WHAT WAS NEO WAS THE lEFT ACCEPTING THE eND OF hISTORY:

Neoliberalism, which fundamentally reshaped Western politics in the last decades of the twentieth century, encompasses a range of views, ideologies and policy prescriptions. From Thatcher and Reagan to Blair and Clinton, neoliberals on both the right and the left cut back the welfare state, lowered taxes and privatized government services. Foucault asserted that neoliberalism differed from nineteenth-century liberalism, Dean and Zamora write, in that it attempted "to extend the market and its rationality to all forms of social existence and to test and evaluate every single act of government" in relation to that market rationality. It sought in this way to unleash economic growth and to do away with the supposed inefficiencies and stifling regulations of the Keynesian state. "Our hero," wrote Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters in his 1982 article "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto," "is the risk-taking entrepreneur." What, we might wonder, could a philosopher so critical of the workings of power have seen in the ideology of neoliberalism--an ideology that had, as Dean and Zamora point out, already been implemented with such violence in Pinochet's Chile and which has led to such devastation in our own era?

The key, according to the authors, was in Foucault's late turn to subjectivity, to how power--by which he meant the decentralized and dispersed ways that institutions and norms govern our lives--shapes and even creates identity. "The criminal," "the homosexual," "the pervert," "the madman": these, according to Foucault, are all inventions of this particular sort of power, which stemmed not from the edicts of a monarch, but from the surveillance and normative inquiries of scientists and police, doctors and bureaucrats over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [...]

Neoliberalism, by cutting away the state, by guaranteeing a minimum of existence through a negative tax or some other universal basic income, by wielding power through a supposedly value-free economic rationality, would, in Foucault's view, do away with many of the most insidious exercises of power that characterized the modern state, the kinds of discipline that had ensnared the modern subject within a proliferation of discourse. The blending of these two strands of thought appears prominently at the conclusion of Foucault's March 21, 1979 lecture on American neoliberalism:

What appears on the horizon of this kind of [neoliberal] analysis is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society ... On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.

These are the words, Dean and Zamora argue, of someone who saw potential in the neoliberal project, who believed it might offer a corrective to the kinds of biopolitical, disciplining power that the welfare state had built up around the individual.

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