Political Economy 

"Prosocial preferences may be experimentally measurable within a binary opposition between Homo economicus and Homo socialis. The argument developed here, however, is that any behavioral value or detection of crowding effects has a relative quantitative meaning that still needs to be qualitatively determined within a broader range that is “non–strictly binary.” (...) The qualitative range may broadly describe a binary polarity, but, to use a computer analogy, it accepts quantic superposition, since a quantitative “zero” does not discard a qualitative value of “one.”" (p.236)

"For decades, Western states have been opening their bureaucratic gates to a plurality of private interventions. We have come to live with a model of governance whose aim is to create overly responsible and entrepreneurial subjects whose vital goal and purpose for existence is to continuously scramble for resources whether for social or other personally meaningful life projects. As a by-product of this ‘ethico-politics’ (Rose, 1999), which has been substantially supported by a post-radical ‘humanitarian’ discourse (Douzinas, 2007), there are countless ways democratic citizens can today incorporate a humanist ethical sensibility into their lives and lifestyles and, noticeably, however they choose to intervene, it currently matters much less whether what they do seems conscious, altruistic, social, political or public enough (see e.g. Chouliaraki, 2013). To grapple with this jarring development, social critics have often aspired to the possibility of refining collaboration by denouncing market contamination.

... [And yet] the belief that a ‘purity politics’ is still possible is what Alexis Shotwell has qualified, in a broader analysis of the Anthropocene, as a ‘paradoxical politics of despair’, which is, as she incisively reflects, most probably ‘a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action’ (2016: 8-9)." (pp. 117-118)

"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)