State Phobia and Civil Society

The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault

Mitchell Dean, Kaspar Villadsen

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804796996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

State Phobia and Civil Society draws extensively upon the work of Michel Foucault to argue for the necessity of the concept of the state in political and social analysis. In so doing, it takes on not only the dominant view in the human sciences that the concept of the state is outmoded, but also the large interpretative literature on Foucault, which claims that he displaces the state for a de-centered analytics of power. Understanding Foucault means understanding all his interlocutors—whether Marxists, Maoists, neoliberals, or social democrats. It requires turning to Foucault's colleagues, including Deleuze and Guattari, François Ewald, and Blandine Kreigel, in relation to whom he carved out a position. And it entails an examination of his legacy in Hardt and Negri, the theorists of Empire, or in Nikolas Rose, the influential English sociologist. Foucault's own view is highly ambiguous: he claims to be concerned with the exercise of political sovereignty, yet his work cannot make visible the concept of the state. Moving beyond Foucault, the authors outline new ways of conceiving the state's role in establishing social order and in mediating between an inequality-producing capitalist economy and the juridical equality and political rights of individuals. Arguing that states and their cooperation remain of vital importance to resolving contemporary crises, they demonstrate the interdependence of state and civil society and the necessity of social forms of governance.

CHAPTER 1

STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY

At the end of The Birth of Biopolitics lecture series Foucault states that the liberal art of government is founded on the very rationality of the governed themselves: “This, it seems to me, is what characterizes liberal rationality: how to model government, the art of government, how to found the principle of the rationalization of the art of government on the rational behavior of those who are governed” (Foucault 2008, 312). This is a fundamental conclusion for Foucault. He arrives at it after a key analysis of the emergence of “civil society” at the end of the eighteenth century, especially the late eighteenth-century “protosociologist” Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society, which was first published in 1767. In that analysis Foucault finds civil society populated by economic subjects and argues that “homo oeconomicus and civil society belong to the same ensemble of the technology of liberal governmentality” (2008, 296). Foucault does not elide civil society and the economy in these final passages of his lectures on governmentality, but he emphasizes civil society as the environment of economic agents.

This emphasis has been repeated in some of the standard accounts of what is now known as “governmentality studies” (Sennelart 2007, 390). In this respect it would be straightforward for thinkers such as John Keane (1988) and Jürgen Habermas (1996) to reproach the Foucauldian school for a failure to understand the broader history and significance of civil society as a domain of value-based dialogue and instructive ethics that constitutes another source for telling the truth about society against market exploitation and state domination.

Yet this is certainly not a devastating critique of Foucault. He also stresses that the economic subject “inhabits the dense, full, and complex reality of civil society” (2008, 296) and that this places civil society within a broader story about the “governmentalization” of the state. He locates the problem of how to govern civil society as one version of the emerging general problematic of government through self-government and thus of a piece with liberal and Enlightenment thought. However, given the reemergence of civil society as a key term in the lexicon of contemporary governance, it remains to be explored more fully as, in Foucault’s terms, “something which forms part of modern governmental technology” (297).

When interrogating the status of civil society, we are immediately faced with its other side: the concept of the state. We know that Foucault was concerned to distinguish his approach from a certain style of analysis of the state. At the beginning of these same lectures he argues for a method that, rather than focusing on already given “universals,” as he calls them, such as the state and civil society, would assume that they do not exist and then ask how they are formed through a grid of “concrete practices” (Foucault 2008, 3). This, we might note, is a different project from the one that has so far concerned the most influential of Foucault’s governmentality followers: “The analytical language structured by the philosophical opposition of state and civil society is unable to comprehend contemporary transformations in modes of exercise of political power” (Rose and Miller 1992, 173). While all conceptual distinctions have their limitations, this claim manifests a certain ambiguity in the writings on governmentality. On the one hand, as Colin Gordon (1991, 4) has argued, the concept is introduced by Foucault as a way of bridging his “microphysics of power” pioneered in Discipline and Punish with a concern for the governing of populations “at the level of the exercise of a political sovereignty over an entire society.” On the other hand, this analytical move has been taken by some governmentality writers to imply that analysis of political power should move from macropolitical concerns (with their questions of the conditions of social order, the distribution of power and resources, and the regulatory role of the state) to the “humble,” the “local,” and the “mundane” technologies and practices of governing.

Such a turn in governmentality studies to minor practices and powers, the small technologies aimed at “producing subjects,” has even been grounded on the claim that this is where politics is really at stake: Barbara Cruikshank (1999, 124), for example, has argued that “democratic politics is not so much out there, in the public sphere or in a realm, but in here, at the very soul of subjectivity. Politics is also down there in the strategic field of small things.” Foucault certainly focused on the soul of subjectivity. But did he envision the ways in which his analytics have been taken with regard to the state and state-centered power? As we will see, Foucault insisted on a method of decentering the state similar to his earlier displacements of the institutions of psychiatry, the prison, and medicine so that we might better understand our modern experience of the state. He sought, whether successfully or not, to avoid the macro-micro division, but it remains to be seen whether he sought an analysis beyond the state and the distinction between state and civil society.

Civil society and the state are key components of the vocabulary by which politics has been discussed for several centuries in the societies of the Occident. But statements concerning such terms not only can have analytical purposes; they also constitute forms of actions in definite political contexts. In this respect Foucault’s statements focusing on the state cannot be properly understood without understanding their context, and to do that, we need to understand to whom and against whom or what they are addressed.

Foucault’s own work makes this methodological point in several ways. From the analytical perspective of his archaeology (1972), statements should be understood not in terms of what they signify but in terms of what they do. They are hence a form of action that can only be understood within a field of dispersion of statements, a “discursive formation.” The term discursive practices captures this feature of statements as a kind of action. From the perspective of his genealogies of power-knowledge Foucault employs a series of terms that emphasize the intelligibility of statements and forms of knowledge as actions rather than as mere semantic decodings: strategy, programs of conduct, regimes of truth, and so forth (see, e.g., QM). Applied to his own work, Foucault speaks of it as a “critical ontology” of ourselves and our present with the objective of questioning what is necessary and what is contingent in the identities by which we have come to know ourselves and the relations of power in which we find ourselves and thus to open up the possibilities of thinking and acting differently (Foucault 2010, 20–21).

A similar point has been made in a more straightforward way by Quentin Skinner in his classic paper “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” (1969). For him political thought cannot be understood purely through the meaning of terms but rather (following John Austin’s theory of the speech act) by what form of action is performed by them. To understand what is meant by an utterance, it is necessary to understand the field of utterances of which it is a part, what Skinner regards as its context (Tully 1988). While there are serious differences between Foucault’s critical comments on the history of ideas and its focus on authorial intention, and Skinner’s attempt to recover intention by locating utterances in context (Walter 2008), they both agree that speech acts should be understood as illocutionary, as forms of performance that seek and have definite consequences. Skinner expressed his central insight in this way: “the grasp of force as well as meaning is essential to the understanding of texts” (1969, 46).

Following this basic insight, we should regard statements concerning the state and civil society as ones made in a particular context or field of dispersion of statements. While some statements might be exegetical, heuristic, or methodological in character, others are clearly addressed to a range of different interlocutors and seek to intervene in a particular field. It is, then, worth examining the context of the locus classicus of many of Foucault’s statements about state and civil society, and by implication, much of poststructuralism’s approach to power, what now might be called his “governmentality lectures” (2007b, 2008).

For our present purposes here the most important thing to note about these texts on governmentality is that they are lectures. This does not mean that they are less than fully reliable sources or that their readers today can take greater interpretive license (see Gordon 2013, 10–13). It does mean, however, that they were likely composed in a single, rapid draft rather than through a number of drafts and that their writing and delivery is often punctuated by present-day concerns more directly than Foucault’s monographs. This is a point we find well-put in the foreword reproduced in all these lectures by François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, their general editors: “The courses also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault’s art consisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality” (Foucault 2008, xv). This primary point is not so much of context as of the nature of the text. The act and immediacy of writing and giving lectures underlines, if anything, the performative and illocutionary aspects of Foucault’s thought in its present. This is redoubled by the 1979 lectures, where Foucault, for the only time in his analyses, directly addressed that present. This means that context becomes, if anything, more important.

That context for these lectures is certainly a difficult one to reimagine from our current perspective (Tribe 2009). But to understand his statements on the state, civil society, and related subjects such as socialism, it is necessary to list his possible interlocutors. First, we could name Marxist “state theory,” given the then-receding dominance of Marxism in social and political analysis in France. If Marxism was by the mid-1970s waning as a theoretical framework, it was in part due to the diminishing viability of “really existing socialism” with the controversies that followed the publication of books such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in France in 1973–74 (Macey 1993, 383–84). Second, certain statements addressed institutional socialism both as a form of state in Eastern Europe and as a kind of party politics in contemporary liberal democracies. In France this took the form of the long-expected and -delayed ascendancy of the Left to government and the alliance between socialists and the French Communist Party. Third, Foucault is concerned to distance himself from a certain kind of politics of the ultra-left, which views the state as the embodiment of evil that must be attacked at all costs. This may well be related to his own relatively recent collaboration with the Maoists in France, particularly in the Groupe d’information sur les prisons and the more current discussion of left-wing terrorism, particularly in Germany but also in Italy. As a participant in his seminars during this period, Pasquale Pasquino (1993, 79) noted that Foucault’s lectures on government were an attempt to break with his earlier language of war and battle, which he now viewed as leading to “an extremist denunciation of power” as a repressive force.

The context of the lectures becomes clearer by considering an episode in November 1977 that occurred just before the start of the “governmentality” lectures. Foucault had protested the extradition from France to Germany of a lawyer, Klaus Croissant, who had represented members of the Baader-Meinhoff gang (officially the Red Army Faction). For his troubles he had received a fractured rib from a police baton (Eribon 1991, 260; Sennelart 2007, 371–77). He also did not want, however, to be identified with a certain style of leftist critique, which confirmed the analysis of those he regarded as “terrorists” by partaking of the denunciation of the German state as a police state or, worse still, a “fascist” state (Eribon 1991, 259–61). This was manifest in his refusal to sign a petition that made precisely such claims. A month later in Berlin he suffered official harassment both while trying to cross into East Berlin and while staying in West Berlin, where he had been denounced for mentioning a book about Ulrike Meinhoff. In The Birth of Biopolitics a year later he would speak of this crossing the border in Berlin, where “the question every good Western intellectual asks himself is, of course: Where is true socialism? Is it where I have just come from, or there where I am going?” (Foucault 2008, 93).

While this statement addresses itself to the problem of the choice between Soviet-style socialism and social democracy, others address themselves to the problem of how a socialist government might approach governing, then an imminent possibility in France:

I would say that what socialism lacks is not so much a theory of the state as a governmental reason. . . . I do not think there is an autonomous socialist governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism. . . . Socialism can only be implemented connected up to diverse types of governmentality. It has been connected up to liberal governmentality. . . . We have seen it function . . . within governmentalities that would no doubt fall more under what last year we called the police state. . . . Maybe there are still other governmentalities that socialism is connected up to, it remains to be seen. But in any case, I do not think that for the moment there is an autonomous governmentality of socialism. (Foucault 2008, 91–93)

If these statements evidence Foucault’s concern with institutional socialism and its variants, both the third (ultra-left) and first (theoretical Marxism) of his interlocutors are addressed in the well-cited passage on the two forms of “overvaluation of the state” in Security, Territory, Population. The first overvaluation taking an “immediate, affective and tragic form is the lyricism of the cold monster confronting us” (Foucault 2007b, 109). While the immediate target of this are those on the extraparliamentary ultra-left, Foucault will reveal (over the following two years) strange bedfellows of those who suffer from “state phobia,” including several types of liberals and advocates of the virtues of civil society (2008, 76). The second is the “paradoxical” reduction of “the state to a number of functions like, for example, the development of the productive forces and the reproduction of the relations of production” (Foucault 2007b, 109), which refers directly, if somewhat crudely, to the Marxist functionalist theory of the state.

At the same time, of course, “neoliberalism” was nothing like the accomplished and embedded program of national and international government it would be by the 1990s, the controversial legacy with which we are still dealing (Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2009). It was more a rationality that remained on the horizon during a time of significant economic and political transformation. Indeed it is his diagnosis of what he calls “state phobia” (Foucault 2008, 76; Tribe 2009, 687) that leads most directly to a recovery of German Ordoliberalism and Austrian neoliberalism and the genealogy of a form of rule that sought to limit the extent of the state in the face of a notion of civil society.

The discussion of state phobia appears at the start of the fourth lecture of 1979 as a kind of prolegomena to the historical analysis of forms of neoliberalism. Foucault (2008, 75) begins by citing, rather freely, the art historian Bernard Berenson, to the effect that he feared the invasion of humanity by the state more than the destruction of the world by the atomic bomb. He then proceeds to discuss the coupling of the two fears of the state and the atomic bomb, of the sources of state phobia in the experiences of the Soviet Union of the 1920s, of Nazism, and of English postwar planning and its multiple agents and “promoters” (76). Among the latter are Austrian economists from the 1920s onward and political exiles and dissidents. He concludes by comparing the critique of despotism in the second half of the eighteenth century with the anxiety concerning the state in his own time.

The idea of state phobia serves, then, as a kind of preface to the genealogy of neoliberalism that will follow, beginning in the next four lectures with German Ordoliberalism. It is only after these four lectures that Foucault returns to the theme. What is of contemporary significance about their analyses, he suggests, is that they introduced two themes that amount to a contemporary “critical commonplace” (Foucault 2008, 187): the unlimited expansion of the state in relation to civil society and the inherent dynamism that is specific to the state. These themes allow an unproblematic and barely considered linkage of the “administrative state, the welfare state, the bureaucratic state, the fascist state, and the totalitarian state.” What results is an “inflationary critical currency” that deprives analyses of specificity, conducts a general disqualification by the worst and confuses the actual situation with “the great fantasy of the paranoid and devouring state” (187–88). As a critical consequence state phobia deprives its subjects of the capacity to identify the real sources of this kind of suspicion, something Foucault identifies in the formation of neoliberalism in the years 1930 to 1945 (189).

State phobia occupies an important place in these lectures because it suggests that Foucault’s project is not so much to do away with the state and its language, as some of his interpreters seem to suggest, but to raise the problem of the denunciatory commonplaces often directed to the state that result in the authority of the state itself being called “fascist” (2008, 188). Foucault’s exploration of it is crucial because it shows anxiety about state phobia to be not only the province of his contemporaries on the ultra-left but also to have many versions across the political spectrum. In fact, his analysis shows that the sources of the antistatism of his own time were to be found in a radical conservative movement—neoliberalism. Thus, the Freiburg school of Ordoliberalism, according to Foucault, diagnoses the history of Germany not as one of market failure but of state failure in which the market has never really been tried. They find the sources and examples of this in List’s national economy, Bismarckian state socialism, the planned economy, and Keynesian-style interventionism (Foucault 2008, 107–9). These are all so many versions of the “anti-liberal invariant” (111), which, in what Foucault regards as an intellectual coup de force, they find epitomized in Nazism. Indeed Foucault spends some time on the relation between National Socialism and the state in the Ordoliberals’ arguments and considers how the latter rejected a possible alternative analysis of this regime, which would be that it initiated a “withering away of the state” by placing the Volk above law and right, the Führer above authority and administrative hierarchy, and the party above the state (111–12). If one accepts this analysis, Nazism might be considered less an instance of the extension of the rational-legal authority of the state and its bureaucracy (Bauman 1989) or of the “despotism of the state” immanent in governmental rationalities (Rose 1999, 23) and more the appalling consequence of a kind of radical antistatism.

Foucault draws up a similar state-phobic list of opponents for the Chicago School of economics and law of the 1960s: this time “the New Deal, wartime planning, and the big economic and social programs mostly supported by postwar Democratic administrations” are added to the list (Foucault 2008, 323). His genealogy, however, indicates even earlier sources for this antistatism. In Security, Territory, Population Foucault already mentions forms of counter-conduct to raison d’État that would appear with liberal notions of state and civil society that affirm “an eschatology in which civil society will prevail over the state” (2007b, 356). At the end of the next year’s lectures he locates this antistate eschatology at the founding of the American republic, and in the idea of the Third Estate in France (2008, 310–11). State phobia, for Foucault, is thus inscribed deeply in liberal and neoliberal ideas of civil society, assertions of the nation against the absolutist state (Abbé Sieyès), republican ideas of human wickedness leading to government against the inherent goodness of civi...