Michel Foucault

"The ironic truth that Foucault is at pains to explain during his lecture on the invisible hand is that, in principle, the market mechanism can in fact be expected to “work”—and that this can be expected, not despite but thanks to its invisibility. Its “invisibility” corresponds, concretely, to the chaos that surrounds any scene of exchange, that is, to all the external factors that ultimately endow each economic encounter with the kind of uncertainty out of which calculative actors can extract advantage.

Many factors of this kind correspond to what, since the work of Arthur Pigou, have been called “externalities.” For economists, these external factors are generally treated as unaccounted costs and benefits that come to disrupt the internal equilibrium that economic exchanges are supposed to maintain and foster for the sake of societal fairness. Yet the irony is that, from Foucault’s account, one can infer that the market works through externalities. It is this ironic and politically problematic dependence on the opaque “labyrinths and complexities of the [total] economic field” that allows Foucault to identify, at the end of the lecture, a necessarily critical, secondary, or “lateral” role for market economics within the art of government." (p. 49)

"In principle, a ‘skeptical’ attitude could be seen as a void, as a position that, already lacking any content itself, goes on to empty of meaning and value whatever discourse, theory or opinion it confronts... Foucault went beyond this extreme interpretation, endowing the capacity for skepticism with a certain general value, yet he still rejected the possibility that a skeptical subjectivity could come up with any content of its own … Even if it is the case that the large majority of individuals have a certain freedom to be skeptical as part of their ontological condition, the expression of that skepticism, for Foucault, cannot in itself be productive." (p. 84)

"Even if Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society is known as the first modern text on the topic, its political ideas do not precede or directly influence neoliberal thinkers, or at least that is not what Foucault is implying. Rather, he attempts to show that Ferguson’s text has a certain perspective on the social which, suddenly, becomes relevant and elucidating for an unfamiliar neoliberal present. The point of reference for this reading of civil society is not a developing past, but a surprising present in the future. What is at stake is not the genealogy of a historical event in the West as much as the ‘architecture’ of an enduring political project." (p. 84)