Neoliberalism

"The young adults who have spent several weeks or months doing volunteer work in the field are likely to feel these days that, in having done so, they may have paradoxically engaged in a misguided act of global citizenship that is ultimately irresponsible (whether their concerns relate to women’s rights, decolonial aid, environmental responsibility or equality of opportunity), thus rendering them ‘complicit’ for being, as a participant put it, ‘part of the problem rather than being part of the solution.’" (p.236)

"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)

"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)