the foreclosure of this library of thought has also seemed to
shut down those possibilities too.

Neoliberalism, on the basis of Brown’s reading of Foucault, comprises a

range of unstable and constantly-evolving elements that are characterised by
their exceptional ability to adapt and transmogrify according to circumstances,
yet which also yield to analysis a constancy of values - including self-reliance -
and a continuing emphasis on individual asset-building as a means of gaining
competitiveness through the shoring up of human capital. Enterprise, she tells us,
takes over from production, and the field of the socio-political, including ideas of
citizenship, comes to be subjected to widescale ‘economisation’. Overall Foucault
sees this as a ‘re-programming of liberalism’. The modern state finds itself cast in a
new role as servant or handmaiden to the market economy rather than - as was the
case for some moments in time, especially in western Europe - a force capable of

121
 Soundings

constraining the full effect of the market and competition, by providing a degree of
redistribution (or, as Brown puts it, ‘compensation’ for some of the damage wrought
by capitalism). Market-spread has the quasi-magical ability to de-legitimise older
ideas of welfare as earned through social insurance. When disadvantaged ‘others’
are cast as feckless and undeserving, the scene is set to establish a vocabulary which
questions why ‘we’ should support ‘them’. Instead the market takes on an organising
role shaping the kind of subjects we need to become in order to have any kind
of chance for making a living, and managing the uncertainties of the new regime.
For Brown the most serious consequence of this process of economisation is that
democracy is in effect ‘disembowelled’, and the very idea of rule by the people,
and active citizenship, is shrunken and eviscerated, starved of life and emptied
of meaning. As she writes: ‘Homo politicus is the most important casualty of the
ascendance of neoliberal reason’ (p87).

The Foucauldian concept of political rationality as a ‘normative order of reason’

permits, as Brown shows, a stronger, yet also more diffuse and disseminated, idea
of power to emerge, one which has the capacity to be ‘world-changing’ insofar as
it creates a global tapestry of ‘qualities and relations’ which operate in a processual
way, in which agents themselves are less visible. This political rationality emerges
as a force which brings into being a whole realm of truths which in turn frame and
shape our very ‘forms of existence’. Its managerial practices are closely connected
with the workings of governance, which again places an emphasis on protocols
- such as best practice and benchmarking - alongside endless arrays of strategies,
techniques and procedures. Although Brown does not quite spell this out, it would
seem that it is here that the ideas of the business schools are again most in evidence,
since this is where people are trained up to implement such ideas. By fading out the
role of actors, and emphasising instead processes, techniques and ‘internal markets’,
institutions such as hospitals, schools or government departments take on the
appearance of being competitive but also consensually-driven operations, free of the
older obstacles such as inequities or conflicts between management and employees.
In addition, as Brown points out, public institutions become eminently manageable
entities, overseen by the same kind of rules as are adopted by CEOs across any
number of fields. What works for Tesco can also be implemented in the NHS, or
in social services, or in the public library system. This is the logic of contemporary
governance. Brown also provides great insight into the demise of the liberal arts
component in the US public university system, and its replacement by vocabularies

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which emphasise ROI (return on investment), and foreground opportunity and

employability rather than the values of knowing about and understanding the
arts and humanities. This is far-reaching, and has dire consequences for the life
of democracy, since without a population educated to understand the value of
rule by the people, the whole realm of public participation in decision-making is
dramatically shrunken and power comes to be consolidated in the hands of the few.

One of the key strengths of Brown’s book is to reveal how, within contemporary
life or civil society, inside the seemingly ordinary worlds of institutions,
organisations, public services and local authorities, the powers of what used to be
called ‘administration’ come to be yielded in ways that are less and less accountable,
by people whose business agendas are able to have a profound and seemingly
irreversible impact on social spaces that were previously subjected to the exercise of
democracy. There is a kind of heroic corporate triumphalism manifest across what
used to be the social field, and this is as evident in popular entertainment as it is
on the pages of The Financial Times. While Brown acknowledges that in Foucault’s
writing there is a noticeable absence of living and breathing persons whose daily
activities might stretch to bursting point the constrained spaces of allocated
subjectivity envisaged by the shaping forces of political rationality, and who might
even find the wherewithal to contest the confines of such subject-hood, both she
and he have done us all the great service of deciphering the modality of power that
makes such sweeping changes possible, and which present new kinds of danger to
our still-existing and hard fought-for freedoms.

Notes
1. Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today, January 1979.

2. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts
(eds), Policing the Crisis, Macmillan 1978.

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