The Government of Desire

A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject

Miguel de Beistegui

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226547404
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Liberalism, Miguel de Beistegui argues in The Government of Desire, is best described as a technique of government directed towards the self, with desire as its central mechanism. Whether as economic interest, sexual drive, or the basic longing for recognition, desire is accepted as a core component of our modern self-identities, and something we ought to cultivate. But this has not been true in all times and all places. For centuries, as far back as late antiquity and early Christianity, philosophers believed that desire was an impulse that needed to be suppressed in order for the good life, whether personal or collective, ethical or political, to flourish. Though we now take it for granted, desire as a constitutive dimension of human nature and a positive force required a radical transformation, which coincided with the emergence of liberalism.By critically exploring Foucault's claim that Western civilization is a civilization of desire, de Beistegui crafts a provocative and original genealogy of this shift in thinking. He shows how the relationship betweenidentity, desire, and government has been harnessed and transformed in the modern world, shaping our relations with others and ourselves, and establishing desire as an essential driving force for the constitution of a new and better social order. But is it? The Government of Desire argues that this is precisely what a contemporary politics of resistance must seek to overcome. By questioning the supposed universality of a politics based on recognition and the economic satisfaction of desire, de Beistegui raises the crucial question of how we can manage to be less governed today, and explores contemporary forms of counter-conduct.?Drawing on a host of thinkers from philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis, and concluding with a call for a sovereign and anarchic form of desire, The Government of Desire is a groundbreaking account of our freedom and unfreedom, of what makes us both governed and ungovernable.

PART ONE

Homo Oeconomicus

1

The Birth of Homo Oeconomicus

At a Conservative Party meeting in the late 1970s, shortly after Margaret Thatcher had become party leader, a speaker had prepared a paper arguing that the socioeconomic middle way was the pragmatic path for the party to take. Before he could finish introducing the paper, Thatcher reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. She interrupted the speaker, and held the book up for all to see. “This,” she said sternly, “is what we believe,” and banged Hayek down on the table.1 After winning the 1979 general election, she appointed Keith Joseph, the director of the Hayekian Centre for Policy Studies, as her secretary of state for industry in an effort to redirect Parliament’s economic strategies. This change of economic policy was soon to be followed by Ronald Reagan in the United States, and other countries throughout the world subsequently. The age of neoliberalism had begun. Although hard to define, the terms “Thatcherism” and “Reaganomics” are often thought to refer to the set of policies that include the privatization of the public sector, the deregulation of industry, reduction of trade barriers, and the “liberation” of the powers of finance worldwide, which are themselves reinforced by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. However, neoliberalism also signals the emergence of a new form of subjectivity and a new technique of government, organized around the economic norms of competition, flexibility, risk calculation, and human capital.

With Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States, however, there is evidence of a political rejection of over thirty years of neoliberal economic policies, and of the total transformation of the social and even existential landscape it has led to. The very countries in which it was first introduced have now voted against it, in what amounts to a reaffirmation of politics, albeit of a nationalistic, populist, xenophobic, and generally exclusive kind. Politics, it seems, is having its revenge, one that, sadly, but unsurprisingly, often takes the actual form of revenge, and even fascism. Neoliberal international treatises, such as NAFTA or TTP, European antitrust and state-aid regulations, and basic neoliberal principles, such as the free movement of people, are called into question, and protectionism, mercantilism, and tariffs are back on the agenda. Will 2016 have been the year that neoliberalism died? It is, I think, too early to say. As I will show in chapter 3, neoliberalism is not just an economic program. It is also, and perhaps above all, a construction of subjectivity, and one that has permeated every sphere of life. As a result, and in addition to the skepticism one might have with respect to the anti- or post-neoliberal declarations of Theresa May in the United Kingdom, or Donald Trump in the United States, one might wonder about the sudden demise of a technique of government and of the self that has grown such deep roots.

The year that Thatcher became prime minister, Foucault gave a lecture course at the Collège de France entitled The Birth of Biopolitics. In fact, the lecture course has very little to say about biopolitics as such, but much about the history of liberalism, the emergence of neoliberalism, and the birth of political economy. It is a remarkable lecture course, in which, contrary to his habit, Foucault interrogates not a more or less distant past, nor even the present, but a phenomenon that was only beginning to take shape at the time, and that has dominated the life of hundreds of millions of people in the last thirty years. His analyses turn out to have been not only accurate, but also prescient. In that respect, Foucault’s lecture course is a remarkable tool to interrogate our present and understand the sort of subjects that we are today. It provides us with the means to understand a decisive shift that took place in the “art of governing.” At the heart of it figures desire, and its inscription within a normative horizon anchored in the concepts of interest and utility, and played out in the rigorously constructed and monitored space of the market.

Yet, as he clearly says in the lecture course from the previous year (Security, Territory, Population), his main concern is not with the history of political economy as such, but with the manner in which this specific form of knowing (savoir) is connected with a specific modality or regime of power (pouvoir), and oriented toward a particular type of subject. Foucault’s thesis is that, from the eighteenth century onward, “government” no longer consists solely, or even primarily, in the exercise of the sovereign’s right. Rather, to govern now means to administer and manage, to monitor and supervise, to support and sustain human beings as living entities, or as population, and thus as imbued with a certain naturalness. This new kind of power, which Foucault defines as “biopower,” doesn’t simply replace sovereign power, but overlaps with it and complicates it. Where sovereign power was seen as the right to “take life and let live,” biopower can be seen as the power that rules over life itself, invests it, governs it, manages it. It is the right to “make live and let die.” The emergence of what Foucault calls liberal governmentality is itself to be situated within that power shift. We need to be a bit clearer here: Foucault’s claim is not that the notion of population did not exist before the birth of biopower. It is a notion that can be found as early as Bacon’s Essays (1597).2 His point, rather, is that the problem of population in the classical age was entirely bound up with a specific problem, that of the power of the sovereign, and with the question of territory, as that over which the sovereign’s power is extended. It is a problem, yes, but only insofar as it interests the sovereign, and it interests the sovereign primarily as a quantity that can be used: A large population is a source of power in that it provides troops and resources. Population is contrasted with depopulation, which can happen as a result of wars, diseases, or famine. So the problem of population, even for the mercantilists and cameralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, remains subordinated to the rationality of the state and the question of how to increase its power.3

This begins to change in the eighteenth century, and with the French économistes (or, as they came to be known, Physiocrats) in particular: The population no longer appears as a collection of subjects of right, of the sovereign’s will, but as a set of natural processes, which need to be managed. What does this mean? It means, first of all, that it is recognized as a complex phenomenon, which depends on a large series of variables, such as the climate, material surroundings, commerce, customs and laws, moral and religious values, means of subsistence, and so on. Because of that complexity, it is not immediately transparent to the sovereign’s action, and the relation between the population and the sovereign cannot be one of obedience or refusal of obedience, submission or revolt. One cannot act on those variables through sheer voluntarism. It is no longer possible to think of the relation as one of the type: “Do this.” It requires a different rationality of government, namely, management, and a different kind of knowledge, namely, political economy. All of this comes out very clearly in the “Maxims of Economic Government” that Quesnay lays out at the outset of his article from Diderot’s Encyclopédie on “Corn,” as well as in his articles on “Men.”4 It is “men,” we are told, who constitute the economic power of states, and the wealth of nations depends on “the employment of men and the increase of population.”5 As a result, “the principal matter of concern in the economic government of states” is “the state of the population and of the employment of men,” and the government in question is precisely a matter of “management” and “administration.”6

At the same time, the question is also one of knowing whether, beneath all those variables, which now need to be recognized, analyzed, combined, there is something like an invariant, or a “mainspring of action” that the population as a whole would share, and which should therefore become the object or target of government. And that is precisely desire.7 The next chapter will be devoted to the manner in which desire entered the field of economic governmentality, and was very closely associated, if not identified, with the concepts and norms of interest and utility. However, before turning to the question of the economic government of desire, and the birth of the homo oeconomicus, I need to sketch Foucault’s genealogy of the discourse of political economy, and describe the transformation of the epistemological status of the market that accompanied its emergence. Chapter 3 will reveal a radicalization and further internalization of the economic regime of desire, and of the norms of interest and management, in neoliberalism.

“Economics” and “Politics”

The association of the terms “economics” and “politics,” which we take for granted today, was far from obvious when it was introduced toward the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, politics and economics designated two very different, even heterogeneous spheres of activity. In ancient Greece, for example, the very idea of political economy would have been seen as a contradiction in terms.8 This is how one historian puts it:

Oikonomikè, the science of the oikonomia, was first and foremost the art of managing one’s oikos, one’s property, and what we call economics, that is, the set of phenomena related to the production and exchange of material goods, had not yet acquired in Ancient Greece the autonomy that, beginning in the eighteenth century, it acquired in the modern world . . . Economics was still embedded, integrated into the social and political realm.9

Telling, in that respect, is that, besides war and politics, the only activity the Greeks documented in some detail, and saw as worthy of a free man (and thus a citizen or political animal), was agriculture. While the Greek world was one of cities, its main economic activity was related to the land. Furthermore, the connection between the land and the city was not only of an “economic” nature. It was also a religious connection and, more important still, a political one: Only landowners were allowed to be citizens.10

By contrast, the so-called mechanical arts (βαναυσικαὶ) were held in low esteem, as Socrates makes it perfectly clear in the following passage from Xenophon’s Economics:

Very good, Critobulus; for to be sure, the mechanical arts, as they are called, are spoken against, and are, naturally enough, held in utter disdain in our city-states [τῶν πόλεων]. For they spoil the bodies of the workmen and the foremen, forcing them to sit still and live indoors, and in some cases to spend the day at the fire. The softening of the body involves a serious weakening of the mind. Moreover, these so-called mechanical arts leave no spare time [χολίας] for attention to one’s friends and city-state, so that those who follow them are reputed bad at dealing with friends and bad defenders of their country. In fact, in some of the city-states, and especially in those reputed warlike, it is not even lawful for any of the citizens to engage in such arts.11

We have a clear indication of the value system within which work in general, especially that of the builder or craftsman, was held, in the fact that the salaries of, say, an architect, and the various people working under his supervision, or the potter and the goldsmith, were roughly equivalent, and never exceeded a ratio of one to three. This means that labor was not deemed sufficiently important, or valuable, to be measured precisely, but was seen only as a “service.”12 While undoubtedly recognized for his skilled work, requiring the mastery of a certain techne, and thus freeing men from the constraints of nature, the artisan was also seen as unable to gain access to that other, nobler techne, the techne politike.

Aristotle’s own conception of economic exchange, and of the role of money in particular, confirms this general attitude:13 It is, he says, a just and equitable operation between equal citizens, yet always threatened by the danger of an unlimited desire for money, which severs the links between free, sovereign, and equal citizens—the basic political link that he calls philia and for which we, moderns, living in the age of self-interest and competition, have no equivalent (solidarity, or fraternity, rather than friendship, would be an approximation). In his Politics, Aristotle warns against the dangers of this peculiar techne called chrematistics (χρηματιστική), or money-making, which consists in the accumulation of wealth for one’s personal gain. He distinguishes it very clearly from economics, which caters to the natural needs of life (zoe) and the household, and is governed by a principle of use. The following two passages are worth citing in full:

As in the art of medicine there is no limit to the pursuit of health, and as in the other arts there is no limit to the pursuit of their several ends, for they aim at accomplishing their ends to the uttermost (but of the means there is a limit, for the end is always the limit), so, too, in this art of wealth-getting there is no limit of the end, which is riches of the spurious kind, and the acquisition of wealth. But the art of wealth-getting which consists in household management [ἠοἰκονομία], on the other hand, has a limit; the unlimited acquisition of wealth is not its business. And therefore, in one point of view, all riches must have a limit; nevertheless, as a matter of fact, we find the opposite to be the case; for all getters of wealth increase their hoard of coin without limit.14

Hence some persons are led to believe that getting wealth is the object of household management, and the whole idea of their lives is that they ought either to increase their money without limit, or at any rate not to lose it. The origin of this disposition in men is that they are intent upon living only, and not upon living well; and as their desires are unlimited, they also desire that the means of gratifying them should be without limit. Those who do aim at a good life seek the means of obtaining bodily pleasures; and, since the enjoyment of these appears to depend on property, they are absorbed in getting wealth; and so there arises the second species of wealth-getting. For, as their enjoyment is in excess, they seek an art which produces the excess of enjoyment; and if they are not able to supply their pleasures by the art of getting wealth, they try other arts, using in turn every faculty in a manner contrary to nature.15

In his highly influential The Great Transformation (1944), the economist and historian Karl Polanyi refers to those passages as “probably the most prophetic pointer ever made in the realm of the social sciences” and judges them to be “certainly still the best analysis of the subject we possess.”16 The reason for that, he argues, was Aristotle’s ability to distinguish between gain as a motive specific to production for the market and use as the principle governing production for household management (which, we know, was extended to the ma...