Munro Neoliberalismandtheriseofradicaleconomism

Neo-liberalism and the Rise of Radical Economism
By Andre Munro, B.A.
A thesis submitted to
the Faculty o f Graduate Studies and Research
in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Master o f Arts
Department of Political Science

Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada
© Andre Munro 2006
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Acknowledgements
A Genevieve pour son amour, son support; je n ’aurais pas pu emprunter ce chemin
seul. Je la remercie aussi pour sa patience, ses corrections et ses suggestions qui ont ameliore
grandement la qualite de ce memoire. I am also indebted to Professor Maben W. Poirier for
having shown me the limits of ideology and philosophy as a way of life. To my teachers and
mentors Professor Host Hutter, Dr. Herminio Meireiles Teixeira and Professor Maben W.
Poirier for having giving me the passion o f political theory and opened the way for a
vocation. A special thanks to my supervisor Professor Tom Darby and my readers Professor
Alan Hunt and Professor Geoffrey Kellow. Merci par ailleurs a Diane Breton pour ses
conseils judicieux et son ouverture a discuter avec un novice sans condescendance aucune. I
am also grateful for the support o f the Fonds Quebecois de Recherche sur la Societe et la
Culture, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and the Social Science and Humanities Research
Council for having supported this thesis project.
11
Thesis Abstract
By contrasting neo-liberalism with liberal and more succinctly classical-medieval
thought, this thesis expose this movement as a form o f radical economism, the unlimited
application of economic rationality to an increasingly larger field. Particular attention is
given to the writings o f Adam Smith and the Chicago School o f Economics to demonstrate
that neo-liberalism is based on a totalising and rationalistic principle absent in the classical
form of liberalism. Inspired by Foucault and Arendt, this thesis approaches neo-liberalism
both as an economistic mode o f government and as the erosion o f the political sphere of
existence.
Ill
Table of Contents
I. Introduction 2
II. Looking to another age: the ancient primacy o f the political 8
III. Classical liberalism: in search o f balance 24
IV. Neo-liberalism and the totalisation o f the economic 67
V. Neo-liberal govementality: the market as a matrix o f order 99
VI. The retreat o f the political sphere o f existence: consumer society 120
and the return o f homo laborans.
VII. Conclusion 144
VIII. Bibliography 150
1
He who reads the inscrutable book o f Nature as if it were a M erchant’s Ledger is justly
suspected of having never seen that Book, but only some School Synopsis thereof; from
which if taken for the real book, more error than insight is to be derived.
Thomas Carlyle
2
Introduction
In our age o f advanced economic globalisation, understanding the moving
boundary delimiting the political from the economic is arguably more important than
ever. While many scholars and social activists have highlighted the growing power of
global corporations and the powerlessness o f national governments in matters o f trade,
much less attention has been devoted to the relation between the political and economic
spheres as distinct modes of existence.
All history and political science students are aware that boundaries are displaced
over time and that their alteration, however small it is, affects the whole entity they
delimit. This is o f course true for geo-political boundaries, but equally for the limits
defining the public and political spheres. In this sense, this thesis presents a reflection on
the actual state o f that boundary - or the absence thereof - separating the political from its
most potent contemporary competitor, the economic domain. By contrasting neo-liberal
thought, with special attention to the writings affiliated with the Chicago School of
Economics, with early liberalism and more succinctly classical-medieval thought, this
thesis exposes neo-liberalism as a form o f radical economism, which is the unlimited
application of economic rationality to an increasingly larger field.1 Whereas classical-
medieval thought understood the political as superior and primary to the economic and
whereas earlier forms o f liberalism limited the market to one sphere o f human activity
amongst others (culture, religion, etc.), neo-liberalism enlarges the field o f economy to
encompass all social interactions and elevates economic rationality as the principle by
1 Neo-liberalism is not to be confused with radical econom ism , o f which it is merely one o f the clearest
expressions. We could have analysed other forms o f this phenomenon like orthodox Marxism, in which the
superstructure follow s in a direct and quasi-mechanical manner the m ovement and direction o f the
econom ic structure.
3
which all reasonable behaviours must be guided. Especially inspired by the writings of
Arendt and Foucault, we thus wish to demonstrate that neo-liberalism represents far more
than an anti-social ideology, a policy o f cuts to social programs, a minimalist vision o f the
state or the simple repetition o f Adam Smith’s Liberalism. It represents, in short, an
economistic form o f government and the retreat o f political existence. Because o f the
limited length afforded by a master thesis, this analysis will focus on the comparison
between early liberalism and neo-liberalism. In this perspective, the writings o f Adam
Smith and the Chicago School o f Economics will be the main primary sources examined.
This analysis will be carried out at two different levels. With Foucault as our first
guide, neo-liberalism will be analysed as a specific gouvernmentalite (a rationality and
technology o f power) based primarily on an economic subject of individual choice (homo
oeconomicus) and the ubiquitous character o f the market. We will see that, contrary to
pre-modem forms o f sovereignty and to classical liberalism, neo-liberal govemmentality
is a rationalistic and totalising mode o f power. The economic subject is encouraged to
evaluate everything in terms o f consumer-based rationality and behave accordingly.
Secondly, Arendt’s theorisation o f the expansion of the Social will helps us uncover neo
liberalism as an advanced stage in the depreciation of the political at the profit o f the
economic. Notwithstanding their differences and disagreements, it is believed that both
theorists help us understand, through Foucault’s concept o f bio-political govemmentality
and Arendt’s portrait o f homo laborans, that radical economism represents the elevation
o f ‘mere life’ (zoe) as the ultimate object o f government.
Epistemologically, this thesis draws mainly on the genealogical and
phenomenological approaches. On the one-side, we will avoid presenting political action,
the political sphere or the political subject as transcendent essences immune from power
4
and change. Although our study is based on a quasi-ontological conception o f the
political, it recognizes that its form, its boundary and its content is shaped by power
relations. Indeed, by demonstrating the demotion o f the political in favour o f an
economistic mode o f government, this thesis highlights the changing nature o f these
categories. On the other side, we will present in the tradition of existential
phenomenology the political and the economic realms and subjects as spheres o f human
activities and modes o f Being-in-the-world that are revealed to our collective
consciousness. Even though they represent essentially contested realities, these categories
and subjectivities are important as they affect the limits and possibilities of human life
and self-understanding. Such an anti-essentialist interpretation does not mean that
categories such as ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’ are only grammatical entities. As
Pecharman explains, the political is real although its reality is not a given, it is a reality
that is constructed in the performance o f speech and action.2 As we will see with Arendt,
political activity itself reveals to consciousness the existence of a shared world. The
economic and the political are not to be taken as natural entities but as spaces of
possibilities, spheres o f existence rendering possible certain modes o f Being-in-the-world
and Being-with-others and closing the door to others. To understand such categories as
spheres of existence is not to fall into complete relativism but simply to understand that
pure idealism and metaphysics are themselves escapes from the political. Human
existence is political precisely because this existence is itself in question and the limits
2 Martine Pecharman, “L ’idee du politique,” in D enis Kambouchner (ed.), N otions d e Philosophic, III
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 92.
3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1962), 32.
5
o f the political and the economic, however uncomfortable such a political sensibility
might be, remain open to speech and action.
Moreover, the promotion o f the economic subject and consumer-citizen over the
political actor will be interpreted as reflecting different strategies to form and promote a
well-governed subject. The terrain o f the political and the economic are also spaces
invested with power and organised in terms o f order. It is therefore important to show that
the ‘retreat of the political’ does not mean that power and government disappear. In the
language-game o f neo-liberalism, the reconfiguration o f what is ‘economic’ is associated
with a new form o f government, one pushing to its out-most limit the market as a matrix
of spontaneous order and the ideal o f “governing at a distance”.4 Indeed, it is because the
economic domain is govermentalised, passing from the realm of production and services
to a equilibrating and ordering force, that economics can pretend to replace politics as the
master science from which standpoint all other realities are ordered and hierarchised.
Finally this thesis attempts to open up a dialogue between the Arendtian and
Foucauldian perspectives on the modem position o f the political. While it could appear
that the two authors disagree on whether the political terrain has eroded or has on the
contrary expanded, we propose that their theories have a lot in common in their
descriptive dimension and that a dialogue can be engaged between them after
distinguishing what they mean by politics. Hence it is not seen as a contradiction to affirm
at the same time that the political has retreated and that the possibilities to critique the
exercise o f power in private and public spaces have increased and have been
democratised.
4 Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “Governing econom ic life,” Econom y an d Society 19, No. 1 (1990): 9.
6
In our opening chapter, we return briefly to the relation between the economic and
political spheres as idealised in Greek antiquity and the European Middle Ages. The
pretension o f this short chapter is certainly not to give the readers an accurate summary o f
more than two thousands years of history. Simply, it is hoped that by describing these
epochs in a broad outline and by contrast, we can make visible the transformation
occurring and the radicalism o f this change. As a contrasting standpoint, the classical-
medieval period can make us realise that while classical liberalism is quite moderate in
comparison to neo-liberalism, it still represented an advance o f economism in the larger
scheme of history.
Our second chapter, focusing on the advent of political economy and the thought
of Adam Smith, draws a portrait of the political/economic relation as conceived by
classical liberalism. Particular attention is given to the moderate and balanced character of
classical liberalism. As we will see, classical liberalism seeks to protect the domain o f the
economic from the ignorance o f the sovereign but does not generalise its logic to all
reality. Educated in the classical tradition, an author such as Smith still believed in the
mere life/good life distinction and considered the tranquillity o f ethical life as superior to
the accumulation of wealth.
The three last chapters all analyse, from different angles, neo-liberalism and reveal
it as a form o f radical economism. The distinction between those chapters lies in the
perspective adopted. In the third chapter, a general overview o f neo-liberalism is given to
make explicit its radicalism. Studying the rupture and continuity between the Austrian
School of Hayek and the Chicago School o f Friedman, we describe how the market is
projected as the perfect matrix of order and how the scope o f the economic is expanded in
a rationalistic and totalising manner. In the fourth chapter, neo-liberalism is approached
7
from the angle of power. In the light o f Foucault’s recently published lectures at the
College de France, neo-liberalism can be presented as a mode of govenmentality, a mode
o f power primarily based on the self-governance o f maximising subjects. Although
him self hostile to such grand categories, we believe Foucault’s thought can help us
decipher how economism claims to organise and govern social life in its entirety and
therefore replace politics as the art of living together. Finally, the fourth chapter turns to
Hannah Arendt and argues that radical economism represents what some have called the
‘retreat of the political’. Taking the political seriously, Arendt devoted most o f her life to
exploring the meaning o f the vita activa. Although we contest the rigidity o f her
categories, we believe her account o f the victory o f the homo laborans remains an
accurate description of consumer society and the flattening of meaning which
accompanies radical economism. In an Arendtian spirit, we wish this thesis to stand not as
a resignation towards the end o f politics but rather as a call to a collective awakening and
action. Although very different, we believe the sociological analysis o f neo-liberalism as
an economistic mode o f government and the more philosophical interpretation of radical
economism as a retreat o f the political can complement each other. Foucault’s analysis
examines the neo-liberal model o f govemmentality while Arendt’s writings illustrate the
consequences of this movement in terms o f existential meaning; both approaches are
welcomed to understand a movement that pretends to have found in the economic sphere
a source of both order and meaning. Emphasising the rupture o f neo-liberalism with the
traditional primacy of the political over the economic as well as with classical
liberalism’s spirit of moderation and pluralism, this thesis will try to demonstrate the
radicalism of this movement, give an idea o f the immensity o f the space colonised over
time by the economic, and explain the significance o f its new pretension to primacy.
8
The classical primacy of the political
From Classical Greece to the end o f the Middle Ages, the division and the
superiority of the political over the economic is a fact taken as obvious. Whether it is
considered at the service of the pdlis, the common good, or the prince, economic life was
integrated into the norms and culture o f the community and consistently understood as
subservient to the later.5
In the classical pdlis of the IVth and Vth century B.C., a period when political
consciousness gains some autonomy over religion6, the economic, in both its private and
collective dimensions, remains completely integrated, dependant and subjected to the life
o f the community as a whole. As we have learned from the substantivist school o f
political economy and scholars such as Michael Polanyi and Moses Finley in particular,
antique societies did not approach the economic as an independent sphere or as a theme
warranting study on its own. On the contrary, topics related to the economic were always
studied in relation to an end considered o f a higher nature than household management or
profit acquisition.7 When, for instance, Aristotle discusses household management
(oikonomia) or commerce (money economy, chrematistike), the underlying message is
really about the proper positions the citizen must adopt towards his family and
belongings, as well as the unnatural character o f striving for profit as an end in itself.8
5 Andre Piettre, H istoire de la p e n se e econom ique et analyse des theories contem poraines (Paris: Dalloz,
1966), 1-4.
6 On this question the classical Greek p d lis differs from its archaic counterpart. See Pauline Schmitt-Pantel,
“Collective activities and the Political,” in Oswyn Murray and Simon Price, The G reek City, From Flomer
to Alexander (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 210.
7 M .l Finley, The Ancient Econom y (Berkeley, University o f California Press, 1973), 17-20.
8 Aristotle, The P olitics (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1985), 44-52.
9
When the same philosopher analyses economic exchanges and price formation, it is again
from the perspective o f ethics and politics. As Polanyi and Finley have explained, the
absence of an Aristotelian economic theory is not a sign o f the Philosopher’s lack of
knowledge o f that ‘field’ but rather a reflection o f the Greek ethos in which economy was
never isolated, even conceptually, from the community. In the same spirit, when
Xenophon discusses the good management of the oikos, the domain, he designates by this
field a reality far larger than the modem concept implies. Besides farming per se, the
discussion touches upon a large web o f activities and qualities (for instance physical
fitness, warrior patriotism or leadership qualities) seen as supporting or arising from the
gentleman farmer way o f life.9 In this sense, the economic is never isolated, even
conceptually, from the community. With few possible exceptions, the economy is
constantly approached as a secondary subject and always as a mean and not an end.10
Not only does the Greco-Roman world has no conscience o f the economic as an
abstract reality possessing its own dynamics and rationality, but this sphere o f existence is
also subordinated to it of the political. Again, Aristotle writings can shed some light over
this issue, it being widely accepted that the Stagyrite philosopher is more representative
o f classical Greece thought than Plato or even Xenophon. Aristotle opens one o f his most
seminal texts, The Politics, by distinguishing ontologically the two spheres of existence,
the political from the economic, and by affirming the primacy o f the former over the
latter. From the onset, the founder of the Lyceum makes clear that political rule is not to
be conflated with the management o f household or slaves (oikonomia).u The difference
9 Xenophon and S.B Pomeroy, Oeconomicus: a social a n d h istorical com m entary (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 129-135.
10 An exception could be the Pseudo Aristotelian Oeconomicus, see M. I. Finley, Op. Cit., 20-21.
n Aristotle, Op. Cit., 35.
10
between these two realms of activities, Aristotle argues, is o f quality and not o f
12
quantity. This ontological distinction arises from two considerations. First, the pdlis is
prior to the household because it leads to self-sufficiency (whereas the household cannot
be sustained on its ow n).13 Secondly, while household management and commerce are
engaged in for the need o f living, political activity is engaged in for the sake o f living
well. This hierarchisation o f values, understanding the economic as meaningful only as a
mean towards political life, is adopted consciously and explicitly as one of A thens’s
sources of identity. In his famous Funeral Oration, Pericles boasts the primacy of the
political as one o f Athens’s source of pride: “For we alone think that a man who does not
take part in the affairs o f the city is good for nothing, while others only say he is ‘minding
his own business’.” 14 The establishment o f the city-state and the activity of politics is thus
distinguished from economic activity as a transcendence of necessity management and a
leap into political action. One o f Aristotle’s most famous expressions illustrates cogently
the priority accorded to the political: “he who is without a city through nature rather than
chance is either a mean sort or superior to man”, either an animal or a god.15 For many
thinkers of Attica, the political emerges directly from our humanity, our capacity of
existing as beings of reason and deliberation. To be the one and only animal bearer o f the
logos signifies far more than simply being able to communicate, for in this predicament
we are no different than bees or other gregarious animals. The metaphysical distinction
drawn by Aristotle between mere life (zoe) and qualified life (bios) has played a
fundamental role in the development o f the political consciousness o f the West, serving as
u Ibid., 35.
13 Ibid., 37.
14 Thucydides and P. Woodruff, On justice, pow er, an d human nature: the essence o f Thucydides ’ H istory
o f the Peloponnesian War (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 42.
15 Aristotle, O p.C it., 37.
11
a negative standard from which to elevate humanity. As Giorgio Agamben’s reading of
Aristotle points out, the political appears out o f its distinction with the negative standard
of mere-life: “There is politics because man is the living being who, in language,
separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains
him self in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.” 16 It is not fortuitous that the
classical conception of the political understands this realm as higher than the economic
since the very existence o f the former is predicated on the transcendent position it
occupies above what is understood as part o f the cyclical and ultimately meaningless zoe.
Although household management (oikonomia) is judged lower than the political,
this private facet of economic activity is still a matter o f necessity and hence judged as a
legitimate activity to engage in. As for the other, profit-motivated, dimension of the
economic, what Aristotle refers to as chrematistike, it is looked down with a more severe
attitude. In reality, chrematistike is completely antithetical to the ideal o f the pdlis. In a
polity based on patriotism and the self-control o f its citizen-soldiers, external commerce
represents a potentially subversive activity and an open door on internal strife and chaos
(stasis). Not only do merchants entertain suspect relationships with outside forces,
commercial activity was also criticised as the slavish reign o f appetites over reason, a
base and slavish position incompatible with the duties o f a citizen. Unlike the nineteenth
century English merchants praised as the great captains o f industry and creator of wealth
or the contemporary encouragement o f entrepreneurs as creative leaders, the money
makers of Antiquity are, at best, tolerated as a necessary evil. Always looked from above,
often ridiculed and sometimes even excluded from the public realm or altogether
16 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign P o w er an d B are Life (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 8.
12
banished, people living from commerce are stigmatised in a manner similar to today’s
common perception o f prostitutes.17
Order-spiritual and material
The first fundamental reason for the hierarchy o f values elevating the political
above the economic lies in the need for stability and order, both spiritual and material. In
the pdlis, politics appears as a solution to the cultural and spiritual crisis experienced after
the Peloponnesian War, an active and reflexive participation in the fortification o f the
‘W e’. Partaking in the family religion or believing in the Homeric myths is no longer an
adequate answer to the predicament o f Socrates’s contemporaries. Greek society had
emerged out of the ancestral cosmocentric and tribal world-view and the human
individual actor and thinker, the anthropos, has gained an unprecedented space of
legitimacy and importance. O f course, religion remains a powerful source o f meaning and
authority, still imbuing all other modes o f human activity and existence, including the
political. As the death of Socrates reminds us, it is not economics which represented, for
politics and philosophy, the contender as the architectonic science, but the religion o f the
house, the city or those myths shared by most Hellenes.18 Economics was not seen as a
potent challenger for this position since it did not offer an answer as to the integration of
the self and the collectivity. On one side, that of oikonomia, economic space is associated
with the family, the tribe, or other such sub-political and un-reflexive units. On the other,
that o f chrematististike, it represents the self-seeking and ultimately meaningless pursuit
o f the desires of the ‘I ’. Unlike this twofold conception o f ancient economic space, the
17 Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient an d M odem s, Classical Republicanism an d the Am erican Revolution
(Chapel Hill: The University o f North Carolina Press, 1992), 58.
18 On the importance o f religion in Classical Greece see Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite Antique, etude sur le
culte, le droit, les institutions de la G rece et de Rome, Vingtieme edition (Paris : Hachette, 1908), 1-5.
13
political possesses the necessary ground to represent an authoritative source of meaning
and identity, creating an existential horizon from which to organise social life. While
religion, through faith and rituals, serves as a horizon19 revealing to the believer its place
in the cosmos, the political becomes for the citizen and the city-state an alternative
ground or horizon linking dialectically the self and the community. As Strong explains,
politics differs from morality, religion or economics in that it represents “the most general
response to the simultaneous asking o f the two questions, ‘who am I ’ and ‘who are
w e’.” 20 Within the horizon delineated by the political, the ‘W e’ becomes a solution to the
question of the ‘I ’. Yet political existence always remains marked by a tension, never
reducible to the group or the individual. In contrast, ancient economic activity is
dependent on other realms (in the case o f oikonomid) or often regarded as outright
unnatural and slavish (in the case o f chrematistike). The subordinate position assigned in
Greek culture to the economic is also related to an ideal o f ethical education for the
warrior aristocracy charged with the city’s defence and leadership. In this sense it is not
only a cultural question but equally instrumental to the survival of the community. In the
upbringing and disciplining of young citizens, many dangers are attached to the
possession of wealth or the lack thereof. On one side, to be subjected to poverty (ponos)
is antithetical to the autonomy and leisure demanded by a citizen’s life. One can find a
clear expose o f this position in the writings o f Demosthenes. For this great orator, ponos
brings down the dignity of the free citizen and impedes his capacity for political speech
and action: it both compels the citizen “to do many things slavish and base” and makes
19 On the question o f the existential horizon, V oegelin ’s idea o f the m etaxy might bring some light. Whether
cosmocentric or anthropocentric, most ancient societies understood sym bolically spiritual activities
(religion, philosophy, etc) in such an in-between space, between particular and universal, nothingness and
absolute, animality and godliness.
20 Tracy B. Strong, The Idea o f P olitica l Theory, Reflections on the S e lf in P o litica l Time an d Space (Notre
Dame: University o f Notre Dame Press, 1990), 3.
14
him “unable to say or do anything. For his tongue will be tied.”21 On the other side, the
search for and possession o f riches is looked on with apprehension by the public as it is
seen as having dangerous impacts on the citizen’s self-esteem, leading to excesses
(hybris) and threatening the community with division (stasis).22
Furthermore, the priority o f the political over the economic is supported by the
platonic tripartite division of the human soul (reason/spirit/appetites) and its
transcendence o f animality. Although generally not the most representative author of
Classical Greece, Plato’s Republic's tripartite order mirrors the hierarchy that most
believed must reign in well-governed poleis and human souls. At the beginning o f the
description of the “City o f Speech”, Socrates lays down the foundations o f a city of
necessity, a ‘healthy’ city erected on the labour and work o f farmers, craftsmen, traders,
and all other professions required by the life and reproduction of the community.
However, an aristocratic spirit is in the room, one who refuses to let the city be reduced to
the fulfilment of mere-life and the numb satisfaction associated with corporeal satiety.
Although they live in houses and divide their labour, the inhabitants o f the ‘healthy city’
are closer to nature than to culture, sharing animal appetites but no distinctly human
longings. The honour-loving and erotic Glaucon wants more; he has tasted the richness
of life and its overflowing dimension. With sarcasm, he urges Socrates to go beyond the
first city: “If you were providing for a city o f sows, Socrates, on what else would you
fatten more than this?”23 Reflecting this conception of natural order, the political must
21 Demosthenes, Cited in Paul A. Rahe, O p.C it., 38.

22 Ian Morris, “The Community Against the Market in Classical Athens,” in Colin M. Duncan and David
W. Tandy (eds.) From P olitica l Econom y to Anthropology, Situating Econom ic Life in P a st Societies
(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1994), 57.
23 Plato, The Republic, trans. Alan Bloom , second edition (N ew York: Basic Books, 1968), 49.
15
reign on the economic as reason must, with the help o f the spirited part o f the soul
(,thymos), keep control over our longing, appetites, and desires.
The primacy o f the political over the economic is hence not solely a philosophical
and institutional question, but parallels a model o f the well-governed self, an ethic o f self
moderation and restraint thought to be central to the order o f the pdlis. The relation
between the primacy o f the political over the economic and the correlate regime o f the
soul presented in The Republic is made even more explicit in The Laws. Not content with
limiting politics to the constitution o f poleis, the Athenian stranger here discusses with
Kleinias the Cretan and Megillus the Spartan the order and hierarchy that must exist in
the souls of the good citizens for a polity to be just and for its laws to be rooted in virtue.
In this journey that will lead them to the elaboration o f a new colony’s laws, the three
discussants begin by laying down the foundations o f stability, order, and virtue in what
might constitute the city writ small: the regime o f the soul. Before attending to the
disorder, wars, and strife arising from human interactions, one must first take care o f the
inner conflicts that take place in each o f us. As in the city, the Athenian points out, there
is in the soul of each man a multiplicity o f forces fighting for rule. 24 One does not have
to look very far for the cause o f civil war, the possibility o f chaos looming in every one o f
us: “there is a war going on in us, ourselves against ourselves.” 25 The platonic art of
politics is far more ambitious than simply knowledge of political structures and processes;
it always begins as an exercise (askesis) in the care of the self and of others, as the
“business it is to care for souls.”26 Proposing a ranking o f the different goods available to
us and separating them in divine and human categories, the Athenian Stranger places
24 Plato, The Laws, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1988), 5.
25 Ibid.
26
16
wealth as the lowest o f them all.27 The highest o f the divine good, prudence, must, with
the help of courage, come to rule over one’s passions and appetites. Although classified
as a good, the possession o f wealth also represents a danger since it, if unleashed, knows
no limit of its own and can seek dominion over reason as a tyrant would do over laws and
people. Like its god, Pluto, wealth is blind if unguided by prudence. Ideally, the forces of
pleasure and appetites must come to accept the leadership o f political prudence. For the
ancients, one must not negate the legitimate place for material satisfaction or live as an
ascetic, but develop a form of ‘spiritual gymnastic’ in which one gets accustomed to the
attraction of desires and uses other psychic forces to limit their ascendancy over the
soul.28
Although the economic is conceived as distinct and inferior to the political, it
would still be a mistake to portray the ancient representation o f this divide as absolute. To
share the Greek perspective on that question, it would be more appropriate to
conceptualise oikonomia as a foundational activity, which, if fulfilled in line with its
nature, can offer humans the leisure necessary for higher activities and equip them with
ethical dispositions (temperance, rationality, leadership) pre-disposing them for public
life. A too rigid separation of the political with other modes of existence and forms of
behaviour, like the strict separation public/private adopted by Arendt, risks covering the
role played by extra-political activities in the constitution of the public sphere. As
demonstrated by Schmitt-Pantel’s study o f Archaic Greece group-forming activities,
collective institutions such as collective hunts and symposiums cannot be understood as
completely external to the public sphere even though they clearly belong to the private.
21 Ibid., 10.
2i Ibid., 14.
17
Although not political activities per se, such undertakings play a major role in the
formation of a public and shared experience and in the appearance o f relations o f equal
29
peerage. As such, ‘private’ activities like the banquet, if not political in themselves, can
be regarded as positive conditions for the emergence of a common domain (koinon),
which space is obviously a sine qua non condition for the political to be possible. Indeed
the idea that farming is closely related to the development and preservation o f civic virtue
and a sense o f belonging to the political community is an idea that survives more than a
millennium.30 We find this portrayal of the gentleman farmer as the occupation most
conducive to citizenship in classical writings such as Xenophon’s Oeconomicos. From the
defence of the city to its management, the earth is said to provide important qualities for
the education o f a good citizen. Xenophon goes so far as to states that: “The man who
said that farming is the mother and nurse of the other arts spoke truly.”31 To represent
ourselves graphically the positions occupied by these two spheres o f existence, one
should hence think of not two separated and opposed circles but of two partly overlapping
circles. Oikonomia, in opposition to the unattached and hence unpatriotic activity of
chrematistike, is thought as an important pre-condition for the emergence o f a healthy
political domain and sense o f civic duty.
It would be easy for us modem readers to associate the classical primacy o f the
political with a primitive economy or with a lack o f consciousness o f commerce benefits.
Yet, contrary to this perception, the habitants o f Ancient Greece are much aware o f the
29 Pauline Schmitt-Pantel, “Collective Activities and the Political in the Greek City,” in Oswyn Murray and
Simon Price (eds.), Op. Cit., 200-201.
30 Defenders o f the old aristocratic ethos like Lord Bolingbroke w ill later base their critique o f the rising
commerce and nascent industrial revolution on this long accepted road leading from the private domain to
leadership in the affairs o f the commons. Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke an d his Circle, The P olitics o f
N ostalgia in the A ge o f Walpole (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), 73-83.
31 Xenophon and S.B. Pomeroy, Op. Cit., 133.
18
necessity of wealth and of the fruits o f commerce and trade, and Athens, its most
politically conscious city-state, is also an important commercial hub. The Piraeus acts as
an entry point for the whole region and beyond, as well as the departure gate for
important quantities of wine, oil, decorated jars, and silver.32 In the classical period,
commerce expands significantly and, albeit Greek xenophobia, extends to the so-called
‘barbarians’. Indeed, this movement o f resources coincides with increased interactions
with different cultures and foreign mentalities, which, whatever the resistance, clearly
affects philosophy and politics. As different authors have noted, it is not fortuitous that
the most seminal book on justice o f this age, Plato’s Republic, opens with Athens’s
Piraeus as its background stage. It is particularly revealing that Socrates’s relentless
quest for the meaning of the Good and the just ordering o f the soul begins in this book by
recognising foreigners’ deeds.33 O f course, Socrates is not nor could have been a modem
cosmopolitan man. Yet his boundless love o f wisdom seeks the logos where he sees it,
breaking civic boundaries if needs be. While the Greek pdlis was proud of its identity and
generally weary o f foreigners, Socrates recognises that any cogent reflection on one’s
community values and institutions must reckon with others and be enriched by the
experience of cultural difference, whether from the lessons o f the past or from others. In
that sense, the relative opening o f Athens’ doors to commerce has certainly been a factor
in the evolution o f its culture and its political institutions.34 At the very least, it
paradoxically gave its citizens a negative standard from which to compare themselves and
32 It is important to note that although Levy brings important facts about Greek trade volume and contents,
w e do not share his rather weak analysis o f the attractiveness o f trade for Greeks or his anachronistic
comparison between the Greek p d lis and the 19th century commercial powers. See Jean-Phillippe Levy, The
Econom ic Life o f the Ancient World, trans. John G. Biram (Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press,
1967), 24.
33 Plato, The Republic, trans. Alan Bloom , second edition (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 3.
34 One can note the constant comparison between Athens and Sparta in classical political philosophy.
19
affirm their uniqueness. The very moral charge launched by philosophers o f Classical
Athens against the perceived dangers o f commerce might well be a reaction to the
increased place occupied by this activity and the rise o f a merchant class.35
The Middle Ages: the minor arts of oikonomia
Thought-out the Middle Age, the subordination of the economic is perpetuated by
Christian doctrine. In its theorisation o f the purpose of the state, medieval philosophy
stands in continuity with Plato and Cicero. The primary task o f the ‘City o f man’ is the
maintenance of justice, without which no commonwealth can endure.36 However, one
significant change that occurs in medieval economic thought is that the economic is no
longer negatively contrasted with the political but with the divine order o f nature. Before
the Fall, it is believed, there existed no property, no sovereign, nor politics nor
economics.37 In this sense, both sovereignty and economic activity are considered parts of
human law in contrasts to divine law and unfortunate yet necessary predicaments o f the
human fallen condition. True, the political is still considered higher than the economic,
since the sovereign replicated on earth the sovereignty o f God and has his authority
derived from divine will, but politics is nevertheless dethroned as the master science by
theology.
Furthermore, if both political and economic activities derive their principles of
action from the virtue o f prudence, political prudence is judged higher because more
universal in its scope than domestic prudence (aiming at the common good instead o f the
35 Although I consider problematic his use o f the word capitalism to characterise (even if partially) classical
Greece, Trever may be correct on this point. See A. A. Trever, A H istory o f G reek Econom ic Thought
(Chicago: The University o f Chicago press., 1916), 21.
36 Ernst Cassirer and C. W. Hendel, The Myth o f the State (N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1974), 97.
37 Diana Wood, M edieval Econom ic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17.
20
individual good).38 Throughout the Middle Age, the economy is hence subservient to the
common good of the community and, by extension, to the prince. Private property is
generally recognised but riches are considered as entrusted on the upper class as stewards
of a property belonging to mankind as a whole.39
This hierarchy is made evident by the legislation o f the crown and the church over
economic matters. In stark opposition to today’s ideal of free markets, the medieval ideal
of a well ordered economic sphere is one o f equality of justice in exchanges, instituted
through moral and political intervention. Following this ideal, commercial exchanges o f
goods are regulated with the political evaluation o f a just price and, in the domain of
financial exchanges, by the prohibition of usury.40 The market, far from being a space
which should be let free to function on its own, is addressed as a place o f vice and
corruption. A commentator of the Thirteen Century warns in the following passage his
brethren of the danger o f the market place for the salvation o f their souls:
Sometimes again the lord is defrauded o f market dues, which is perfidy and
disloyalty....Sometimes, too, quarrels happen and violent disputes.... Drinking is
occasioned.... Christ, you may note, was found in the market-place, for Christ is
justice and justice should be there....Thus the legend runs o f a man who, entering an
abbey, found many devils in the cloister but in the market-place found but one, alone
on a high pillar. This filled him with wonder. But it was told him that in the cloister all
is arranged to help souls to God, so many devils are required there to induce monks to
be led astray, but in the market-place, since each man is a devil to himself, only one
other demon suffices.41
Wishing for this space o f temptation to be ordered and regulated, medieval authors
acknowledge the sovereignty o f the prince on the economic sphere, as the supreme
38 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 35-39.
39 G. O ’Brien, An E ssay on M edieval Econom ic Teaching (N ew York: Burt Franklin, 1920), 85.
40 Ibid., 102.
41 Humbert de Romans, “On M arkets & F airs (c. 1270),” Internet M edieval Sourcebook (Fordham
University), http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1270romans.htm (accessed May 16, 2006).
21
temporal authority who can order and force justice into trade.42 Consider for example the
unequivocal position taken by the 14th Century schoolman and chancellor o f the
University o f Paris, Jean Gerson: “In the civil state, however, nobody is to be decreed
wiser than the law-giving authority. Therefore it behoves the latter, whenever it is
possible to do so, to fix the just price, which may not be exceeded by private consent, and
which must be enforced.”43 The price fixed as law by the prince (pretium legitimum) is
ipso facto the price to be considered as just {jus turn pretium).
The doctrine o f the Catholic Church on the proper position o f the economic has o f
course not been static or monolithic. From the age of the apostles, the Church has been
the stage o f intense debates on the proper stance to adopt towards this very mundane yet
ever present plane o f existence. Indeed we could not fully understand the advent of
modernity and liberalism without taking seriously these transformations in the Christian
doctrine on the economic and in particular on the topic o f commerce. At the beginning, in
the late Roman Empire and the Middle Ages o f the Fathers o f the Church, not much
tolerance is expressed. The early Church is clear and adamant in its rejection of
commerce. The Fathers o f the Church consider the love o f money the root o f all evils
while canon Eiciens Dominus states that sin permeates most aspects of buying and selling
and see little hope of salvation for merchants and o f course usurers.44 Increased urbanism,
the aggrandisement o f commerce through the crusades, and the translation o f the writings
o f Aristotle by Albert the Great represented important factors for an increased tolerance
towards the economic in the Fifteen Century. Notable contributions to this increased
42 O f course this does not mean that the religious authorities were not also sovereign with regards to the
econom ic domain.
43 G. O ’Brien, Op. Cit., 106.
44 R. A D e Roover, San Bernardino o f Siena an d Sant ’ Antonino o f Florence; the two g rea t economic
thinkers o f the M iddle A ges (Boston: Baker Library Harvard Graduate School o f Business Administration.,
1967), 10.
22
toleration towards commerce and the economic are San Bermardino o f Siena and San
Antonio of Florence who, following St-Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus,
recognise economic activity as respectable insofar as it serves the commonwealth.45
These thinkers relativise or negate the difference o f virtue separating trade from other
mundane activities but continue to approach the economic realm from an ethical
perspective and to prioritise the political community.
If we take Athens as a standard o f comparison, medieval thought still represents
an expansion o f the economic realm. One can argue that the Middle Ages brought closer
the economic (as oikos) and the political with the normalisation o f the monarchical form
of rule, a model, we have to remember, where the sovereign rules on his kingdom as on
his house and as a pastoral figure. Although compared positively against tyranny, both
monarchy and despotism are essentially regarded as economic forms o f rule.46 The main
reason why monarchy is regarded morally superior to tyranny lies in the different
directions these economic forms of rule take: personal or collective. In one case, the king
stands as a benevolent father figure who acts lawfully with the good and aggrandisement
o f his kingdom in mind. In the other case, power knows no boundary at all and follows
only the private interest o f the tyrant. While the king’s will, legitimated on the basis of
reason and justice can still be presented as partly political, the tyrant’s will is the upmost
expression o f the reign of appetites over reason and therefore the classical experience of
the economic rule in its most primordial form.47
45 Ibid., 10-16.
46 Leo Strauss and others, D e la tyrannie; suivi de, M ise au p o in t; ainsi que de la Correspondance Leo
Strauss-Alexandre K ojeve (1932-1965) (Paris: Gallimard., 1997), 60.
47 The virtuous manager o f the oikos, the paternalist king, can be said to master this art and his belongings.
On the opposite, the tyrant is totally controlled by the econom ic domain, in his case all forms o f appetites
and passions he follow s slavishly. See Strauss's comparison o f Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and h is’ Hiero.
Ibid., 60.
23
Nevertheless, it should be clear that although gaining ground, the economic
remains, in the Middle Ages, subordinated to the political. Since human law is formulated
by the will o f the sovereign, this relation (political rule as rule o f the sovereign house) is
subservient to sovereignty and does represent an economistic form o f government or the
autonomy o f the economic realm as found in the liberal practice. While in comparison
with the agonistic and honour-loving public space o f the agora the possibility o f genuine
political life was dramatically affected by the rise o f empires and the normalisation of the
monarchical form, the primacy o f the political as the bene vivere nevertheless survived in
the more corrupted form o f kingly sovereignty.
24
II
The crisis of modernity and the search for meaning and order
With the advent of modernity, the perception o f the relation between the economic
and political spheres of existence arguably underwent its most dramatic reversal. The rise
o f the merchant class, the Christian reformation and the scientific revolution are some
causes behind the transformation of these categories, the boundary separating them and
their relative hierarchy. As we will see, the upheavals characteristics o f early modernity
and the Enlightenment period in particular brought about a crisis o f transcendence and a
valorisation o f immanentist foundations for government. 48 This reversal occurred both
with regards to the source o f meaning and the source o f order. From a largely
uninteresting domain in need o f management and limits, the economic became the mirror
o f the most important natural laws, a space offering answers as to what is and what
should be done. This chapter, both theoretical and historical, analyses classical liberalism
and the new field of political economy as answers to this crisis.
While during the preceding ages the economic was always subordinated to the
political as a mean towards the ethical telos - the good life - of the community, the prince
or legislator will now be encouraged to ground and direct his governance on the economic
or other natural mechanisms or laws. If classical liberal thinkers diverged in opinions
concerning strictly economic forces like self-interest or the invisible hand o f the market,
all turned to the hitherto rejected realm o f mere-life (zoe) for stable sources o f meaning
and for symbols surviving the modem attack on traditional sources of authority. As we
will see, the immanentist sources o f authority which will be proposed by Enlightenment
48 We here prefer to use the term immanentist instead o f immanent to highlight the fact that concepts like
individual, population, nation, market, are still metaphysical.
25
thinkers and the new economists are diverse, from the population-mass to the individual
bearer of interest and all the way to theories o f the moral sense. Nevertheless these
thinkers all share a common scepticism towards political rationality and elevate interests,
passions and other affects or forces o f nature as the primary principles o f organisation and
behaviour.49 As Teixeira explains, the displacement o f the common good from civic
virtue to bio-politics was advanced by thinkers such as Hobbes who traced back the origin
o f the state not to our longing for a moral excellence and the good life but to the human
appetites and fears we all share.50 Indeed, the philosophical anthropology o f Locke and
Hobbes reflects this reversal, human behaviour and government being based on the
ineluctable and natural law of self-preservation. Unfortunately, the scope o f our inquiry
does not allows us to elaborate on the intellectual foundations behind this teleological
reversal nor does it gives us the leisure o f a close or exegetical reading of the major
thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke leading to this new configuration o f the relation
between zoe and bios. It is clear however that the disembedding of the economic from the
polity and its elevation as a source o f governmental meaning and order would not have
been possible without the focus on these laws o f nature.
The modem crisis o f transcendence thus devalues the old sources of meaning and
order. Meaning and order are only separable conceptually and a crisis o f meaning
inevitably leads to the erosion o f the bounds holding the community and the self together.
The old chain o f Being put into question by the new cosmology, all transcendent symbols
and claims of political legitimacy, including the categorisation o f the political as the
49 When thinkers like Hutcheson speaks o f morality, the cause o f morality is sought is the human as animal
instead o f the human as political or existential animal. Morality then exists but is an expression o f a sense
not fundamentally different than the sense o f smell.
50 Herminio Meireles Teixeira, The Sovereignty o f G overned Populations: An Inquiry into the D isplacem ent
o f the Common G ood in M odem P olitica l Thought (PhD diss., Ottawa: Carleton University, 2002), 70.
26
realm of the common good, civic excellence and the space o f transcendence o f animality,
are now seen as arbitrary and too shaky foundations for government to be justified upon.
As the economic has been earlier criticised as a source o f factions, the political now is.
Ironically, the desacralisation o f nature might be one o f the main reasons for the
new role of mere-life as the immanent telos o f government. When nature starts to be
understood as nothing more than matter into motion, it both denigrates it and elevates it as
the only terrain entirely knowable to hum ans.51 When Hobbes deconstructs the
Aristotelian four causes of Being and keeps only two, life is simplified as a standalone
machine of which the state is but a Promethean replica.52 The question is not to know if
Bacon or Hobbes were unconscious atheists: the God or pan-psyche that Enlightenment
thinkers believed in no longer required the primacy o f the political over the economic,
only o f human power over nature. In other words, the existence o f politics was no longer
a sign o f our part-animal part-divine nature but on the contrary the institutionalisation of
our mundane longings: fears, appetites, passions, preservation.
Setting the stage for the demise o f the old politico-moral order are foundational
events like the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. The Reformation critique of
natural theology combined with the crisis o f transcendence fostered by the Copemican
Revolution destroyed the point of rest o f the scholastic-medieval world-view.
Previously, within the orthodox Christian framework, the raison d ’etre of the
prince and o f his temporal power (the causa portandi gladium) is the eradication o f evil
in the world.53 Empowered by the grace of God, the sword of the prince is blessed with
51 Francis Bacon, The N ew Organon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45.
52 Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 3.
53 Walter Ullman, Principles o f Government an d P o litics in the M iddle A ges (London: Methuen & Co,
1961), 64.
27
divine legitimacy. The sacred science and authority which can determine the identity o f
that evil is however beyond the scope o f temporal forces and belong solely to the pope.54
The Reformation represents a radical challenge to the Aristotelian-Thomistic order and by
extension to the primacy of the political over the economic because of its rejection o f
natural theology’s claim to provide the state with a direction and purpose transcending
people and things. According to the new preaching of Luther and Calvin, anyone
pretending to understand the Lex Aeterna and Naturalis through unassisted reason is
committing the sin o f pride or, at the very least, overestimating human capacities and
downplaying the unintelligible and impenetrable dimensions o f Grace. James Moore
gives a succinct and clear account o f the theological critique behind the Enlightenment
rejection o f Aristotelian natural law and its replacement by natural rights theories and
laws of nature:
The fundamental problem with the scholastic Aristotelian theory o f natural law was
theological. That theory of natural law supposed that human beings could participate,
albeit imperfectly in the Supreme Being, in the mind o f God or the eternal law. In
Reformed or Presbyterian theology, no such participation was possible. Men and
women do not participate in the real presence o f God; the presence of God is merely
signified. The mind o f God is signified to us by revelation; but the same critics
insisted that to cite Holy Scripture is “not at all to philosophize. The mind o f God is
also made known to us by the nature o f things. And such knowledge of the divine
mind is properly called the natural law.55
Politics is not philosophy, yet political action also takes reason as its direction and
horizon. At first, the Calvinist demotion o f unassisted reason as a path to faith and
divine knowledge did not undermine political sovereignty. Indeed, reformist leaders
preached God’s appointment of earthly rulers and the necessity o f obedience. In the
54 Ibid.
55 James Moore, “Natural Rights in the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (eds.),
The Cam bridge H istory o f Eighteenth-Century P olitical Thought (Cambridge: University o f Cambridge
Press, Forthcoming), 299.
28
long run however the new teaching contradicts the claim o f the sovereign to know the
Good and displaces the authority and source o f knowledge behind state power from
theology to the laws and mechanisms o f nature. As we will see, political economy
emerges out of this scepticism towards traditional sources o f authority.
The Copemican Revolution represents the second major event bolstering this
crisis and leading to the new autonomy o f the economic later secured in classical
liberalism. The new cosmology adopted by Copernicus, Bruno and Bacon is based on
universalistic principles directly contradicting the traditional order o f Feudal Europe.
Within this new Weltanchauung, there can no longer be any transcendent ground for
truth, no unmoved mover, no high or low56. With the Scientific Revolution the fixed
centre from which the grand chain o f Being was holding on is lost. As the great Neo-
Kantian philosophers Ersnt Cassirer illustrates:
The heliocentric system deprived man of his privileged condition. He became, as

it were, an exile in the entire universe. The schism with the Church endangered
and undermined the foundation o f the Christian dogma. Neither the religious nor
the ethical world seemed to possess a fixed center.57
But it would take no time for order to be reaffirmed, this time on the basis o f a new
immanenticised ground of order and meaning. The modems rediscovered the normalising
power and order-generating quality o f human passions and appetites, these attractions
Plato referred to as the strings o f the gods.58 More dynamic, the liberal order will try to
56 Ersnt Cassirer and C. W. Hendel, Op. Cit., 132-133.

51 Ibid., 169.
58 Plato, The Laws, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1988), 25.
29
decipher the underlying laws behind these forces o f nature and to base government on
their free yet policed interplay.59
One has to grasp the measure o f the transformation. From a world-view placing
the political above the economic, government and morality are now based on pre-political
attributes of laws o f nature such as self-interest and empathy. Insofar as the classics
would have qualified human appetites as belonging to the economic realm, the state is
now seen as legitimate insofar as it protects and allows the flourishing o f economic
activity and zoe in general.
The following paragraphs will reflect on important schools o f thoughts and
paradigmatic thinkers at the forefront o f this historical reversal. By contextualising the
appearance of the field o f political economy in the perspective o f this anxious search for
immanent sources o f meaning and order, we can better make sense o f the rise of
prominence of the economic sphere. In the second part o f this chapter, we will engage in
a close reading o f Adam Smith’s work. We will see that, unlike neo-liberal radical
economism, Smith’s conception o f the role of self-interest and the place of the economic
realm is more nuanced. Placing the emphasis on private morality, Smith seeks to
reconcile the commercial city with virtue. If Smith is to be regarded as a paradigmatic
thinker of that period, early liberalism must be understood as bearing the inchoate seed of
economism without advocating the full autonomy or totalisation o f the economic sphere.
In relation to the political, it is a clear advance o f economism; from the angle of virtue
and ethics, the picture is much more equivocal.
59 The contradiction is only apparent. The free interplay o f interest, sentiments or even o f the moral sense is
always preceded by policing, security and order. The physiocrat, liberal, and neo-liberal critiques o f state
intervention are always limited and relative.
30
Political economy and the search for a new order
The first significant school o f thought o f what has come to be referred to as
political economy and which conflates economy and politics is German cameralism.60
The advent of cameralism brings about the displacement o f the nature and object of
politics in one major respect. The source o f governmental meaning, order, and direction is
now located outside sovereignty in economic reality. By grounding the objective of
government in the economic domain and by defining this later category through the
concepts of happiness, population and the primacy o f agricultural wealth, cameralism
relates the end o f government to a form of vitalist welfare, a sort o f bio-politics. What is
encountered as political is now degraded to the level of governmental interventions
directed towards economic ends.
The determining position attributed by the cameralist school to the economic
realm can be explained by its understanding of the dynamics at work in society as in
nature. Sharing the Enlightenment view o f the laws o f nature, cameralists believe that
there exists a fundamental and intrinsic relation between economy, politics and civil
society in general. Like Pufendorf, cameralists see all these different human activities as
rooted in a natural, pre-political, and pre-societal attribute o f sociability (Verkehr).6'
Considering the two realms as naturally linked, cameralism rejects as baseless any rigid
distinction between the logic of the oikos and that o f politics. In fact, cameralists often
60 W hile mercantilism precedes cameralism, it is not a united school o f thought and proposes policies rather
than a comprehensive worldview. French mercantlilism was in agreement with German cameralism on the
enlightened position o f the monarch and the need for constant regulations but departed from it on its
preference for manufactured goods over agriculture. Since French mercantilism represented a much larger
movem ent and since Adam Smith writings are a direct reaction to it, some readers could wonder the
rationale behind the present focus on the cameralists. The reason is that cameralism was much more
theoretically articulated on the need for discipline, police, and regulation. One could say that although
mercantilism is more significant for the history o f econom ic thought, cameralism is more important for the
genealogy o f government as a more self-consciously governmental movement.
61 Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation o f German Econom ic Discourse, 1750-1840
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 29-30.
31
use the allegory o f the patriarch and his household to represent the ruler and the state. The
following passage makes explicit this association:
For what is a good Cammer-President or Cameralist if not an experienced, good

and prudent Oeconomus or householder. The science of Oeconomie is essential
to the Cammer; thus the teachings o f Oeconomie is the genuine and proper
founding principle upon which the whole state, from the highest to the lowest,
rests.62
In this perspective, the direction of enlightened governance is no longer grounded in a
transcendent source o f truth and legitimacy as for instances the platonic idea o f the Good
(Agathon), Christian salvation or the medieval conception o f natural law as derived from
eternal law. On the contrary, for cameralists the primary objective o f the ruler must be the
enhancement and rational administration o f the population’s welfare. What is here
advocated is not political action but economistic state policing. From the cameralist
perspective, the sovereign needs no longer to rule his kingdom, but simply to administer
things and bodies.
The cameralist state, or police state as Foucault calls it, is by definition economic
and without limit. Unlike the liberal govemmentality we will later analyse, it does not aim
at limiting the ruler’s interventions and does not place much emphasis on the actions of
individuals. The real actor o f the cameralist economic order is the sovereign, while the
population represents a “subject mass to be regulated, enhanced, supervised” and not a

/TT
collectivity o f egos. Moreover, from cameralism’s point o f view, the fulfilment of
human needs cannot be attained through civil society alone. Although human beings
62 J. H. G., Curieuser und nachdencklicher D iscurs von der Oeconomia und von guten Oeconomis (n.p.,
1713), 14-15, cited in Ibid., 35.
63 Ibid., 29.
32
naturally strive for commodious living, the natural order of growth and civilisation needs
the recurring intervention o f rational government - through the action of the enlightened
sovereign - in order to prevail in a socialised environment. Two major obstacles make
necessary the intervention o f the sovereign and an applied knowledge of government
(,Staatswissenschaft). First, society being divided between unequal social orders and
social stations, the sovereign must legislates so that everybody behave in line with his or
her social station (Standesmafiig) and receive a welfare commensurate to it.64 Secondly,
individual subjects are seen as either moved by external factors and forces or simply too
ignorant to represent a significant source of order on their own.65 Profoundly immature,
the population is therefore governed as a family; the subjects being like children prone to
transgression; they need security and regulations for their own happiness and
development. The action of the monarch is needed to re-order, in accordance with natural
law, every space which has fallen out o f line.
However, theories o f an economic natural order such as that o f cameralists
increasingly problematised population as a space of government and made explicit the
limits of sovereignty. The emphasis on population and the application of new
technologies of government (statistics, demography, etc.) highlighted the independent and
autonomous logic o f population. While cameralism seeks to use these technologies to
reinforce the model o f the family, they inadvertently reveal population as a distinct
phenomenon and help to dethrone the family as the primary model of government. As
Foucault remarks:
The perspective of population, the reality accorded to specific phenomena of

population, render possible the final elimination of the model o f the family and
64 Ibid., 31.
65 Ibid., 29-31.
33
the recentring of the notion of economy. Whereas statistics had previously

worked within the administrative frame and thus in terms o f the functioning of
sovereignty, it now gradually reveals that population has its own regularities, its
own rate o f death and diseases, its cycle o f scarcity, etc.66
In the Polizeistaat theory of German cameralism and the equally enlightened monarch of
French mercantilism, no real distinction can be made between the economy and the
sovereign or between the good o f the sovereign and that o f the populace. However, the
uncovering o f natural economic laws on which these theories are based reveals important
limits to the wisdom o f the monarch and thus comes to contradict their premises.
It is in this context o f growing scepticism towards the wisdom o f the sovereign
that physiocratic thought replaces cameralism as the prevailing paradigm. Mostly
influential in late 18th century France, the economistes as they were also called unite as a
school of thought under the intellectual leadership o f Louis X V ’s physician Frangois
Quesnay.67 While cameralism recognition o f the economy as the main source of
governmental truth represents one o f the fundamental conditions for the emergence of
liberal govemmentality, physiocratic thought brings forward two other conditions leading
to the apparition o f classical liberalism: a focus on individual agency and the belief in
laissez-faire generated order.
The respective etymologies o f the words cameralism and physiocracy can be very
instructive. The two names reveal the opposite positions advanced by these movements
concerning the knowledge o f the sovereign. On one side, the word cameralism is derived
from the word camera, denoting the prince’s chamber where the cameralist advisor gives
66 Michel Foucault, “Govemm entality,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon Peter Miller (eds.), The
Foucault Effect: Studies in G ovem m entality: with two lectures by an d an interview with M ichel Foucault
(Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1991), 99.
67 H. W. Spiegel, The Growth o f Econom ic Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
34
counsel to the sovereign on public matters.68 It connotes the interventionism and
statesmanship needed from the prince’s court and the trust that is vested in the sovereign
as a steward on the commons. On the other side, the word physiocracy, which means rule
o f nature, was coined to highlight the superiority o f the natural order over the human
order o f the state.69 Physiocracy, like cameralism, aims at enlightening the sovereign
about the natural order, but stresses the danger o f governing too extensively instead of
advocating the need for a plethora of regulations.
With the physiocrats, the major problem o f rule changes and becomes a concern with
the proper limits and boundaries o f government. As Foucault explains, the underlying
concern shifts from the need to regulate chaos to the need to adjust one’s rule to the order
o f things: “est-ce que je gouveme bien a la limite de ce trop et de ce trop peu, entre ce
maximum et ce minimum que me fixe la nature des choses.”70 Contrary to the German
cameralists, the physiocrats are sceptics about the capacity o f the sovereign to mimic the
natural order and they consequently defend the principle o f individual laissez-faire.71 If
both cameralists and physiocrats see natural law as the source o f government veridiction
(the source o f the truths on how to govern), Quesnay’s followers believe the sovereign
too ignorant and incompetent to legislate better than the god-given laws o f nature. The
following discussion between a French physiocrat and Catherine the Great o f Russia
illustrates vividly the position o f this school:
“Sir, can you tell me the best way to govern the state well?”
“There is only one way, Madame, namely to be just, that is, maintain order and
enforce the laws.”
Ibid., 714.
69 Ibid., 185.
70 “am 1 governing w ell with regards to this limit o f too much and not enough, between this maximum and
minimum that the nature o f things fix to me?” [My translation] M ichel Foucault and others, N aissance d e la
biopolitique: cours au College de F rance (1978-1979) (Paris: Gallimard -Seuil, 2004), 21.
71 H. W. Spiegel, Op. Cit., 186.
35
“But on what basis should the laws o f a kingdom rest?”

“On one only, Madame, on the nature o f things and men.”
“Certainly, but if want to give laws to a people, what rule should one follow?”
“Madame, to make laws is a task which God has reserved for Himself. How can
man be considered competent to impose laws on being o f whom he has no or
only imperfect knowledge? And by what right would he impose laws on beings
whom God has not placed in his hands?”
“To what then do you reduce the science o f government?”
“To the study o f the laws which God has so evidently engraven in human
society. He created man. To seek to go beyond this would be a great calamity
and a destructive undertaking.”72
Nonetheless this critique o f sovereignty, the principle o f laissez-faire and the
concern with excess o f government does not mean that what is advocated is an absence o f
government. By positing as a standard o f government these economic laws o f nature in
general and the market in particular, the physiocrats lay down the epistemological
precondition for a more scientific rule o f people and things. The content and form of
regulations and interventions that will be needed from the sovereign will now emanate
from the object o f government itself and will consist of creating and securing the
possibilities o f liberty and self-regulation.73 However, as we will see later, some coercive
and illiberal interventions, although regrettable, might be judged from time to time
necessary in order to protect natural liberty and create the possibilities for people to act
freely.
The second major change taking place with physiocratic thought is the emphasis
on the individual. With the new importance accorded to the market as a natural institution
revealing the acceptable limit o f government intervention, the interplay of individual
behaviours as generating order is noticed. This is a significant change o f outlook from the
72 Interview ofM ercier de la Riviere with the empress o f Russian Catherine the Great, cited in Ibid., 198.
73 Graham Burchell, “Civil society and the ‘system o f natural liberty’,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon
and Peter Miller (eds.), Op. Cit., 140.
36
preceding paradigm. Whereas the cameralist enlightened monarch needed to understand
the laws of populations, the physiocratic sovereign needs to secure spaces o f liberty for
the agency of his or her individual economic subjects. The physiocrats sustain an
economic conception o f the individual and advance this proto-liberal subject o f interest as
the primary societal actor o f growth and order.
Furthermore, with the principle o f laissez-faire arises the ideal and dream o f a
scientific form o f human management. Under medieval economic doctrines, we have to
remember, the market was seen as a space to be regulated and ethically directed. The
authority needed to make sure a just price was attached to the exchanged goods and that
the market was free from theft, fraud, usury and other such impious practices. In other
words, medieval economy was imbued with morality and justice.74 Theoretically, the idea
of the just price referred to a fair and balanced price.75 Concretely however, the concept
was more loosely applied and referred to the current market price which needed to be
enforced by authorities.76 Nevertheless the difference in rigidity, the standard of the ‘just
price’ was morally grounded. The origin of this concept is to be found in the
Nichomachean Ethics where Aristotle argues that reciprocity in exchange can be found
when “things are equalised, so that the shoemaker’s product is to the farmer’s as the
farmer is to the shoemaker.”77 Justice in exchange is needed, Aristotle believes, to unite
78
the community as one. With the physiocratic and later with the liberal conception o f the
market, the idea o f the ‘just price’ is replaced by that of the ‘natural price’.79 The
importance of that change extends far beyond semantics. The market - now seen as a
74 M ichel Foucault, O p.C it., 32.

15 Diana Wood, M edieval Econom ic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 135.
76 Ibid.
11 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 75.
78 Ibid.
79 A lso called normal price and good price.
37
natural institution - becomes the standard to judge the correct from the incorrect
governmental practices. 80 In this sense, a good government is not only grounded in moral
justice, theological justification, or political conception of the common good, but must
now derives its action from the truth of these laws o f nature.81
Adam Smith and the unintended ordering effect of passions
Adam Smith and other major figures o f the liberal tradition adopted the same
belief in a natural and unintended source o f order and civilisation. From the perspective
of nature and society as a whole, order and harmony is seen as possible even where the
bounds of solidarity and friendship were lacking. An invisible hand o f nature, passing
through individuals’ insatiable quest for self-betterment, drives historical development
and integrates society. As we will see, however, this does not signify that humans are
simply economic beings, driven solely by selfish desires and their motivation for profit.
The contradiction between the impersonal order o f the Wealth o f Nations and the moral
bounds portrayed in the Theory o f Moral Sentiments is only apparent. The so-called
‘Adam Smith problem’ is a matter o f perspective more than anything else: Smith
distinguishes the elevated standpoint of nature and philosophy from the empathic outlook
of the moral actor. The invisible hand’s orderly force exists at the level of nature and the
whole, but it is not a perspective to be adopted by individuals. Influenced by the stoic
conception of happiness, Adam Smith still differentiates between mere life and good life,
the life of turmoil obsessed with necessity compared with the life o f tranquillity and
virtue. But if the private life of virtue is still seen as superior to the self-centred view of
the merchant, the polity is now subordinated to society, and the political to the economic.
80 M ichel Foucault, Op. Cit., 33.

81 Ibid.
38
Contrasted with classical-medieval thought, Adam Smith appears as the father of the new
economistic order. Contrasted with neo-liberalism, he will come to light as a balanced
figure fully aware o f the deleterious effects of commercial society.
The Scottish Philosopher was not the only thinker of that period to believe in a
spontaneous and natural source of order. Many, in the salons o f Enlightenment Europe,
enunciate ideas resembling the famous concept o f the invisible hand o f the market. Dr.
Mandeville, for instance, who became infamous for his Fable o f the Bees, argued that
civilisation’s advances and luxuries were primordially the results o f private vices and
individual appetites.82 Influencing Adam Smith’s Wealth o f Nations, Mandeville first
articulates the idea that civilisation’s successes are based on the purely self-interested
actions of individuals, not public morality. Although, as we will see, the two authors
fundamentally disagree on the existence o f virtue, the invisible hand metaphor retains the
notion o f the unintended ordering force o f self-interest. By looking for personal
advantage, Smith argues, the individual often fulfils indirectly society’s welfare:
Every individual is continually exerting him self to find out the most
advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own
advantage, indeed, and not that o f society, which he has in view. But the study of
his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that
employment which is most advantageous to the society. 83
The same belief is indeed expressed in the Theory o f Moral Sentiments: the wealthy’s
actions, although often moved by rapacious and selfish motives, indirectly benefit the
poor, redistribute wealth, “advance the interest o f society, and afford means to the
multiplication of the species.”84 The invisible hand brings growth and progress in spite of,
82 Bernard Mandeville, The F able o f the B ees (Oxford: F. B. Kaye, 1924).

83 Adam Smith, The Wealth o f Nations (N ew York: Bantam D ell, 2003), 569-570.
84 Adam Smith, The Theory o f M oral Sentiments (New York: Prometheus Books, 2000), 265.
39
not because of, the bourgeois merchant. On its own, the interest o f the individual
merchant tends towards monopoly and hence runs contrary to the interest o f the public.85
It is only from the more distanciated viewpoint o f society and when balanced by the
matrix of the market that this laissez-faire interplay o f passions can produce order,
civilisation, and the advancement o f the specie. It is nature’s hand, and not the merchant,
which must be applauded for Europe’s progress. Tradesmen are judged by Smith as too
self-centred to claim a right to leadership.86
The liberal solution to self-interest and factions is exposed most clearly from the
pen of Madison, an author deeply influenced by Smith, in the foundational Federalist
Papers. The force o f self-interest and other passions, Madison writes in the tenth paper,
must be recognised as part of human nature and as an inescapable dimension o f social
life. Any form of denial or utopian politics would be doomed to failure. At the same time,
liberal thinkers like Madison fear that, if unharnessed, these powerful forces would divide
and destroy, through organised factions, the unity o f the republic. Rejecting as unwise the
destruction of human liberty and as impracticable the homogenisation o f society, Madison
proposes to play passions against passions and thus assuage their divisive effect:
It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing
interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen
will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at
all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely
prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the
rights of another or the good o f the whole. The inference to which we are brought is,
that the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the
87
means of controlling its effects. [Emphasis in original]
85 Adam Smith, The Wealth o f Nations (N ew York: Bantam Dell, 2003), 339.
u Ibid., 621.
87 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The F ederalist P apers (New York: N ew American
Library, 1961), 80.
40
Rejecting as futile the classical idea o f relying only or primarily on exhortation for the
defence of virtue, liberal authors like Madison and Smith transform passions into a
movement containing the possibility o f their own containment. While a few will be able
to follow the inner call o f conscience and act as moral actors, societal order as a whole
must depend on more solid bases such as habituation, interest, and rules. If, as we will see
later, the population must still be warned against the corruption inherent to self-love, it is
still preferable to channel individual interests toward the commonwealth than to deny its
power.
This principle is not peculiar to the market. The desire for material gain is only the
economic dimension o f the human pervasive quest for self-betterment. For Smith, the
primary mover o f society and individuals is passion, a force at the origin of both our
natural yet pre-moral desire for gain and our capacity for moral sympathy. Like its name
indicates, the underlying logic behind the invisible hand o f passions and sentiments is not
directly accessible to rational understanding. Like Hegel’s cunning o f reason, the true end
of these interactions, the preservation o f life and civilisation, is only revealed in the long
run.
If this relation between individualism and order seems quite banal to our modem
sensibility, we have to remember that the idea according to which self-interested action
can generate social stability was quite heterodox for the time. In Hobbes’s philosophy,
self-interest is recognised as a primordial motivation in human nature but also as one of
the most destructive and problematic forces. At the bottom, it is self-interest which
constituted the state o f nature were everybody competed against everybody for survival
41
and recognition. Self-interest is thus chaos-generating and can only be countered by the
all-mighty Leviathan.88
In line with the spirit o f the emerging science of political economy, Smith is rather
sceptical towards well-intentioned pretensions to know the inner functioning o f nature
and to administer processes like the market. Like the physiocrats, Smith treats as sheer
vanity the idea o f an enlightened interventionist statesman:
the statesman, who should attempt to direct people in what manner they ought to
employ their capitals, would not only load him self with a most unnecessary
attention, but assume an authority [...] which would nowhere be so dangerous as
in the hands o f a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit
89
to exercise it.
For Smith, the reason of state differs from that o f the market and political prudence
demands that the sovereign respects the distinction between human sovereignty and
natural law. Equally sceptical is Smith o f the possibility o f steering people to virtue
through moral exhortation. Too utopian on its own, moral exhortation is bound to fail
unless it is first based on the more solid grounds of self-interest and justice. The
traditional appeal to benevolence and excellence does not understand the need to
instrumentalise passion as the prime mover o f individuals and society. The importance o f
moral exhortation however remains. As we will explain in more details later, it remains a
necessary practice for the encouragement o f high virtues such as benevolence.
Nonetheless, Smith lacks confidence in appealing to high virtues as a sufficient basis for
social order and as an appropriate path to virtue for the great majority o f individuals. For
him, moral philosophy should adopt a pragmatic view o f human nature and accept its
inherent finitude. Joseph Cropsey, in his important work on Smith, contrasts Smith’s
88 M. L. Myers, The Soul o f M odem Econom ic Man: Ideas o f Self-Interest, Thomas H obbes to Adam Smith
(Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1983), 28-33.
89 Adam Smith, Op. Cit., 573.
42
virtue by habituation with the traditional path o f virtue by exhortation. Unlike the
traditional call to virtue o f the moralists, Smith’s moral philosophy serves as rhetoric, “a
mean for working upon men, not to make them ‘good’ but to make them manageable.”90
In order for earthly virtue to be possible, Smith advocates virtue by habituation, a
balancing of the different passions, and an education directing vanity to its proper
object.91 Again, the unfolding o f passions represents for Smith the new immanent ground
for moral order; passions hence need to be controlled, not suppressed or sublimated.92
The determining role o f the passions and, by extension o f the economic sphere, is
also reflected in Smith’s view o f progress and world history as expressed in the third
chapter of The Wealth o f Nations. Dividing human history into four stages, from the age
o f hunters and gatherers to commercial society, Smith evaluates progress in terms of
socio-economic organisation instead o f through a classification of political regimes or
within a Christian historiography as was the tradition. Unlike other thinkers o f the
Enlightenment like Hobbes or Locke, Smith approaches progress from the dichotomy
rudeness-civilisation and not by contrasting a pre-political state of nature with the coming
in existence o f civil society.93 When Smith highlights human propensity to “truck, barter,
and exchange” as unique and defining characteristics of our species, he is not trying to fit
human existence into an abstract model like the homo oeconomicus. He is rather trying to
locate the origin o f the division of labour and highlight this phenomenon as the cause of
historical advances and social hierarchies.94 For him, economic activity is not superior to
90 Joseph Cropsey, P olity and Econom y (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), 26.
91 Ibid., 23-27.
92 Ibid., 23.
93 Ibid., 58.
94 Adam Smith, Op. Cit., 2-3. See also the title o f Book 1: “O f the causes o f Improvement in the productive
powers o f Labour, and o f the Order according to which its Produce is naturally distributed among the
different Ranks o f the People” in Ibid., 7.
43
philosophy or politics in absolute terms, yet it is o f greater historical importance because
it represents a pre-condition for the latters’ emergence. The economic is the beginning
and the end o f society since it encompasses the specialisation leading to private property
and classes and creating the possibility o f civilisation. Acting as the hand o f nature, the
economic is the driving force behind history leading to a secular and liberal age “where
every man [...] becomes in some measure a merchant and the society itself grows to what
is properly a commercial society.”95 Like the Marxist and other structural models of
history, Smith’s theory of the four stages does not leave a great place to human agency
and action. As Brown and McNamara point out, his political economy presents statesmen
as shaped by history rather than shaping it.96
Moreover, while the Smithian state is a far cry from the neo-liberal night
watchman model, his writings nevertheless present the role of this institution as
essentially negative, dedicated namely to defence, justice, and the public works necessary
for wealth accumulation, commutative justice and the protection of negative freedom.97
Smith, it is true, readily acknowledges the limits o f the laissez-faire and spontaneous
order and supports the fact that there are times when the magistrate’s intervention is
necessary to defend society. Nonetheless, his liberalism considers the role o f the state as
primarily negative. Directed at the preservation of life and property, the political sphere is
depicted as subservient to the economic and private sphere. Happiness and freedom are to
be found in the private sphere, but the state is maintained as an institution necessary to
safeguard negative freedom. It is for this reason that Benjamin Constant, in his famous

96 Peter McNamara, P olitical Econom y and Statesmanship, Smith, Hamilton, an d the Foundation o f the
Com mercial R epublic (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), 54.
97 Adam Smith, Op. Cit., 879-916.
44
speech delivered at the Athenee Royale, warns his compatriots not to forgo entirely their
share in the public: “Could we be made happy by diversions, if these diversions were
without guarantees? And where should we find guarantees, without political liberty?”98
Since liberals like Constant and Smith are also humanists, it must be added that they also
consider political participation as an important part o f moral development and personal
education. Public participation is second to private happiness but remains an important
dimension o f individual life, since by “submitting to all citizens, to all citizens without
exception the care and assessment o f their most sacred interests, enlarges their spirit,
ennobles their thoughts, and establishes among them a kind o f intellectual equality which
form the glory and power of a people.”99 The focus is on the private, but the public
sphere is, in their nuanced assessment, regarded as an environment fostering individual
autonomy and excellence.
On this ground, many scholars have accused Smith o f deflecting political
philosophy towards economics and o f spearheading liberal capitalism and the rise of
economism. In reaction to this reading, a number o f more sympathetic scholars have
argued that this critique arises from an incomplete assessment o f Smith’s oeuvre and a
lack o f attention to his moral philosophy. Adopting a more historicist perspective, this
second camp tries to re-situate Smith as an 18th century thinker leaving an important place
to politics and as someone preoccupied with virtue, education, and freedom.100
Studying the Theory o f Moral Sentiments, the reader is forced to appreciate Smith
as a virtue theorist and to realise that despite his support for commercial society, this
author is well aware of the dangers it poses for morality. Social competition for wealth
98 Benjamin Constant, P olitical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 326.
" ib id ., 327.
100 Peter McNamara, Op. Cit., 7.
45
and status is qualified by Smith as both necessary and deceiving. More socially oriented
than individualist, the social climber portrayed by Smith ultimately longs for recognition.
Through ranks, wealth, and honours, the majority o f people seek happiness in the public
world, searching for the approbatory look o f society. While The Wealth o f Nations
presents interdependence and the capacity to communicate as the distinctive marks o f
human society, the Theory o f Moral Sentiments adds the desire for recognition as the
main object of the drive for self-betterment: “To be observed, to be attended to, to be
taken notice o f with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages
which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure,
which interests us.” 101 Yet if we all desire happiness, the drive for self-betterment leaves
the majority “constantly dissatisfied” because they confuse external contentment with real
happiness which requires tranquillity o f mind and body. The greatest part o f mankind
seek to better their condition through social status and economic satisfaction, enthralling
102
themselves in a life of toil and anxiety. Like Hobbes, Smith distinguishes happiness
from felicity: the bustling life of the markets and the courts only leads to ephemeral
1O'}
contentment, not genuine happiness. Furthermore, this drive towards self-betterment,
while natural and made necessary for the advent o f civilisation, can become destructive
for the very virtues that make this society great:
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to
despise, or, at least, to neglect persons o f poor and mean condition, though necessary
both to establish and to maintain the distinction o f ranks and the order of society, is, at
the same time, the great and most universal cause o f the corruption o f our moral
104
sentiments.
102 Ibid., 72.
103 Charles L. Griswold, Adam Smith an d the Virtues o f Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 221.
46
Highlighting fortune as the most “vulgar and obvious way” o f self-betterment - the road
chosen by the majority - Smith implies the existence o f other more socially oriented and
stoically infused paths to happiness.105 To seek happiness in fortune and glory is a
deception of nature, albeit a useful one.
The possibility of virtue
While Smith recognises some truth in Dr. Mandeville’s system and acknowledges
the importance o f self-interest for societal order and civilisation, he does not consider that
self-love should be regarded as a proper standard to guide our choices and actions. From a
God-like ‘perspective’ (sic), the interplay o f passions, forces, and interests is always good
since it serves the aggrandisement and betterment o f the whole o f society and o f the
universe. What is good from the perspective of nature and the whole o f society however
might not correspond to what is good at the level o f the individual. Mandeville might
have pointed out an effective force o f nature and society, but for Smith he is completely
mistaken on its meaning for individuals and morality. His caustic Fable o f the Bees has
touched upon a very real motivation o f human nature but is totally blind to the direction
and restraint one must give to such an affect. For this reason, Dr. Mandeville idea only
“bordered on the truth.” 106 Indeed, Smith does not hesitate to reject Mandeville’s system
as generally based of sophistry and error. For Smith, the fallacies o f the Doctor’s tract are
numerous, but they all relate to his tendency to characterise all passions as vicious and
moved by vanity and his incapacity to differentiate vice from virtue, self-love from self-
interest. 107 Far from rejecting virtue, Smith’s work is trying to propose a new solid
ground to reconcile commercial society with the exercise of virtue. Reacting to Tory
105 Adam Smith, The Wealth o f Nations (New York: Bantam D ell, 2003), 436.
107 Ibid., 458.
47
conservatives lamenting the moral degeneration associated with the growth of the
commercial city, Smith’s grounding o f morality in nature thus opens the possibility of
1 QQ
virtue in all aspects o f life, including commerce. Self-love or pure ego cannot be
completely evacuated and its role and power has to be acknowledged. In no way,
however, is self-love a sufficient basis for society to foster and for individuals to realise
themselves. Neither is self-love the sole motivation behind all activities. Pure
benevolence might never exist but the majority o f our actions are moved by a multiplicity
o f motivations. Seen in this light, Smith appears neither as a disciple o f Dr. Mandeville
and the doctrine of self-love, nor as a nostalgic believer of the aristocratic civic virtues
like Lord Bolingbroke, but as mediator, a pragmatic virtue theorist wishing to infuse and
temper the worldly passions of commercial society with a diluted form of stoicism. In
terms of the relation between the political and the economic, Smith appears as an
ambiguous figure, elevating private virtue above the public life and ascribing the
economy as the primary factor of civilisation while still praising the great men o f action
and the need for martial spirit.
Smith first criticises Mandeville for rejecting virtue as a fraud and as the “mere
offspring of flattery begotten upon pride.” 109 In his opinion, Mandeville is wrong to
reduce our longing for recognition and approbation to mere vanity. Smith’s whole moral
philosophy is predicated on sympathy and on the fact that our moral sensibility is based
on the outlook of others and of our own conscience. Virtue lies precisely in the sensibility
of the actor to judge the property o f actions and motivations, to know what should be
done, what should be longed for, and what should be avoided. But property o f moral
108 Leonidas Montes, “N otes on Das Adam Smith Problem,” Journal o f Econom ic Thought 25, No. 1
(2003): 145.
1,19 Adam Smith, Op. Cit., 452.
48
conduct cannot be learned in isolation, this kind o f moral knowledge can only be
developed through socialisation and the conscience o f others’ judgement. For one to
search what is honourable and worthy o f esteem or even for one to seek glory for deeds
worthy of it should not be confused with vanity: “This frivolous passion [vanity] is
altogether different from either the two formers, and is the passion o f the lowest and least
o f mankind, as they are o f the noblest and the greatest.” 110 Desiring worldly recognition
does not necessarily entail vanity; in some cases it can even encourage moral conscience
and an higher standard o f virtue.
The “licentious system” offered by Mandeville has the deleterious effect o f
lowering all people to the same level o f amorality and self-centeredness. For Smith this
generalisation is not only factually false but also pedagogically dangerous. Throughout
the Theory o f Moral Sentiment, Smith distinguishes hierarchical ranks o f virtues and
people. Smith does not deny that the “great mobs o f mankind” are primarily motivated by
low virtues such as prudence and self-interest. But besides this ordinary social standard,
Smith projects the higher moral standard o f the stoic actor. Smith’s moral philosophy thus
traces two unequal ways to happiness and self-betterment. On one side, the great masses
o f commercial society and the men of small politics live by the lower virtue of prudence,
whether private or public. In the higher echelon of that first group o f people, lies a small
minority of “great men o f actions” who truly dedicate their life to something higher. Still
higher in the rank of virtues are the stoic sages, whom he also refers to as the “wise and
virtuous men.” The lives o f these virtuous sages approach most closely the absolute
property of action and the complete self-command demanded by the standard o f the
impartial spectator. Smith tries to offer a high moral standard that is nevertheless
uo Ibid., 453.
49
compatible with passions and commercial society. Presenting the impartial spectator as a
continuum of virtue, he wishes to show that the city is not hostile to the practice of private
virtue. In his system of moral sentiments, the great majority will practice the low social
virtues while a minority o f self-conscious actors will reflect a milder version o f stoic
a p a th iea .
To illustrate the different paths to virtue, Smith first presents us the model o f the
prudent, patient, and fair working man, the archetype o f ordinary virtue. This brave man
belongs to a great commercial city like London: he is, for Smith, the living example that
this environment can foster moral character. While the prudent man exercises lower forms
o f virtue than the wise and virtuous sage, he is not reducible to an economic man who
would be lead by his bodily appetites and by utility. A lesser reflection o f the impartial
spectator, the lower and private virtues are still bom of the same human capacity for
sympathy that makes possible the high and public directed virtues. When making a
prudent judgement on self-interest, sacrificing present enjoyment for security and future
growth for instance, the prudent man shows a certain degree o f detachment and self-
command. In fact, one of Smith’s objectives is to convince us that self-interest does not
necessarily entail vice and that it can even, when tempered by a sense o f prudence, be a
virtuous motivation.111 Once mediated through prudence (the low virtue representing the
detached judgement of the impartial spectator on self-interest), self-interest can indeed
cultivate other qualities worthy o f general approbation such as “the habits o f oeconomy,
industry, discretion, attention, and application of thought.” 112 Above all else, the pmdent
man is portrayed as a sober and reserved individual. He is, it is tme, primarily driven by
1,1 Ibid., 452.

U1 Ibid., 445.
50
self-interest. Still, his behaviour is at the antipodes o f that o f a man consumed by self-
love, vanity, and present satisfaction. Keeping himself at bay o f society’s intrigues and
cabals, the prudent man is always sincere but does not always tell the whole truth.113 He
is o f course capable o f friendship but prefers steady relationships based on good conduct
rather than passionate transports o f camaraderie. His simple character completely foreign
to the manners and the spirit o f the salons and convivial societies: “Their way o f life
might too often interfere with the regularity o f his temperance, might interrupt the
steadiness of his industry, or break in upon the strictness o f his frugality.” 114 We can see
from his portrait of the prudent man that Smith’s model o f ordinary life and virtue
opposes, rather than encourages, the modem model o f the economic maximising and
profit-focused man. In control o f his desires, Adam Smith’s prudent man is an economic
man who has become social, a simple and honest character exemplifying the Calvinist
work ethic. Resisting the pessimistic assessment o f Tory conservatives, the Scottish
thinker tries to reconcile economy and morality, the commercial city and virtue, by
illustrating the possibility o f a low form o f virtue available to everybody and easily
amenable to the interest-driven and temptation-laden nature of the commercial city.
But if the ideal of the prudent man is suitable for the great majority, there exists a
much higher path to virtue and happiness. The private and prudent man only brings cold
esteem, not love or admiration from the impartial spectator.115 Much more admirable, the
“wise and virtuous individual” will show a balance of the four cardinal virtues (prudence,
justice, benevolence, and self-command) and a willingness to sacrifice his self-interest to
113 Ibid., 312.

UA Ibid., 313.
115 Ibid., 316.
51
the interest o f his social order or civil society in general.116 Contrary to the great masses
of the earth who are confusing ranks and fortune with happiness and utility with
property117, the few wise and virtuous individuals accept steadily their fate as part of the
greater good and at the end as the work o f a benevolent deity:
So Smith’s system teaches us that it is permissible for a ‘great Conductor’ to

‘poison the happiness’ o f individuals, to ‘afflict and mortify the individual’, to
disregard ‘the conservation and prosperity... o f any private individual’, to inspire
in us a ‘respectful affection’ for brutal tyrants and esteem for the noble military
exploits of even ‘very worthless characters’, and to ‘sacrifice [individuals’] little
systems to the prosperity of a greater system’ - all in the putative interest of
118
society, o f ‘the whole’.
Whether in public or private life, for Smith everyone should ultimately aim at this
ideal o f virtue. If one desires genuine happiness and tranquility o f life, this person
should accept his fate as a soldier marching enthusiastically to glorious death. Such a
stoic attitude does not need to be associated with a rejection o f this world, for it is
only in the process of sympathy, a reflexive conscience o f others’ existence, that one
can come to this elevated moral standpoint. Smith’s mild apatheia is embracing, not
rejecting, the world; he applies to the social order this detached attitude that ancient
stoicism reserved for nature. Standing between ancients and modems, Smith wishes
to keep some o f both worlds. In his second-best city, worldly virtue is possible, but it
lies neither in sheer individualism nor in pure dispassionate abandonment of one-self.
As Athol Fitzgabbon rightly notes, the social occupies a central position in Smith’s
moral theory: “In summary, Smith modified Ciceronian virtue by introducing society
U6 Ibid., 346.
117 Smith calls this confusion o f means and ends the ‘Spirit o f System ’. People take enjoyment in the
systems they develop such as econom ies or government apparati and forget that those were supposed to
serve another purpose. Likewise, we get attached to utility as an end in itself; the perfection o f the system
has the same effect on us than aesthetic attraction. Adam Smith, The Wealth o f N ations (New York: Bantam
Dell, 2003), 257-268.
118 Andy Denis, “Was Adam Smith an Individualist?,” H istory o f the Human Sciences 12, No. 3 (August
1999): 83.
52
as an intermediate term between the individual and God. Society first taught the
individual to moderate his self-love and to cultivate dispassion and self-
command.” 119 The social life o f urban setting offers for Smith a space where
consciences meet each other. The public gaze o f the social acts as a moral standard
and encourages the exercise of virtue.
But have these social virtues anything to do with the political? Should we interpret
Smith’s virtuous men as private individuals or public heroes? Here again the ambiguous
relationship o f Smith to the political realm becomes evident. The virtuous “reformer[s]
and legislator[s]”, those truly devoted to the common good, are elevated by Smith as the
“greatest and noblest of all characters.” 120 Their love of country and dedication is for
Smith truly admirable and demonstrates great virtue. However admirable these great men
of actions are, their first virtue is still prudence, a virtue o f lower rank than self-command
and benevolence. These great political actors, even if superior to the majority, evaluate
their conduct on the basis of custom and ordinary morality. Comparing themselves to that
second rate standard they become conscious of their superiority and subject to vanity.
Much more demanding o f themselves, the wise and virtuous individuals try to imitate the
121
property of action and the perfection o f the impartial spectator, this demi-god within.
Although this goal is ultimately unattainable, since he can never equal in perfection the
“divine artists’ archetype”, his sensibility to this higher standard, his mastery o f the
cardinal virtues and his self-consciousness raise him above others. The wise man is
originally moved by the same nature than the person of ordinary virtue: the desire to be
119 Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith's System o f Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995), 68
120 Adam Smith, Op. Cit., 316, 341.
121 Ibid., 363-364.
53
happy, a need for approbation, and a reliance on the same impartial spectator for moral
judgement. The degree to which he approaches the detachment o f the impartial spectator
and his higher exercise o f self-command and benevolence are what raises him above the
many. As an artist, he has worked upon himself to shape his conduct closer and closer to
the “great judge and arbiter of conduct”, impartial conscience.122 The prudent and patient
man of industry, o f ordinary virtue, fabricates a world around him; the wise and virtuous
man is first concerned with working upon himself. Both are homo faber seeking
happiness but only the second is conscious o f the end o f utility and creation: tranquillity
and social harmony.
This idea is in every man more or less accurately drawn, its colouring is more or
less just, its outline are more or less designed, according to the delicacy and
acuteness o f that sensibility with which those observations were made, and
according to the care and attention employed in making them. In the wise and
virtuous man they have been made with the most acute and delicate sensibility,
and the utmost care and attention have been employed in making them. Every
day some feature is improved-every day some blemish is corrected. He has
studied this idea more than other people; he comprehends it more distinctly; he
has formed a much more correct image o f it, and is much more deeply
enamoured o f its exquisite and divine beauty: he endeavours as well as he can to
assimilate his own character to this archetype o f perfection.123
Because o f the human need for recognition and the happiness one finds in sympathy, very
few despise ranks, distinctions or prominence. The wise and virtuous person who can
reject such honours as unimportant and rely only on property to conduct his or her life is
“so confirmed in wisdom and philosophy” that he or she is “raised very much above [...]
the ordinary standard of human nature.” 124 Moreover, like Cicero taught in the story of
the dream o f Scipio, the fame and glory one can gain in this world is ephemeral and
n2 Ibid., 363.
123 Ibid., 363-364.
124 Ibid., 81.
54
I 'y c
contingent on fortune. The honour o f the wise and virtuous, in contrast, is based on the
absolute property o f their conduct and is therefore eternal.126
Moreover, the praised figure o f the “great man o f action” is not representative of
Smith’s view o f the political sphere in general. These are individuals o f exception,
founders and reformers. Ordinary court politics on the contrary is decried as a theatre of
appearance, etiquette, vanity, for which Smith has much less respect. The portrait Smith
gives o f princes, courtiers, and other “men o f rank and distinction” is not a flattering one.
The great admiration conferred upon their persons by the mass is due less to virtue than to
the title they bear and the majesty emanating from court etiquette. Even Louis XIV, the
most powerful prince in Europe for most o f his reign, acquired his reputation not from
heroism, knowledge, a sense of justice, or other such talents, but from a certain grace in
his voice, deportment and attitude which suited perfectly his office and his rank in the
eyes of the beholders. 127 Institutions may ultimately rest upon the hard work and genuine
talents o f civil servants, but great authority is often the result o f a combination o f power
and a capacity to perform well one’s social role so as to transpire distinction and
superiority.128 Such are the function o f the arts o f ordinary court politics. People of
inferior stations are obliged to show great talent and ambition to stand above their peers,
• 1?Q
gam admiration, and climb to high governmental offices. They even turn to war, Smith
remarks, as an opportunity to distinguish themselves and show valour. Those bom in high
stations, in contrast, shy away from all difficulty, labour, and real danger: “to figure at a
125 Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Commonwealth, trans. George Holland Sabine and Stanley Barney Smith
(Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1929), 256-268.
126 Adam Smith, Op. Cit., 370
127 Ibid., 75-76.
128 Ibid., 78.
55
1TO
ball is his great triumph, and to succeed in an intrigue o f gallantry, is highest exploit.”
Smith respects the ambition and hard work o f public servant but despises court politics as
the art of flattery and appearance. Smith portrayal o f court politics as undignified and
contemptible can also be read as a response to Tory conservatism: not only is virtue
possible in the commercial city, Smith argues, but the lower virtues associated with the
economic realm and private prudence (patience, industry, fortitude, and application of
thought) are often superior to the decadence o f the court. In fact, Smith even counsels
anyone wishing to remain “free, fearless and independent” to stay away from the “circles
of ambition” and not to compare one-self to “those masters o f the earth who have already
engrossed the half mankind.” 131 In the exceptional cases of the “great men o f action”, this
path to political power could lead to high virtue and civic accomplishment but for the
majority of people of ambition it would breed vain glory and lead to a broken life. 132
The widespread interpretation o f Smith as a completely economistic thinker is
largely due to a misreading o f his view on benevolence. Smith doubts universal
benevolence but does not universalise self-love as the primary human motivation or
rejects benevolence altogether. Too many o f his readers have thrown out the baby with
the bathwater in this regard. Holding the virtues o f Enlightenment against fanaticism,
Smith’s moral theory proposes a foundation for moral interactions moulded for this
imperfect world. Like Hobbes, Smith is wary o f religion. He sees its call for perfection as
unfitted as a practical and deontological source o f morality: “In defending the standpoint
o f ordinary life, Smith rejects moral theory that imposes demands we cannot meet and
130 Ibid., 78.

131 Ibid., 80.
132 Ibid.
56
1TT
that requires guilt we ought not to bear.” Sceptical o f the philosophers’ search for
perfect systems, Smith defends a vision of the Enlightenment where the scope o f wisdom
is limited to the knowledge of the limits of the cave.134
Far from supporting a vision o f the economic as an independent and a self-
sufficient realm, Smith thus construes a model o f society where economic and natural
liberty is protected but in which justice ensures fair play and in where high virtues like
benevolence and self-command are constantly encouraged.
Smith’s recognition o f the importance o f self-interest does not make him an
absolute critic o f the state. Contrary to contemporary neo-classical economists, Smith
does not hold a libertarian position. This is particularly evident on the subjects of
education and defence. For instance, Smith justifies the state imposed basic military
education. This obligation to take part in the defence o f the land is even prioritised over
the right to do commerce or join a corporation.135 With Smith, and arguably in opposition
to contemporary neo-liberalism, the economy is still at the service o f society and not the
other way around. A realist, Smith considered wealth as dependant on non-economic
factors such as security, moral and national exigencies. His studies focus on the subject of
wealth, yet he does not deny the existence of separate spheres o f existence nor projects he
wealth as the primary moral standard. The economic historian Karl Polanyi contrasts
Smith with the latter market ideologues by stating that for the former economy remains
one part among others of the life o f the community. In his perspective, the limits of
state interventions are important to highlight but the existence of markets and the free
133 Charles L. Griswold, Op. Cit., 142.

135 Adam Smith, The Wealth o f Nations (New York: Bantam D ell, 2003), 887-888.
136 Karl Polanyi, The G reat Transformation, The P o litica l an d Econom ic O rigins o f Our Time (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2001), 116.
57
pursuit of self-interest is ultimately conditional on the existence o f a community and a
state. Smith’s balanced opinion on government confirms the compatibility o f self-
interested motivations with the existence of a pluralistic realm o f social and moral order.
According to Smith, self-interest represents an important but not totalising principle of
government; economic-based rationality is a major human motivation but it cannot exist
without justice nor can it supplant the exercise o f virtue.
Harmony and the civic eye
We would thus be mistaken to interpret the Smithian liberal subject as simply an
atomised and self-seeking individual. In this respect, the liberal governmental program
differs significantly from the neo-liberal totalisation o f the market and homo oeconomicus
models. Classical liberal thought differentiates the state from the cultural/social spheres it
construes as natural (the market, religion, civil society, the nation, etc.) and seeks a
balance between governing and recognizing that these domains function under different
rationalities.137 Unlike neo-liberalism, classical liberalism is completely opposed to the
universalisation or systematic replication o f the market as a rationality and technique of
government. As in economic thought the individual is conceived as part of a population,
in the realm o f moral and political thought the economic subject is equally counted as a
moral subject, a member of civil society. This is because liberal government develops
both from the growth o f individualism and the birth o f the social (or civil society as it was
more commonly called in early liberal writings). Liberal government can thus be said to
be multidimensional; the subject is approached as being a member o f and dwelling in
137 Graham Burchell, “Liberal government and techniques o f the self,” in Andrew Barry and others (eds.),
Foucault and P olitical Reason: Liberalism , N eo-liberalism and R ationalities o f Government (Chicago:
University o f Chicago Press, 1996), 24.
58
different spheres o f activity and existence, be they religious, cultural, economic, political,
and so forth.
Albeit all their dissensions, liberal thinkers from Hobbes to Smith were trying to
ground political order on new foundations. Witnessing the Scientific Revolution o f
Copernicus and Newton, they were all confronted with a major existential crisis. Such
thinkers realised that order had to rest on a different basis than the traditional transcendent
symbolism of Christianity.138 Sheldon Wolin recounts: “The need to establish a field of
intelligible meanings among political phenomena becomes acute when traditional and
political arrangements appear to be breaking down into a kind o f primal condition.” 139 In
such a period o f instability, these thinkers looked for a principle o f social harmony which
would provide order as Newton’s Law awarded harmony to the universe. In the case of
Smith this principle was our capacity and tendency to socialise, a principle o f human
behaviour inscribed in the nature o f the individual and society themselves and
independent of external authority.140
The majority of liberal thinkers did not rely mainly on self-maximising actions to
ground social order. As Dean explains, they tried instead to harmonise the new subject of
freedom and interest o f liberalism with the moral subject o f civil society.141 Although
liberal thinkers credited self-maximising actions as order-generating, most o f them looked
at social conscience and empathy as better sources of social integration. As Wolin
reminds us, early liberalism was all but advocating an egotistical or autonomy-seeking
conscience:
138 Sheldon S. Wolin, P olitics an d Vision, Continuity an d Innovation in Western P o litica l Thought (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 218.
139 Ibid., 244.
140 Ibid., 292.
141 M itchell Dean, “Sociology after Society,” in David Owen (ed.), Sociology after Postm odernism
(London: Sage, 1997), 210.
59
Liberalism has always been accused o f seeking to dissolve the solidarities o f social
ties and relationships and replace them by the unfettered, independent individual, the
masterless man. In reality, the charge is almost without foundation and completely
misses the liberal addiction for social conformity.142
The liberal imperative for social conformity is explicit in the writings o f Locke who
affirm the Taws o f opinion’ to be more effective than official laws and in those of
Rousseau who call for the harmonisation o f one’s private conscience with the general will
of the public.143
In this spirit, the third Earl o f Shaftesbury, a student o f Locke and a member o f the
English parliament, turns to natural morality as the source o f order. Unlike classical
philosophy and Christianity, Shaftesbury does not ground moral behaviour in a
transcendent reason or in revealed truth. The Reformation and the Scientific Revolution
have indeed shaken people’s confidence in their capacity to attain this kind o f pure
knowledge o f natural essences or o f God’s will. It is in this context that Shaftesbury
conceives of an innate moral sense which enables us to distinguish right from w rong.144 A
lover o f nature, Shaftesbury sees in this sense the principle o f order necessary for us to
base our everyday moral actions.145 Shaftesbury does not deny the existence o f self-
interest but emphasises communal bounds and teaches to fuse one’s own interest with the
public good. Again, this philosophy denotes a longing for a new ground for order and
social harmony. As a body shows symmetry, Shaftesbury argues, self-love needs to be
balanced with the love o f fellowship.146
Another thinker o f the Scottish Enlightenment advanced further the idea of a sensus
communis. Siding with Shaftesbury against Hobbes and Mandeville, Hutcheson
142 Sheldon S. Wolin, Op. Cit., 343.

143 Ibid., 343-370
144 Milton L. Myers, Op. Cit, 51.
145 Ibid., 53.
U6 Ibid., 54.
60
denounces self-interest as too narrow and inadequate to answer all ethical questions. As
Myers explains, Hutcheson conceived o f the moral sense as prior to interest calculation:
“two people, he argues, may serve my interest equally well, but my reactions towards the
one who served from his self-interest and toward the other one who served from
friendship, with no thought of gain, would differ greatly.” 147 As we have a sense of
aesthetic beauty, we can equally discern the morally commendable from the
reprehensible, a moral sense he qualify as benevolence.148 Both self-love and benevolence
are regarded by Hutcheson as sources o f social cohesion. Even though Hutcheson values
the moral sense as superior to self-interest, he makes clear that order cannot be sustained
without one or the other.149
In the same sense, both Shaftsbury and Hutcheson critique Mandeville for being
blind to the moral sense they believe humans have naturally in order to distinguish virtue
from vice. In their perspective, limiting human motivation to immediate self-interest
eclipses all actions motivated by a striving for the common good or by a natural moral
intuition. For Hutcheson, this moral sense is the only disposition that can explain our
affection for distant heroes and our tendency to differentiate between advantageous
objects and advantageous fellows. We cannot always decipher a “secret chain” relating
our love for others’ virtue and self-advantage. Such love for virtue and excellence arises
not from cold calculating reason, but from this moral sense that is superior to the balance
of interests.150 In essence, both agree that human beings are striving for happiness but
decry Mandeville for occulting our moral longing for excellence:
147 Ibid., 68
1481bid., 69
149 Ibid., 69
150 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the O riginal o f our Ideas o f B eauty an d Virtue, Volume 1
(Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1971), 118-119.
61
For in this we should all agree, that happiness was to be pursued, and in fact was
always sought after; but whether found in following Nature, and giving way to
common affection, or in suppressing it, and turning every passion towards private
advantage, a narrow self-end, or the preservation o f mere life, this would be the
matter in debate between u s.151
In a similar fashion, Adam Smith sought the loci o f balance and harmony in laws
of nature. As we saw earlier, self-interest was approached by Smith as a natural source o f
order. Behind the apparently self-serving and chaotic individual actions was a natural law
at work that tended towards achieving equilibrium o f public welfare. However, unlike
modem economists, Smith did not restrain himself to one discipline and sought such a
natural law of order in different spheres o f human activity. In his Theory o f Moral
Sentiments Smith looks into the a priori conditions which makes morality a possible
source o f social concord.152 Smith calls sympathy the principle of human
communication and relationship making morality possible.153 According to this
definition, sympathy denotes one’s participation in the sentiments of others not a simple
approbation o f them .154 Hence sympathy does not refer to the content o f morality but to
humans’ natural and instinctive capacity to adopt another perspective when judging moral
conducts.155 Living in a condition o f human plurality, we identify imaginatively with
others’ position and even feel some o f their happiness or m isery.156 From the possibility
o f the moral spectator to identify with others arises his or her capacity to judge their
151 Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis” from C haracteristics (1711), ed. John M. Robertson. (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merill, 1964), 80-81.
152 Adam Smith, The Theory o f M oral Sentiments (N ew York: Prometheus Books, 2000), 23.
153 Glenn R. Morrow, The Ethical an d Econom ic Theories o f Adam Smith (New York: Augustus M. K elley
Publishers, 1969), 29.
154 Ibid., 27
155 Just like Rousseau’s image o f the ‘happy savage’, Smith’s moral spectator could not exist before the
advent o f civil society. Although Smith was certainly influenced by his teacher Hutcheson, his concept o f
sympathy emphasises the sociability o f the moral subject instead o f positing an individual and pre-given
instinct. See Ibid., 33.
'56 Ibid., 30.
62
action according to the felt concurrence or dissonance between the two positions. In
essence, the moral spectator develops a moral judgement by assessing weather his or her
sentiment would accord with that o f the actor. In the same way, self-judgements are
possible because we can imaginatively take an external and distanced position to judge as
if we were looking at ourselves from the judging eye of the public or o f another
spectator.157
The theory o f sentiments does not mean, however, that moral judgements can
simply be derived from egotistical or fanciful opinions we might have on others or that
others might have on us, for this would lead to a moral relativism that Smith does not
endorse. The problem is how to reconcile passion with morality, and interest with moral
objectivity. When confronted with a difficult moral decision involving high personal
stakes, however, the individual’s decision cannot be made solely on mood or opinion. The
problem at this stage is twofold. The first difficulty is o f methodological nature. The
spectators will not be fully capable o f empathising with a situation in which he or she has
no interest. The second problem relates to the resoluteness o f our moral decision when
passions fly high. Reflexive judgement based on sympathy might not always be stable
and strong enough to counter self-love. In case o f grave danger for our security or when
the lives of our friends are at risk, it becomes difficult to take the necessary moral
distance.
Smith suggests two solutions to answer these challenges and to harmonise self-
interest and empathy. To the methodological problem, Smith proposes the concept o f the
impartial spectator. When a moral judgement involves high personal stakes, when
imagination is not able to excite the involved passion (e.g. hunger), or when the passions
]51 I b id ., 31.
63
arose by the spectacle are too strong and distort judgement, the spectator cannot be
158
expected to share the interest of the actor and cannot fully judge ‘objectively’. In all of
these cases where the moral spectator cannot evaluate on its own merit the propriety of
another’s action, he should adopt the detached perspective o f an imaginary third person:
the impartial spectator. As Lindgren explains, this third party represents the ideal mean o f
interest that should prevail in a community for its maintenance: “the equitable degree of
interest in such objects is the one which is expected to provide and sustain the basis o f as
concord of sentiments among men. This level o f interest defines the image o f the ideal
disposition, i.e., the impartial spectator.” 159 The impartial spectator is hence supposed to
provide us with the distance necessary for moral judgements.
If the impartial spectator solves the problem o f methodology, there remains the
question of individual resoluteness with regards to moral principles. When judging their
own actions and personal well-being is involved, Smith believes most people will not be
able to face death or danger and choose ethically on their own. Smith believes this is the
reason for the edification o f universal and permanent moral codes. Continual moral
observations on the concurring sentiments o f mankind have led us to lay down general
rules, which we can refer to when in need.160 Thus the individual is not left alone and can
appeal to a universal conscience to guide his or her actions.
As with the market and the economic order in general, ethical judgements and
actions are thus connected through the natural moral fabric o f civil society. The
correspondence does not end there. In the same way that Smith is sceptical o f the capacity
o f the sovereign to understand and regiment economic laws; he doubts our capacity to
158 Ralph J. Lindgren, The Social P hilosophy o f Adam Smith (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 29-30.
159 Ibid., 28.
160 Glenn R. Morrow, Op. Cit., 34.
64
understand rationally this moral order.161 To conclude on this question, we can see that
the moral order defended in the Theory o f Moral Sentiments does not contradict the self-
interested individual o f the Wealth o f Nations. On the contrary, moral sentiments and self-
interests are regarded by Smith as two parallel sources o f social order, the former superior
and more rewarding and the later assuring the possibility o f a well-ordered polity even
when virtue is lacking. Smith believes the sympathetic process mirrors in society the law
o f nature and represents a way to reconcile in the modem city self-interest and virtue.162
Like all mirrors however, the image is reversed. From the standpoint o f nature or God, the
order and good o f the whole is what is proximally considered. From the human
standpoint, what comes proximally is the particular, and we are first benevolent to those
who are close to us: our families, our neighbours. The poet Alexander Pope, whom Smith
personally admired, illustrates with great imagery this complex relationship. Because it
captures so vividly Smith thought, it is worth quoting at length:
Self-love thus push’d to social, to divine,

Gives thee to make thy blessing thine.
Is this too little for the boundless heart?
Extend it, let thy enemies have part:
Grasp the whole words o f Reason, Life, and Sense,
In one close system o f Benevolence:
Happier as kinder, in whate’er degree,
And height of Bliss but height o f Charity.
God loves from Whole to Parts: but human soul
Must rise from Individual to the Whole.
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre m ov’d, a circle straits suceeds,
Another still, and still another spreads,
Friend, parent, neibhour, first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race,
Wide and more wide, th’o ’erflowings o f the mind
Take ev’ry creature in, o f ev’ry kind;
161 Ibid., 42.

162 Athol Fitzgibbons, Op. Cit., 57.
65
Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest,

And Heav’n beholds its image in his breast.163
Ultimately, there is no opposition between self-love and benevolence; the wise, with the
help o f the impartial spectator process, can come to adopt a stoic vision of the world
closer to that of Nature and God. Limited by human finite perspective however, we need
self-interest to socialise, reach others, and finally learn to be benevolent to an increasingly
larger circle.
The compatibility of self-interest and concerned or benevolent sympathy is
highlighted in the very first words o f the Theory o f Moral Sentiments'. “How selfish
soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which
interest him in the fortune o f others, and render their happiness necessary to him, except
o f seeing it.” 164 Portraying Smith as a full-blown advocate o f self-interest is a common
yet erroneous reading. Like Hutcheson, Smith considers self-interest as necessary in the
economic sphere as this famous passage renders explicit: “It is not from the benevolence
o f the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest.” 165 Nonetheless, it is our capacity to be ‘other-directed’ and not self-
interest that differentiates us as human beings.166 Self-betterment can be attained from
either self-interest or moral virtue, but the second avenue is superior insofar as it projects
a higher form o f self-control. O f course, one could argue with some basis that sympathy
is only an indirect application o f self-interest. What is clear is that Smith’s theory is
marked by the need to recognise the power o f self-love and the pervasiveness of the
private perspective in moral or public judgements. Far from an unconditional appraisal of
163 Alexander Pope and Maynard Mack, An E ssay on Man (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1950), 162-164.
165 Adam Smith, The Wealth o f Nations (N ew York: Bantam D ell, 2003), 23-24.
166 Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam S m ith ’s wealth o f N ations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004),
88.
66
self-interest, however, what follows is the construction o f economic and moral systems
aimed at the channelling o f self-interest towards a humanist or civic good.
Adam Smith’s economic and moral theory thus comes out as part o f a
philosophy o f moderation, looking for an immanent source of order and proposing a
form o f human excellence suited for the imperfect beings that we are. To be fair, a
large part of his scepticism towards the public realm is a reaction the pettiness and
self-serving court politics of his times and not a rejection of the political as such. To
his pragmatic eyes, the philosophers perennial temptation to create political systems
grounded in transcendence does not take into account human beings inherent limits
and finitude.167 As Charles Griswold clarifies, Smith rejects all ideas o f a perfect
political order or even a perfect community o f stoic sages and settles for a second-
best system: “to see this is to understand the limit o f the rule of mere passion and
force, as well as o f the rule o f perfect virtue and philosophy.” 168 Smith readily
acknowledges that the order he proposes is not perfect: the fusion o f sympathies
between the actor and the spectator can never be complete. Anti-utopian, Smith
nevertheless judges the realised harmony sufficient for societal integration: “These
two sentiments, however, may, it is evident, have such a correspondence with one
another, as is sufficient for the harmony of society. Though they will never be
unisons, they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required.” 169 Carved
for imperfection, this social arrangement between interests and sentiments permits
some harmony between the individual and society and encourages the cultivation of
private virtues.
167 Charles L. Griswold, Op. Cit., 304.

168 Ibid., 309.
67
III
In the preceding chapter, we defended the thesis that classical liberalism, when
judged in comparison to earlier theories o f government and economics, represented
an expansion o f the role and importance o f the economic sphere. However, as we
also stressed, classic liberals such as Adam Smith were discreet in their appraisal of
commercial society and did not generalise the reality o f the market place to society as
a whole. Early liberals conceived o f the economic as only one realm amongst others
and regarded the market as only one reflection of a natural force bringing harmony
and order to the whole. Even if Smith advocated laissez-faire in most economic
exchanges, he did not sacralise this precept or frame all questions in the model of the
market. In fact, he welcomed state intervention in several instances and maintained a
rich conception o f the civil society. Like numerous classical liberals, Smith accepted
the existence o f a multiplicity of social spheres. Reacting against a history of
complete devaluation o f things economic, he and others tried to give this realm
respectability and legitimacy and highlighted its role in society. In no way however,
did they conceived o f the market as the centre of society or place the economic at the
core o f human nature.
In the present chapter, we will study how neo-liberalism, a movement reclaiming
the heritage of classical liberalism, departs from that prudent outlook to advance a
radically economistic position. In the first place, we will consider how neo-liberalism
adopts the theory of spontaneous order as an axiom for its entire intellectual edifice.
As the most philosophical and elegant synthesiser o f that theory, most neo-liberals
turned to Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School o f Economics to rethink
economics as a science o f order and to define the market as a matrix of self-
68
generating order. Nevertheless, Hayek’s theory was overall less influential than the
Chicago School o f Economics. Moreover, the influence o f Kant and Polanyi on
Hayek’s theory makes it naturally hostile to the generalisation o f the economic model
and rationality we see taking place with the Chicago stream o f neo-liberalism, which
does not mean that Hayek’s thought is not economistic in nature. In fact, there is no
doubt that Hayek champions the economic as the realm o f liberty and rejects the
political as the realm o f coercion. However, while he does not seem fully aware o f it,
Hayek’s anti-rationalism cannot condone the totalisation o f the economic supported
by the Chicago School. For these different reasons, our study o f neo-liberalism
focuses on the Chicago School o f Economics and its derivatives as the ideal
representative o f radical economism. After briefly recounting neo-liberalism’s
historical and intellectual origins, we will turn to the Chicago School o f Economics
and to its infants Public Choice Theory and Rational Choice Theory as radically
economistic theories representing a rationalistic turn. Mainly, we will make the case
that American neo-liberalism (i) expands the economic in an totalising fashion by
expanding the market and homo oeconomicus paradigms across the board, (ii) by
conceiving of individuals as entrepreneurs of themselves, (iii) by enlarging the field
occupied by economic science, (iv) and by re-writing history and culture through the
lens o f the market model. Because they have attained the status o f economic
orthodoxy and have been able to influence all aspects of society, neo-liberal ideas are
not only important from the perspective of intellectual history but first and foremost
because of what they represent and what they do: they radically expand the economic
at the expense of other modes o f Being-in-the-world and in particular of political
existence. Although our analysis o f American neo-liberalism draws considerably
69
from the Chicago School o f Economics, the phenomenon we wish to highlight is
larger than this particular academic school. The phenomenon under study, radical
economism, comes under different denominations and presents itself under the
emblem of different schools including but not limited to the Chicago School,
Rational Choice Theory, Social Choice Theory, Public Choice Theory, New Public
Management, New Economic History, and so forth. Distinctions and disagreements
clearly exist which separate these schools and warrant their distinct denominations.
However, in the matter that concerns us - the position o f these schools with regards
to the position of the economic in relation to the political - they share a common
vision.
In order to better understand the neo-liberal revival of the idea o f spontaneous
order on which is legitimated the expansion o f the economic sphere, one has first to
replace the emergence o f neo-liberal thought back in its historical context, that of
Keynesian orthodoxy. As Susan George recounts, in the post-war period, Keynesian
and socialist interventionism was the norm:
In 1945 or 1950, if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in
today’s standard neo-liberal toolkit, you would have been laughed off the stage
or sent off to the insane asylum. At least in the Western countries, at that time,
everyone was a Keynesian, a social democrat or a social-Christian democrat or
some shade of Marxist. The idea that the market should be allowed to make
major social and political decisions; the idea that the State should voluntarily
reduce its role in the economy, or that corporations should be given total
freedom, that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given much less rather
than more social protection-such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the
170 Susan George, “A Short History o f Neoliberalism ,” Conference on Economic Sovereignty in a

Globalising World (March 1999), in Global P o licy Forum,
http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/econ/histneol.htm (accessed May 19th, 2006).
70
Brought about by the Great Depression, the predominance o f the Keynesian doctrine in
academia and government was concretised by the arrival in the White House of two
publicly declared Keynesian presidents: Kennedy and Johnson. During the 1950’s and
1960’s the Chicago and Austrian schools were in a position o f minority, standing amongst
the last bastions o f laissez-faire economics. This isolation brought the two universities
closer: Chicagoans were welcome in Vienna as allies and vice versa. Hayek himself spent
twelve years teaching at the University o f Chicago, working closely with figures such as
Knight and Friedman and influencing their understanding o f the market order. This
position of academic marginality endured until important economic dislocations and
population discontent (OPEC crisis, stagflation, opposition to taxes and burden o f social
programs, etc.) in the 1970s opened the door for a paradigmatic shift.171
During his years o f tenure at Chicago, Hayek formulates and disseminated his
theory of the unintended order. Associating state interventionism with Nazi Germany and
Bolshevik Russia, Hayek develops with his teacher von Mises a radical anti-socialist
attitude unbeknownst in most economists o f the earlier Austrian School. For Hayek, there
can be only two choices: liberalism or statism. The second choice, whether it takes the
form of so-called “democratic centralism” or social-democracy, leads for him inexorably
to totalitarianism:
There exists no third principle for the organization o f the economics process
which can be rationally chosen to achieve any desirable ends, in addition to
either a functioning market in which nobody can conclusively determine how
well-off particular groups or individual will be, or a central direction where a
group organized for power determines it. Once it is clearly recognized that
socialism as much as fascism or communism inevitably leads into the totalitarian
state and the destruction of the democratic order, it is clearly legitimate to
provide against our inadvertently sliding into a socialist system by constitutional
171 Elton Rayack, N ot so F ree to Choose: The P olitical Econom y o f M ilton Friedm an and R on ald Reagan
(New York: Praeger, 1987), 4.
71
provisions which deprive government o f the discriminating power of coercion

even for what at the moment may generally be regarded as good purposes.172
This economist-philosopher brings to its limit the liberal association of political liberty
with economic freedom. In his very dichotomous vision, no political liberty is possible
without complete economic laissez-faire and socialist calls for social justice or positive
rights are part o f a fatal deceit which can lead a free people to servitude. Calling himself
“an Old Whig, with the stress on the old,” 173 Hayek affiliates himself with a tradition he
calls ‘individualism true’, in the company o f thinkers such as Locke, Mandeville, Hume,
Smith and Burke.174 Above all, individualism true rejects rationalist and constructivist
pretensions o f possessing perfect reason and designing society in accordance to an ideal
plan.175 The tradition of individualism true Hayek associates himself with is contrasted
with the individualism false of Descartes, Rousseau, and the encyclopaedists who
dangerously flatter human pride by exalting the power o f reason and by praising freedom
as unbounded will. Rejecting all ideas o f societal order being handed down from above or
contracted out from below, Hayek proposes a more organic vision o f civilisation’s
development, picturing this process not as a rational formation but as a series of
institutions formed through evolutionary selection over millennia. The Austrian
economist is not so optimistic about the reach o f human reason and deliberative action. In
the end, for Hayek, there is no Society but only societies, private circles of collaboration
from which emanates an immanent order surpassing the intent and foresight o f the
172 Friedrich A. Flayek, Law, Legislation an d Liberty, Volume 3: The P o litica l O rder o f a F ree P eople
(Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press, 1979), 151.
173 Gilles Dostaler, “Friedrich Hayek sa vie et son oeuvre,” in G illes Dostaler and Diane Ethier (eds.),
F riedrich Hayek, philosophic, econom ie et p o litiq u e (Montreal: ACFAS, 1988), 44.
174 Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” in Chiaki Nishiyama and Kurt R. Leube, The
Essence o f H ayek (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), 144.
175 Ibid., 136.
72
actors.176 His distrust for constructivism and the coercive power o f the state leads him to
adopt radically economistic views. In his famous essay Individualism True and False,
Hayek juxtaposes and contrasts the market as a free institution and the state as an
instrument of coercion. Hayek links freedom with individuals instead o f collective entities
but rejects as a mere caricature o f individualism the idea that society is composed of
atomised individuals.177 Rather, Hayek highlights, individualism true focuses on media of
collaborations such as cultures, traditions, and the market. Such collaborations integrate
individuals and foster a self-sustaining order which is greater than the simple zero-sum
equation of the individuals’ deeds.178
Rejecting anarchism as yet another mask o f the rationalist constructivism he
decries, Hayek recognises the impossibility to forego entirely state coercion. On that
question, Hayek agrees with Hobbes: without the state monopoly o f coercive force,
civilisation is impossible; life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” 179 Yet for him
state order is only a precondition to the emergence of civilisation and in no way does it
represent the backbone sustaining society together and holding people to commit
injustice. On that question, Hayek parts way with the Hobbesian approach. To Hayek,
Hobbes is delusional about human capacity to create a rational dominion from the
ground-up and about his desire to order society as one index lexicon. Far more promising
for him is the possibility o f self-control encouraged by social community and religion180
as well as the market’s potential to benefit the community without having to rely on either
™ Ibid., 135.
]11lbid.
178 Ibid.
179 Hobbes, Op. Cit., 76.
180 Warren S. Gramm, “From Individualism True to Individualism False,” in Warren J. Samuels (ed.j, The
Chicago School o f P olitical Econom y (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1976), 169.
73
benevolence or explicit state dem and.181 The definition o f this pre-rational order can help
us decipher the rationale behind H ayek’s radical anti-political stance which will taint his
students and the members of the Chicago School. Like many others, Hayek returns to
Ancient Greece to lay down the concepts at the basis o f his political and economic
thought. Besides the natural order (physis) - completely independent and indifferent o f
human action - and the rationally designed order (taxis) lies another form o f order,
spontaneous and sub-rational.182 Hayek conceives o f this third form o f order as a human
artefact resulting from a long process of evolution accumulating over history the practical
knowledge from human interactions.183 Understood as one o f the most fundamental of a
number of spontaneous orders, the force resulting from integrated free markets
(cattallaxy) takes a much larger role than the traditional definition of economic as the
domain of production and exchange. The word cattallaxy is coined by Hayek from the
Greek word kattalasein to characterise the market order as a pacifying and integrating
force. The economic can now compete with the political as the supreme realm of human
interactions since cattallactics order not only means a network o f exchange but the
184
possibility to “admit into the community and to change from enemy into friend.” One
can see that the political is here no longer deemed necessary, only some governmental
force is required. Political logos is effectively replaced by economic exchange as the
integrating nexus; the marketplace is substituted for the public forum and the agora as the
181 Friedrich A. Hayek, Op. Cit., 138.

182 Such ideas are not com pletely original. One can see a continuous trend in the history o f western thought
opposing Being as D esigned Formation and Being as Emanation.
183 John Gray, H ayek on L iberty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 28.
184 Friedrich A. von Hayek (exerts from), “Spontaneous ( ‘Grown’) Order and Organized ( ‘M ade’) Order, in
Naomie Moldofsky (ed.), ORDER-With o r Without D esign? (London: The Centre for Research into
Communist Econom ies, 1989), 116.
74
unifying space making possible plurality in unity, and superficially dissonant offers and
demands replace the void of agonistic dissonant public voices.
Hayek’s conception of the unintended order, on which is based his valorisation o f
the market, is also contrasted with the state, politics and all forms of command in a most
* 185
rigid dichotomy. Belonging to the category o f imposed order, politics is rejected as a
dangerous human chimera. The state and politics in general, associated with coercion and
exclusive power, are thus opposed to preferred self-ordered systems like the market.
W aligorski’s study of the political theory o f conservative economists highlights the point
o f agreement o f Hayek with the Chicago School on the market/politics dichotomy: “[to
Friedman and Hayek] Coercion does not exist in the market. Only government can coerce
people, making government the major threat to freedom. [...] The market is, therefore,
the absolute essential arena for the exercise o f freedom.” 186 Following this association of
the state with unfreedom, Hayek argues the need to restrict the power of the state
whenever possible and to limit politics to a negative and juridical apparatus. According to
his constitutional theory, one must reject laws seeking to govern, command and instruct,
and support instead the few substantive laws which only seek to regulate “the relations
between the private persons or between such persons and the state.” 187 Hayek again
borrows from the Greeks, this time from the foundational concept o f isonomia, to critique
total democracy. In his judgement, to follow the rule of law is not to legislate on
everything but to be bound by meta-legal principles insuring liberty.188 In this
185 In fact, the opposition he draws between liberalism and statism is derived from his ontological and
epistem ological ideas concerning the importance o f the unintended order for civilisation.
186 Conrad P. Waligorski, The P olitical Theory o f Conservative Econom ists (Lawrence: The University
Press o f Kansas, 1990), 54-55.
187 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution o f L iberty (Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press, 1972), 207.
188 H ayek’s distinction between these two forms o f law shows great insight on the modem phenomenon
Foucault calls the “govemmentalisation o f the state”, i.e. the fact that laws are increasingly not interdictions
75
perspective, the role o f the state is almost completely negative, its purpose is only to
make possible and secure spheres o f responsibility from which the individuals can
interact.
When one understands that by ‘coercion’ Hayek means any positive, significant,
or purposeful action engaged by institutions above the individual level, one understands
that his theory is not only libertarian but anti-political:
The three great negatives o f Peace, Freedom and Justice are in fact the sole
indispensable foundations o f civilisation which government must provide. [...]
Coercion can assist free men in the pursuit o f their ends only by the enforcement
o f a framework o f universal rules which do not direct them to particular ends,
but, by enabling them to create for themselves a domain protected against
unpredictable disturbance caused by other men - including agents o f government
- to pursue their own ends.189
Hayek’s ideal role o f the state is thus profoundly apolitical and negative. The state
represents this pre-civilised force that must trace and protect the boundaries o f the private
spheres. The public is reduced to a buffer zone for the private, a negative space which
exist so that people can distinguish “between thine and mine.” 190 The role o f politics is
reduced in favour of the market and other unintended orders, and what remains is directed
at creating the possibility o f an economistic existence.
Yet Hayek comes from the continental philosophical tradition and that heritage
makes him stand out in Chicago. Hayek’s philosophical beliefs, in particular his Kantian
critical attitude towards the power o f human reason and his Polanyian appraisal o f
but positive instructions, commands, creations o f subjects: “the great majority o f so-called laws are rather
instructions issued by the state to its servants concerning the manner in which they are to direct the
apparatus o f government and the means which are at their disposal.”, see Ibid., 207. His analysis is, in our
opinion, flawed however since it only understands this phenomenon in statist and legalist terms whereas it
parallels the rise o f bio-politics, the econom isation o f rule, and the retreat o f sovereignty.
189 Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation an d Liberty, Volume 3, The P o litica l O rder o f a F ree P eople
190 Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” in Chiaki Nishiyam a and Kurt R. Leube, Op.
Cit., 142.
76
practical knowledge, gives a level o f complexity and deepness to his economic argument
that is not to be found in his American followers. The philosophical character o f Hayek’s
thought has an equivocal effect. In the first place, the epistemological foundation of
Hayek’s thought makes his vision o f society very economistic by opposing a conception
of politics associated with statism, rationalism and constructivism with a conception of
things economic and the market which are associated with the unintended order,
civilisation and freedom. In the second place however, Hayek’s epistemology also creates
an internal limit to his own economism. Because his economic ideas are rooted in a
rejection o f rationalism and constructivism, he cannot support, without internal
contradiction, any totalisation of the economic sphere. Hayek can praise without
inconsistencies the market as an epistemological device gathering a fragmented and
dispersed form of practical knowledge. Still, we argue that his philosophy cannot condone
without contradiction the tendency o f the Chicago School to force all institutions into the
model o f the enterprise and to apply market rationality to the entirety o f the social
domain. One can find explicit statements supporting this analysis. For instance, Hayek
explicitly rejects the “extension of economic man as the proto-typical base o f human
behaviour in general.” 191 Understanding the danger o f economic totalisation, Hayek also
associates this totalising tendency that will in time become the norm at the Chicago
School as a form of individualism false: “this strategic element in the decision process -
decision theory - has been extended from allocation of economic resources to provide the
conceptual basis for an “economics o f welfare, manners, language, industry, music and
191 Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation an d Liberty, Volume 3: The P olitical O rder o f a F ree P eople
77
1 Q ’J
art [and] w ar.. .power [and] love.” Against the generalisation o f economic choice
rationality to all forms o f behaviour and against total economism which in the end is a
form of rationalism, H ayek’s neo-liberalism retains the socially constrained individualism
of classical liberalism. In a less uni-dimensional account o f the Social, the market is not
pictured as the only force at play in societal order, religion and self-restraint are key for a
193
free form o f order. Also, Hayek does not really care if the state intervenes
economically, as long as it does not affect the integrity o f the private sphere (i.e. as long
as it is not significant). To do so would probably end up a bad decision, but it is not to be
decried as a violation o f freedom. Moreover, as far as Hayek’s ideas can act as a powerful
critique of statist socialism, it cannot justify the predominance of the market (catallaxyj
as a unintended order over other unintended orders such as traditions, citizen political
activity, anti-rationalist streams o f socialism and other activities escaping design. Its
depiction of politics as the unfortunately inevitable locus o f coercion does not account for
the activity o f politics or for what the political life entails but only for what has come to
be known as government. It is no wonder that Hayek can see no truth in discourses of
positive rights, for his account of the public sphere only contains rules and commands, a
structure of fair play and a coercive force that, while necessary for the private to grow in
peace, must be restricted and always distrusted.
The rationalistic turn and economic imperialism
From Hayek to the Chicago School, there is displacement as well as continuity.
Influential figures of the Chicago School o f Economics adopted Hayek’s radical anti-
192 Warren S. Gramm, “From Individualism True to Individualism False,” in Warren J. Samuels (ed.), The
Chicago School o f P olitical Econom y (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1976), 175.
193 Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” in Chiaki Nishiyama and Kurt R. Leube, Op.
C it, 135-139.
78
political attitude and made theirs his idea o f the market as an unintended and spontaneous
order. Compared to post-war Vienna, it is much easier to understand and to account for
the libertarian roots at the basis of Chicagoans’ anti-political attitude. Less subtle and
complex however, the Chicago School’s form o f neo-liberalism is no longer the result o f
a systematic philosophical reflection and lacks the internal limit Hayek’s Kantianism
imposed on its own economism. The American stream o f neo-liberalism can be, without
much exaggeration, qualified as total economism. No longer adopting a defensive stance,
it seeks without restraint to expand the reach o f economic and market rationality to all
institutions and actors. The public is not only warned of the danger associated with
politics, it is educated as to the ubiquitous virtues o f the market and as to the absolute
necessity for the state and the citizen to frame their behaviour in that mindset.
Indeed, the move from the Hayekian world view to Chicago School ideology
represents a rationalistic turn. The main reason Chicago School’s proponents can apply
the logic of the market and o f the consumer to all fields o f reality and in particular to
politics lies in their emphasis on choice, decision-making calculus and, most o f all, utility
or profit maximisation. The Chicagoans ignored Hayek’s anti-rationalism but retained his
idea of the market as a structure o f social order. Whereas Hayek rejected the extension o f
short-term interest as the “proto-typical base o f human behavior in general” 194, the
Chicago School bases its approach on such a generalisation. Friedman for instance
equates the economic with the model o f the market and considers that all parts of life can
be analysed as constrained maximisation.195 Others are even blunter in their enlargement
o f the economic field. Summarising advances of economic theory, George J. Stigler,
194 Ibid., 172-174

195 Warren J. Samuels, “The Chicago School o f Political Economy: A Constructive Critique,” in Ibid., 9-11.
79
another major figure o f the Chicago School and winner o f the Nobel Prize, divides the
development into two general trajectories. The first trajectory o f advance comprises,
without surprise, all research furthering the empirical knowledge and the understanding o f
economic exchanges. But our knowledge o f ‘normal economics’ is only one-side o f the
economists’ mission. As the second trajectory o f advance, Stigler points to what many
have called economic imperialism, and what he refers to as the “the widening o f the
working range of the microeconomist to encompass phenomena previously treated as
exogeneous in economics.” 196 Economic science is seen as the new master science that
will at last unite the social sciences as one coherent whole.
This overt opening to academic imperialism brings some neo-liberals to lower the
monument dedicated to Smith. They remain respectful o f this figure o f authority but
reject his pluralism as a pre-modem artefact, an aberration contradicted by the rest of his
thought. Most if not all in the Chicago School claim Smith as a founding figure of
economics and a prophet o f the free market. At the same time however, many are uneasy
with the enduring distinction between politics and economics that transpires in his
writings. For a radical economist like Stigler, the main limitation to Smith’s ideas is their
lack o f consistency. Was he more coherent, he would have understood that the motivation
o f utility-maximisation he discerned in the marketplace is also the logic at play in all
human behaviour, politics included. In essence, for Stigler one does not have to refute
Smith, only to be more Smithian than Smith himself:
The “uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his
condition” (I, 304 [326])-why was it interrupted when a man entered
Parliament? The man whose spacious vision could see the Spanish War o f 1739
as a bounty and who attributed the decline o f feudalism to changes in
196 George J. Stigler, Chicago Studies in P olitical Econom y (Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press,
1988), ix.
80
consumption pattem s-how could he have failed to see the self-interest written
upon the faces o f politicians and constituencies? The man who denied the state
the capacity to conduct almost any business save the postal - how could he give
the sovereign the task o f extirpating cowardice in the citizenry? How so,
Professor Smith?197
By transposing the economy as a science primarily concerned with order, radical
economistic movements like the Chicago School o f Economics come to deny the utility
o f political science and, in the end, o f the necessity o f a political sphere altogether. This
marks a departure with the traditional conception o f politics but also o f the economy. The
primary concern o f the economy becomes the rationalisation and ordering o f human
behaviour on market logic and not the simple production and exchange o f goods and
services. After all, their theory provides concepts and institutions ready to take the place
o f those pertaining to the political world: it offers a model o f inter-personal relationships
- the market - and a model of socio-political harmony - general equilibrium. Although
economists can show some interest in the behaviour of the individuals who lie behind the
supply and demand curve, it is the focus on equilibrium itself that distinguishes
economics from other social sciences.198 More than an epistemic tool, the curve of supply
and demand acts as a the underlying principle o f a self-generating order, a kind of perfect
state of nature, never actualised but perpetually sought after. This ultimately artificial
point o f rest serves as a technocratic matrix o f order. Neo-classical economy, through the
instrument of market equilibrium, provides a general model o f order from which it is
possible to reconfigure all relationships. This order, while explicitly rejecting
transcendence, is based on an abstraction o f exchange, stripping human relationships
197 George J. Stigler, The Econom ist as Preacher, an d O ther Essays (Chicago: The University o f Chicago
Press, 1982), 144.
198 Edward P. Lazear, “Economic Imperialism,” The Q uarterly Journals o f Econom ics 115, No. 1 (February
2000): 101.
81
outside time and society. A limited relationship is severed from its reality and entered into
a functional order, under the condition that everything remains equal (ceteris paribus).
This methodological proviso, when combined with market-oriented decisionism, has
tremendous implications. The belief that ‘everything remaining equal, the market will
unfold’ implies amongst other things the general status quo, the autonomy o f market
relationships, the generalisation o f economic rationality and the need to discipline those
who do not abide by this circumscribed reality. Unlike with Adam Smith moreover, no
extraneous force is needed to civilise or temper the citizens. “Equilibrium suggests a
magnetic force that draws events towards a coherent pattern and determines the form o f
economic change and movement through time.” 199 As Keynes noted, neo-classical
economics seeks nothing less than a Copemican system where “all the elements o f the
universe are kept in their places by mutual counterpoise and interaction.”200 Unlike most
political conceptions o f order, the neo-liberal’s spontaneous order does not presuppose or
require acts of founding, reforms, revolutions, or any other disrupting interventions in the
world. Re-framed in the model o f the market, political activity contains processes and
utility function, but no action properly called. Robert A. Solo’s critique of neo-classical
assumptions sheds light on the conception of time and change they imply: “There is
movement in the neoclassical system, but no development. The neoclassical system
moves perpetually; it never comes to rest. And it does not develop.”201 In the last chapter,
we will explore in more depth, with Arendt as our primary guide, the inadequacy o f the
economic conception o f change to explain political existence.
199 Robert A. Solo, “N eoclassical Economics in Perspective,” in Warren J. Samuels (ed.), The Chicago
School o f P olitical Econom y (East Lansing: A ssociation for Evolutionary Econom ics and Graduate School
o f Business Administration, 1976), 49.
200 John M. Keynes, E ssays in Biography (London: Macmillan, 1933), 223, cited in Ibid.
201 Ibid.
82
Aggressive and adaptive in their encounter with other disciplines, radical
economists support the colonisation o f other fields o f existence, justifying it with a belief
in monism and with the hope o f a unifying social science. With the Chicago School of
Economics and the constellation o f schools defending an economistic vision of politics,
market-based rationality - utility maximisation and cost/benefit calculation - is
generalised as human behaviour. The concept o f ‘good’ being expanded to include all
things bearing some utility or profit, the economy as the realm o f the production and
exchange o f goods and ideas is ipso facto enlarged to encapsulate all human activity.
While the object of utility or profit sought by the individual might not be categorised as
economic, this is a mere detail since, fundamentally, the structure o f the behaviour is.
Brennan and Buchanan are clear: the essentially economic character o f things lies in their
structure and not their particular end or function:
There are several ways o f viewing political processes in the same terms as we view
markets. The first, and most important at this point, is the view o f political process as
a system of interacting individuals from which outcome emerge as equilibria. This
view is consistent with any number of motives we might ascribe to those individuals
and with any number of criteria by which we might evaluate the operative rules. The
motives and criteria in question can be chosen from the economist’s toolkit. [...] What
is crucial here however, is neither actor motive nor evaluative criteria but, rather, a
preparedness to examine political process in the same general term as we examine
market.202
The economic is therefore defined as a form o f self-ordered rationality where individuals,
constrained by rules and the choices o f others, make decisions in a maximising logic.
Through this definition, the economic is at the same time reduced and enlarged. The
economic is reduced to a specifically market oriented and utility maximising logic. At the
202 Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan, The Reason o f Rules, Constitutional P olitical Econom y
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15.
83
same time however, defining the economic as a form o f decision making rationality
renders possible its application to all fields and spheres o f existence:
Another word that has been attributed to radical economism is economic
imperialism. We already noted in this chapter that economic emperialism - the
application of economic models and theories to other fields and sciences - is an enterprise
that is regarded by economistic thinkers as an important avenue o f the expansion o f the
economic field.203 Interestingly, some economists explicitly laud economic imperialism
as a brilliant scientific uncovering o f the core o f all social life. To them the individual and
the firm are no different than the atom in physics and chemistry, that is, ubiquitous.204 In
its appraisal of economic imperialism, Edward Lazear traces two different routes on
which the expansion o f the economic field has advanced. The first path, points Lazear to
praise the inclusiveness of economist, encourages scholars outside the discipline to adopt
economic analysis to understand social phenomena.205 The second possibility, judged by
Lazear equally successful, is to colonise the other disciplines and take the chairs o f non
economic scholars.206 This author is very candid and honest in exposing the second
strategy: “simply replace outsiders as analysts of ‘noneconomic’ issues, forcing non
economists out of business, as it were, or at least providing them with competition on an
207 *
issue in which they formerly possessed a monopoly.” Lazear’s economism is also
203 The term economic imperialism is more precise than radical economism. This precision represents both
the virtue and the limit o f this term. Econom ic imperialism is best used to describe the application o f
econom ic model and rationality to other academic disciplines. W hile an important dimension o f the
phenomenon o f econom ism , w e do not believe the later can be reduced to this form o f intellectual
imperialism. The phenomenon o f econom ism is not restricted to the University but also shows its effects in
our everyday consciousness, in our actions or lack thereof, in the mode o f interaction and subjectivity
encouraged (consumer-citizen).
204 Edward P. Lazear, “Econom ic Imperialism,” The Q uarterly Journal o f Economics, (February 2000):
105.
205 Ibid., 104.
206
84
totalising, there is virtually no limit to the expansion o f the economic field. The most
aggressive economic imperialist, Lazear states candidly that economic imperialism
“aim[s] to explain all social behaviour by using the tools o f economics.”208 In this
perspective, neo-liberals refuse as a rule to distinguish the rationality o f the homo
oeconomicus from the forms o f subjectivity deployed in politics, arts, religions, and so
forth. Arguably, the Chicago School o f Economics understands all parts of life as
amenable to economistic analysis of advantage and utility.209 As demonstrated by the
following citation, the uni-dimensionality o f the economistic outlook reaches, at times,
surrealistic proportions: “The law of demand is readily applicable to sex, honesty, dates,
highway speeding, babies, and life itself! We predict that if the price o f any one o f these
things goes up, the quantity demanded will diminish and vice-versa.”210 Again, we need
to remember that the relevance o f such statements lies not solely in their veracity or
falsity. Beyond the truth it reveals and the reality it obscures, such a discourse also
represents a theorising act affecting our existential and phenomenological reality,
transforming our conception o f social reality, widening the sphere o f the economic and
vitiating it o f the political.
Following that spirit o f economic imperialism, neo-liberal thinkers like Buchanan
consider that economic rationality must be used in political analysis and preferred over
the model o f the ‘benevolent despot’ or other alternative paradigms. While incapable of
proving that economic rationality is the primary or central form o f human reason 211 ,
209 Warren J. Samuels, “The Chicago School o f Political Economy: A Constructive Critique,” in Warren J.
Samuels (ed.), Op. Cit., 11.
2,0 Lawrence H. Officer and Leanna Stiefel, “The N ew World o f Economics: A R eviewed Article,” in Ibid.,
464.
211 It seem s to us that such a proof would be impossible to provide. To prove that econom ic rationality is the
only or even the primary form o f rationality, one would have to resort to a form o f circular logic and to
85
Buchanan places the burden of proof on economism’s detractors: “The initial burden of
proof must surely rest with anyone who proposes to introduce differing behavioural
assumptions in different institutional settings. [...] for the economist, the only difference
in institutions that are relevant for explaining behavioural differences are the differences
in the price o f the alternatives.”212 On which ground does Buchanan base such an
ontological and epistemological generalisation? Not on truth, nor liberty, nor justice, but
9 1T
methodological facility.
The Chicago School is perhaps the most articulated and transparent exponent o f
neo-liberal radical economism, but it is by no means the only manifestation of that
movement. Precisely because it colonises and remoulds every terrain it encounters,
radical economism has many faces. One o f its most concrete and explicit reflections is the
development and the growth in popularity o f economic approaches to the study of politics
such as the school o f public choice, rational choice theory, as well as the so-called new
public management. These approaches to politics, which are nothing other than the
application of economic models to its study, are derived directly from Chicago School
microeconomics. They represent, in sum, a very important facet o f radical economism:
the aggressive and totalising expansion, across academic disciplines and fields of activity,
o f economic rationality. More topical to our study, they represent the colonisation by the
economic field of the discourse and science dedicated to the study o f political activity and
provide the demonstration with the aid o f econom ic rationality or to contradict himselfTherself. Any monist
world view is to be conceived as an abstraction or else must be based on a leap o f faith. But this question,
which brings us back to the perennial philosophical debates which rages since Parmenides and Heraclitus,
extends far beyond the scope o f this thesis.
2,2 Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan, Op. Cit., 48-49.
213 Ibid., 51.
86
thought.214 In his introductory guide to the field o f public choice, David B. Johnson could
not more clear in his desire to see the economic field enlarged. For this author, the
reduction o f the economic to what has been traditionally understood as economics is
mistaken. The following passage is so bold and explicit that it warrants a exhaustive
citation:
Contrary to the layman’s belief that economics is reserved to a study o f the stock
market, inflation, or the production and consumption o f material goods to satisfy
material wants, economics is much more general. There is an economics of love,
an economics of time, an economics o f crime and punishment, as well as an
economics o f material goods; most importantly, these are not separable
“economics” . Each of these “economics” is based upon a foundation o f a
common set o f analytical tools. Economics is not defined by the subject area it
9 1S
studies, since its domain has become the limitless field o f human choice.
In order to fit political reality into an economic model, economistic theories like public
choice theory translate the normal language o f politics into the language usually
associated with economic exchanges. The objective of such translation is not to make it
more ‘operational’ or more scientific as one could guess from empiricists. While it would
be useless to try to decipher their inner intentions or motives, the language utilised by
public choice theorists effectively masks all difference between the nature o f the political
and the economic. The reader, encouraged to see citizens as consumers and to evaluate
policies in terms o f offer and demand is no longer troubled by the totalisation o f the
economic sphere.
Following this approach, voters can be likened to consumers; political parties

become entrepreneurs who offer competing packages o f services and taxes in
214 The matter is not only academic. With the study o f politics m imicking the study o f econom ics and the
language used in this understanding translated to see politics in terms o f exchanges, prices and goods,
something is lost. The question is neither a simple matter o f linguistic. Arguably, with this translation is lost
a certain access to consciousness o f things political and with it, a part o f political existence itself becom es
inaccessible.
215 David B. Johnson, Public Choice, An Introduction to the N ew P o litica l Economy (Mountain View:
Bristlecones Books, 1991), 17.
87
exchange for votes; political propaganda equates with commercial advertising;

government agencies are public firms dependant upon receiving or drumming up
adequate political support to cover their costs; and interest groups are co
operative associations of consumers or producers o f public goods. Moreover the
whole political system can be viewed as a gigantic market for the demand and
supply o f ‘public goods’, meaning all output supplied through a political instead
91f\
o f a market process [...]
The same is true o f rational choice theory, another very popular instance of neo-liberal
radical economism. Rational choice theory, just like the Chicago School of Economics,
extends economics’ methodological individualism, replicates its market-based conception
o f individual behaviour and rationality and seeks to apply economic logic to political
questions. The incredible success of rational choice theory in academic journals and its
maverick penetration in political science departments reflects in itself the advance of

217
economism. In their famous critique o f rational choice theory, Green and Shapiro list
the four “generally accepted assumptions” o f rational choice theory as follows: (i) rational
behaviour is characterised as utility maximisation, (ii) rational action requires consistency
in ordering options (options can be rank-ordered and preference orderings are transitive),
(iii) the value the individual seeks to optimise is ‘expected’ (because choice must often be
made in uncertain conditions), and (iv) the relevant analytical unit is the individual.218
Although Shapiro and Green are foremost critics of rational choice theory, their account
of this framework’s definition o f rationality is not denied by the ‘believers’. George
Tsebelis for instance, in an application o f the rational choice model to comparative
216 Peter Self, Governm ent by the M arket? The P olitics o f Public Choice (Boulder: W estview Press, 1993),
3.
217 Originating in the 1950s, the application o f rational choice theory to political science has gained its
predominant position throughout the last three decades. A s an example, the number o f articles based on this
theory that were published in the Am erican P o litica l Science R eview has almost doubled between 1982 and
1992. See Donald P. Green and tan Shapiro, P athologies o f R ational Choice Theory, A Critique o f
Applications in P olitical Science (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 3.
2 n Ibid.
88
politics, presents rationality as “nothing more than an optimal correspondence between
ends and means.” 219 He later defines rationality further by adding these requirements on
rational behaviour: it is expected-utility maximising, the beliefs or preferences cannot be
contradictory, preferences cannot be intransitive, and reason conforms to the axioms of
probability calculus.220 After presenting these conditions o f rationality as the ‘weak’
requirements, he further borrows from the economic model by basing his ‘strong’
requirements on the theory o f equilibrium strategy and situating the locus o f rational
choice analysis on the institutional constraints imposed on rational actors.221 Recognising
the parental position of neo-classical economics towards rational choice theory, Tsebelis
cites Milton Friedman, who stands, as we already saw, as one o f the main figures o f the
Chicago School o f Economics, to defend the epistemological value of the methodological
framework.222 Evelyne Huber and Michelle Dion, in their assessment of the contribution
of Rational Choice Theory to the study of Latin American politics, also list similar
assumptions to define the rational choice paradigm: utility maximisation, structured
preferences (transitive and rank-ordered), and a focus on individual or unitary actors’
strategic choices to explain collective outcomes.223 She also points out to the kinship of
neo-liberal economics and Rational Choice Theory: “in the most restricted sense, the
rational choice approach is the political application of microeconomic theoretical
assumptions to the study of politics, or the use o f economic models for the study of non
219 George Tsebelis, N ested Games, Rational Choice in Com parative P olitics (Berkeley: University o f
California Press, 1990), 18
220 Ibid., 24-27
221 Ibid., 40
222 Ib id .,31
223 Evelyne Huber and M ichelle Dion, “Revolution or contribution? Rational choice approaches in the study
o f Latin American politics,” Latin Am erican P olitics an d Society 44, N o .3 (Fall 2002): 2
89
market phenomena.”224 Regardless the fact that some rational choice theorists wish to
incorporate cultural elements in the theory they also remain fateful to utility maximisation
225
and to cost and benefit calculating rationality.
Furthermore, neo-liberal radical economism, in all its forms, also entails an active
and continuous reconfiguration o f the world along market lines. More constructivists than
conservatives, closer to Bentham than to Burke, American neo-liberals do not oppose
intervention per se, only anti-liberal interventions, i.e. interventions that do not serve to
encourage the spread or enforcement o f markets arrangements. At times, neo-liberal
schools have even been actively engaged in state reforming. Public choice, which is in
reality a subset o f rational choice theory, has played a strategic role in supporting
privatisations and the application o f market rationality in government’s decision-making.
Rational choice theory has been promoted as the prime perspective in policy making, its
popularity in part driven by a movement to push politics out o f government:
[...] Rational models are seen not merely as some bundle of techniques to do
policy analysis. The mission o f public/rational choice practitioners has become, in our
view, far more ambitious; the objective for many devotees o f rational models is to
supplant the pushing, bargaining, and noise o f democratic politics with the putative
elegance and parsimony of a rational calculus, the application of which will maximize
cost-effectiveness and personal freedom.226
As one o f its foundational premises, neo-liberalism thus shares with other forms of
radical economism a desire to replace political action and deliberation by economic
rationality. This is a matter of efficiency but also of principle. Since, as we already stated,
neo-liberals associate, in a dichotomous fashion, politics with coercion and economic
224 Ibid.
225 See for example Daniel Little, “Rational-Choice M odels and Asian Studies,” The Journal o f Asian
Studies 50, No. 1 (February 1991): 39.
226 Max Neiman and Stephen J. Stambough, “Rational choice theory and the evaluation o f public policy,”
P olicy Studies Journal 26, No. 3 (September 1998): 450.
90
action with freedom, they consider it a necessity for the moral improvement of society to
“divide the space in which social life takes place so there is a maximum economic and a
minimum political sector.” Their intention might not be malevolent, after all their
contention with the political sphere is primarily directed at the coercive aspect o f politics.
Nevertheless, whatever their initial intention, by framing public deliberation as an
‘exchange’ o f ideas, voting as rent seeking, and action as the simple result o f a cost-
benefit calculus, they throw the baby with the bathwater they evacuate the political as
such and not only coercive sovereignty.
Neo-liberals’ attitude towards public intervention is somewhat paradoxical. In
most cases, advocates of a market-based order oppose collective action and support a
policy o f isolating and restraining politics. After further analysis o f their arguments
however, their position appears more equivocal and strategic. In fact, neo-liberal thinkers
often welcome a large degree o f public intervention as long as it serves to create and
protect the emergence o f new markets and of a economic order. Again, the Chicago
School is a prime example of the essence of neo-liberalism. After having opened his
famous book Free to Choose, Milton Friedman has no qualms advocating constructivism
and social engineering to institute such an anti-political order. The objective might be
laissez-faire, but the means certainly are not:
Our society is what we make it. We can shape our institutions. Physical and
human characteristics limit the alternative available to us. But none prevent us, if
we will, from building a society that relies primarily on voluntary cooperation to
organize both economic and other activity, a society that preserves and expands
human freedom, that keeps government in its place, keeping it our servant and
998
not letting it become our master.
227 John McKinney, “Frank H. Knight,” in Warren J. Samuels (ed.), Op. Cit. (East Lansing: Michigan State
University, 1976), 196.
228 Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, F ree to Choose, A P ersonal Statem ent (N ew York: A von Books,
1980), 29.
91
Friedman’s call to action is a far cry from Hayek’s reverence for millennial traditions and
practical knowledge. Hayek was looking backward, appealing to the pessimism of
classical liberalism, denouncing the folly of modem rationalism and o f action understood
as creation (poesis). Friedman’s form o f economism, less philosophical and less self-
conscious, follows the modem tradition of understanding progress as structural
transformations and showing optimism towards human agency.
Engaged, in their beginnings in a contest against the Keynesian orthodoxy, neo
liberals rapidly developed market proselytism as both a form o f propaganda for the
masses and as rhetoric for the elite. The Chicago School figureheads are very much aware
o f the normative component of their ideas and many accept readily the role of economists
as preachers. Chicago School’s representative voices like Frank H. Knight and Milton
Friedman are clearly conscious of the limits of individualist methodology and that their
analytic tools are intertwined with a prescriptive strategy. However, they consider the
assumption of individual rationality necessary to defeat statism and promote
individualism as a social norm. In his own words, Knight sees reality as being “not what
is logical, but what it suits our purposes to treat as real”230 and is looking for the “basis of
231
a propaganda for economic freedom.” Both Friedman and Knight recognise the
232
importance of collectivist methodology (the influence o f social structures and
collective agencies on the individual) but occult all collective reality in their own method
to advance their normative strategy o f ‘economic education’:
229 Stigler, George J., The Econom ist as Preacher, an d O ther Essays (Chicago: The University o f Chicago
Press, 1982), 3-13.
230 Frank H. Knight, “The Ethics o f Competition,” cited in Warren J. Samuels (ed.), Op. Cit., 365
231 Frank H. Knight, “Theory o f Economic P olicy and the History o f Doctrine,” cited in Ibid., 368
232 Warren J. Samuels , “Further Limits to Chicago Scholl Doctrine,” in Ibid., 403
92
Chicago economics, following Knight, is a science infused with a social control

idea. Chicago economics is social engineering at its most subtle level. It is part
o f the social processes which socialize man along certain lines and not others.
The Chicago School economist is both investigator and pleader, both observer
and participant. The market is not a mere object o f study; it is something which
must be shown to work, and evidence to the contrary, while admitted, is
narrowly and safely circumscribed. 233
At the heart o f the Chicago School’s project lies the endeavour to promote ‘rational
economic m an’ and ‘free markets’ as new founding myths to legitimate the status quo and
move institutions towards their ideal. Ironically, in the process the School itself acts like
the social forces it decries. Some have even discerned religious elements in neo-liberal
doctrines and practices.234
To be fair, not all advocates o f radical economism endorse explicitly a uni
dimensional approach to society and human reason. Gordon Tullock, for instance, the
principal associate of Buchanan and a founding figure of public choice theory,
acknowledges the caricatural character o f the homo oeconomicus model, and recognises
the fact that humans possess plural selves as well as the impossibility o f reducing all life
to economic relations. Nevertheless, Tullocks’s good words for perspectivism and
pluralism do not reflect the enterprise for which he sets out. A few pages following these
open-minded remarks, Tullocks explains public choice’s basic tenets by reciting the
mantra of radical economism: choice is only individualistic, the application of economic
optimality to politics is a value-free endeavour, politics can and must be studied the same
233 Warren J. Samuels , “Chicago Doctrine as Explanation and Justification,” in Ibid., 382-383
234 See for example Robert H. N elson, Econom ics as Religion, fro m Samuelson to Chicago an d B eyond
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 2001).
93
way as economics, and, above all, there is no metaphysical difference between the
economic and the political.235
But political science is certainly not the only discipline which has received
pressure from outside and within to adopt an economistic framework. There are indeed
other fronts in the advance of economism. As with political reality, we can discern in late
modernity a movement seeking to re-envision history and foreign cultures through the
lens of the market. If human rationality can be generalised across the different academic
disciplines and across the entire discursive field, why not across time and space?
Similarly to the distinction that we made between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism,
this economistic tendency in the field o f history is expressed more or less radically in its
approach, some historians are open to some form of ontological pluralism but stress the
primacy of one or many economic factors in institutional determination and change (in
the manner o f Marx or Rousseau) while others reinterpret the other historical periods or
the other cultures through the paradigm o f the free market and the homo oeconomicus.
Again, neo-liberals place the burden o f proof on those maintaining transitivity in human
rationality, in this case on those who pretend that the importance o f the economic realm
changed substantially over time and on those who claim that the market as we know it did
not always exist or is not ubiquitous.
In the field of history, the application o f microeconomic and neo-liberal models
has been spearheaded by a school self-baptised as the new economic history or
cliometrics. Deriving from the Chicago School, cliometrians understand their new science
235 James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus o f Consent, Logical Foundations o f
Constitutional D em ocracy (Indianapolis: Liberty Funds, 2004), 19-35.
94
as a “form of applied neo-classical economics.”236 Keen on formal mathematical models,
cliometricians approach earlier economies with the premise o f neo-liberal subjectivity.
The disciples are called to search for data compatible with the said model, not to acquaint
themselves with the culture or Zeitgeist under study. Typically, new economic history
“starts with a formal model o f some aspect o f economic behaviour, assemble data for use
in the model, and draw conclusion by joining the data and the model.”237 The birth of
cliometrics is commonly traced back to 1958 when Conrad and Meyer published a
controversial article on American slavery seeking to demonstrate the economic
profitability o f the institution and its effect on the economy o f American south238. In the
1960s and 1970s, the movement swept the profession, passing from the margin to the
centre to become in the 1980 the new orthodoxy o f the discipline239. What is troubling
with cliometrics is of course not that it seeks to understand economic history through the
aid of economic theory; the subject matter makes this relation natural and evident. What
is more problematic is that it ascribes to ancient and pre-capitalist economies the model of
the ‘rational economic m an’ and that o f the free market. In this respect, the so-called new
economic history lends its support to the positions called formalism and modernism in
economic history and economic anthropology. These economistic positions, it must be
specified, existed well before neo-liberalism. In the beginning of the 20th century, a
debate raged between the substantive conception of ancient economy, championed by
Polanyi, and the formalist conception lead by Rostovtzeff. Polanyi, opposing the function
and nature of classical and modem economies, defines the former as directed to the
236 Peter Temin (ed.), N ew Econom ic H istory (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973), 8.
237 Ibid.
238 A. H. Conrad and J. R. Meyer, “The Economics o f Slavery in the Antebellum South,” Journal o f
P olitica l Econom y 66 (1958): 95-130.
239 Robert Whaples, “A Quantitative History o f the Journal o f Economic History and the Cliometric
Revolution,” The Journal o f Econom ic H istory 51, N o. 2 (June 2001): 289-301.
95
provisioning o f society, an economy o f use where the economic motive was limited
through integration in social relationships.240 Defending a vision akin what was presented
in the first chapter of the present thesis, Polanyi sees ancient economy as essentially
embedded in the community. The formalist position, by contrast, considers that ancient
economy, while reflecting a more primitive development, is based on private markets and
functions on the same economic rationality as the one ruling modem markets. In both
cases, the formalists argue, the economy can be defined as the market-based allocation of
scarce resources. In the first instance the economy is a mean, in the former an end. As
Polanyi summarises, the two positions are based on two diametrically opposed views of
what is to be considered economic: on the one side a mentalist abstraction of economic
choice processes and mles based on the modem reality o f the self-regulating market, and
on the other hand a larger definition of the economic as an institutionalised process
through which one society acquires its “means o f material want satisfaction.”241 If we
listen to one o f the most famous representatives o f the formalist position, the very
existence o f social institutions revolves around economic calculations and choice
processes: “private benefits or costs are the gains or losses to an individual participant in
any economic transaction. [...] If the private costs exceed the private benefits, individuals
ordinarily will not be willing to undertake the activity even though it is socially
profitable.”242 Differing in degrees of liberality but not in kinds o f rationality, ancient
and modem economies are viewed by formalists and neo-liberal cliometricians as
substantively the same. It is a mistake, in their opinion, to oppose the logic and function
240 Karl Polanyi, Op. Cit., 57.

241 Karl Polanyi, “The Economy as Instituted Process,” in Karl Polanyi and others, Trade an d M arket in the
E arly Empires, Econom ies in H istory an d Theory (N ew York: The Free Press, 1957), 243.
242 D ouglas C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The R ise o f the Western World, A N ew Economic H istory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 2-3.
96
behind the trade o f Mycena or the Roman Empire from that o f Wall Street. The principle
behind market economy is seen as universal, both in terms o f time and culture:
Tales o f the adventure of homo economicus in unlikely places are beginning to

accumulate, in places like nineteeth-century India for example, or medieval Europe, or
declining Rome. But it would be premature to announce his conquest of those places.
Still, the frontier of cliometrics is the wide world beyond America, or indeed, beyond
Europe.243
A similar market-oriented conception o f the economy will also come to prevail in the
field o f economic anthropology. In the case o f anthropology, culture would be often
tossed aside by neo-liberals as a shallow reflection o f rational utility seeking (the school
o f developmentalism) when it was not rejected by orthodox Marxists in the name of
another popular form o f economism: the mechanical reading o f class interests.244 Like in
the case of the school o f public choice, new economic history and its anthropological
counterpart (also known as new institutional anthropology) are not always formally
affiliated with the University o f Chicago but their disciples readily acknowledge its
legacy and their intellectual debt.245
If we decided to emphasise neo-liberalism as the paramount example o f
radical economism, it should be noted that its historical competitor, Keynesian
Interventionism or Fordism, represents no genuine alternative. It is true that
Keyesianism does not reject the state as a positive instrument and is, in comparison
to neo-liberalism, less aggressive in its rejection o f political action and deliberation.
243 Donald N. M cCloskey, “The Achievem ents o f the Cliometric School,” The Journal o f Econom ic H istory
38, No. 1 (March 1978): 24-25.
244 See Clifford Geertz, “Culture and Social Change: The Indonesian Case,” Man, N ew Series 19, N o. 4
(December 1984): 511-532 and Joel S. Khan, “Towards an History o f the Critique o f Economism: The
Nineteeth-Century German Origins o f the Ethnographer’s Dilemm a,” Man, N ew Series, 25, N o. 2 (June
1990): 230-249.
245 For instance, while Fogel did not study at Chicago (even though he later occupied a research position
there), he has stated that George J. Stigler was his most influential teacher at Johns Hopkins University.
http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1993/fogel-autobio.html (accessed May 19th, 2006).
97
Beyond the appearance of opposition, however, the two competing schools represent
merely the two sides o f the same coin. On one side, Keneysians advocate a social
form o f economism which uses the state to manage the population from the macro
perspective of society. On the other side, neo-liberals reject the Social in favour of
the individual.
Notwithstanding this affinity, neo-liberalism might be said to be more
aggressive and utopian in its economism. By conceiving everything as markets,
entrepreneurs and consumers, neo-liberalism encourages a permanent and limitless
reconfiguration o f reality along economic lines. It elevates the market to the position
o f permanent economic tribunal in front o f which all reality must justify itself.246
Furthermore, neo-liberalism can be said to be more radical because it pretends to be
able to replace one o f politics’ traditional and most fundamental domains: order. The
outlook of Keynes’s theory might be economistic, yet its objectives and scope of
action remains mostly associated with the traditional economic sphere, the
management o f economic crisis, and the economic welfare o f the population,
amongst other things. With neo-liberalism, in contrast, one deals not with the
economy as a system of production, exchange, and consumption but with the
economic as self-ordered life.
To conclude this chapter, a word should be written on the zealousness
expressed by many neo-liberals, an overt optimism which can perhaps explain their
unmitigated use of language. Like other new intellectual movements, and especially
those of rationalistic outlook, the Chicago School and its various branches are filled
246 M ichel Foucault and others, Naissance de la biopolitique: cours au C ollege d e France (1978-1979)
(Paris: Gallimard -Seuil, 2004), 253.
98
with assurance and faith. We find in these writings not the morosity usually
associated with number crunchers and thick glasses economists but the spirit o f
adventure o f pioneers, as if neo-liberal scholars went on a mission filled with the
spirit o f duty, as if they were told: onward market soldiers, the world is to be
reorganised, all facts are to be revisited, a new Archimedean point has been found!
Order can be reinstalled!
99
IV
The preceding chapter provided a picture o f the radical and totalising character o f
neo-liberal economism. In the two following sections, we will advance further into our
analysis of the question o f radical economism by approaching the matter from two
specific angles: the sociological implications o f neo-liberalism with regards to questions
o f subjectivity and power, and the philosophical significance of the phenomenon o f
radical economism in terms o f the integrity o f the political sphere and the possibility of
political existence.
With Foucault as our main guide, we will try to decipher how neo-liberalism
brings about a new form of govemmentality, that is a theory and practices o f governance
based not on the state or civil society but on the governmental ideal o f ruling ‘at a
distance’.247 In this horizontal model o f rule, people are governed as empowered though
normalised selves, subjects o f choice and responsibility who are often represented
through the paradigmatic figures of the consumer and the entrepreneur. In order to make
clear the connection between this governmental model and neo-liberalism, we will first
highlight the form of subjectivity implied in the theory o f another child o f the Chicago
School of Economics, Gary S. Becker, and his conception o f human as human capital.
Consequently, we will explore with Foucault how this subject is mobilised to play an
active role in his/her own governance and how sovereignty and discipline serve as
parapets of self-governance, fulfilling the function of normalising technologies insuring
that freedom o f choice is handed down to a well tempered and ‘civilised’ subject. A
sociological analysis of radical economism is necessary because neo-liberalism does not
only reject the political, but also claims to represent an economic ordering o f society.
247 Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, Op. C i t 9.
100
Governmentality: government through proxy
Before advancing any further in our analysis, it might be useful to first
differentiate the Foucauldian analysis o f neo-liberalism as a form o f governmentality
from the usual critique o f neo-liberalism as a right-wing ideology advocating a minimalist
state, cuts in social programs and the free flow o f capital.248 O f course, neo-liberalism
consists partly in the promotion o f such policies, but our interest lies elsewhere.
Beyond the usual critique of neo-liberalism as policy and ideology, this radical
movement can also be assessed as a strategy and a set o f practices of rule, as a form of
what Foucault called gouvemementality (governementalitej. But what exactly is
governmentality, a term often used as academic currency but not always defined or
explained? Polysemic, the word govemementality can only be explained through a series
o f definitions. First, it is interesting to know that Foucault coined this neologism by
uniting the two words gouvernement and mentalite. This term thus relates to both a
mentality and a practice o f rule. Governmental programs are never completely theoretical
and are always presupposing, attached to, or demanding technologies o f rule that
implement their models. Rose makes this point elegantly when he says that governmental
thought always tries to “insert itself into the world by ‘realizing’ itself as a practice.”249 In
this sense, governmentality is inherently technological, neither completely abstract nor
completely realist. As all technological enterprises, it reveals itself as an attempt, partly
utopian to be sure, to co-penetrate thought and action. For Miller and Rose, this
248 Wendy Lamer, “Neo-liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality,” Studies in P olitical Econom y 63
(Automn 2000).
249 Nikolas Rose, “Governing "advanced" liberal democracies,” in Graham Burchell and others (eds.), The
Foucault Effect, Studies in Governm entality (Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press, 1991), 41.
101
technological dimension is expressed by an eternal optimism about the prospect of
administrating reality better, more efficiently, and through its belief that reality is
programmable.250 Reality is represented as being open to and in need o f intervention, and
the technologies that are implemented fulfil that very scheme. For instance, rational
choice grids are instrumentalised in schools, hospitals, and other environments as
‘performance indicators’ which in time bring these institutions closer to the enterprise
form and market logic. On another level, technological governmentality interweaves
thought and intervention ruling through a multiplicity of seemingly mundane techniques
such as: methods o f calculations, examination or training, the appearance o f self-help
guides and self-completed tests, campaigns for self-esteem, repeated calls for a more
251
responsible and personal management o f risk, vigilante actions at borders and so forth.
Part o f neo-liberalism’s force is that it acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy:
If political rationalities render reality in the domain o f thought, these

‘technologies of government’ seek to translate thought into the domain o f reality,
and to establish ‘in the world o f person and things’ spaces and devices for acting
252
upon those entities of which they dream or scheme.
Seeking to rationalise means and ends, neo-liberal technologies o f government bring ever
closer the limit between their model and the reality they work upon.
‘To govern’ also implies that the subject o f rule is not completely dominated, that
he or she possesses some space o f freedom o f choice, a margin o f liberty. In this sense,
Foucault distinguishes government from domination when he further defines government
250 Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, Op. Cit.: 4.

251 Barbara Cruikshank, “Revolutions within: self-goverment and self-esteem ,” in Barry, Andrew and others
(eds.), Op. Cit., 231-252 and Pat O ’M alley, “Risk and responsability,” in Graham Burchell and others
(eds.), Op. Cit., 189-208.
102
as the “conduct o f conducts.”253 Foucault uses the word gouvernement in its old French
definition to bypass the modem obsession with the state and the conception o f power as
inherently negative and restraining: “cette notion [gouvernement] etant entendue au sens
large de techniques et procedures destinees a diriger la conduite des homme.
Gouvernement des enfants, gouvernement des ames ou des consciences, gouvernement
d ’une maison, d ’un Etat ou de soi-meme.”254 There is a negative dimension to governing

9 SS
because it structures the field of action of other subjects. But in a Hegelian fashion, this
negation shapes reality and gives form and identity to the subject; power creates more
than it limits.
One must not look for the presence of governmental power primarily in the courts,
the legislatures, or in the antechambers of the state, but in the proxy zone where, without
repression or interdiction, we are encouraged to reason and act in certain ways.
Government steers a person in one direction and structures that person’s field of action by
mobilising instead o f negating freedom o f choice. It represents this “point o f contact
where techniques o f domination or power and technique o f the self interacts.”256 To
govern is thus antithetical to top-down forms o f sovereignty or uni-directional models of
rule and entails the constitution o f a subject, both active and governed. This explains why
part o f the phenomenon of neo-liberal governmentality cannot be explained solely
through the traditional vocabulary o f political philosophy. Analytics of governmentality
253 Michel Foucault, “Le sujet et le pouvoir,” in D its et ecrits, Vol. I V 1980-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994),
237.
254 “This notion being understood in the w ide sense o f techniques and process seeking to direct the conduct
o f men. Government o f children, government o f souls or consciousnesses, government o f a house, a state or
o f one-self.” [my translation] Michel Foucault, “Du gouvernement des vivants,” M ichel Foucault, D its et
ecrits, Vol. I V 1980-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 125.
255 Maria Bonnafous-Boucher, Un Liberalism e sans Liberte, du terme «Liberalism e» dans la p en see de
M ichel Foucault (Paris: L ’Harmattan, 2001), 81.
256 Colin Gordon, “Governmental rationality: an introduction,” in Graham Burchell and others (eds.), Op.
Cit., 20.
103
reveal a different facet o f power from the understanding canonised by political science,
sociology and philosophy: a microphysics of power passing through a multiplicity of
channels and through a plethora o f technologies, a kind of power more horizontal than
vertical (rhizomatic to use Deleuze’s concept), a transversal power for which the
dichotomies private/public, political/economic, state/civil society lose their heuristic

257
power. In relation to our thesis, this conception o f government sheds light on liberalism
and neo-liberalism as mentalities and technologies o f government trying to reconcile the
necessity o f rule with the necessity o f a free market and a free subject for advanced
capitalist economy. Seen from the perspective o f governmentality, neo-liberalism is more
about power than about finances. Concerned with order, neo-liberalism is thus revealed as
“both a political discourse about the nature of rule and a set of practices that facilitate the
258
governing o f individuals.” This relatively novel approach to the topic explains why
neo-liberalism might means less government in the sense o f ‘less state’, but does not
necessarily means less governance.259
Central to a neo-liberal mode o f government is the constitution o f a subject
integrating economic rationality and behaviour. In other words, the neo-liberal subject
internalises a market-based framework from which to judge the world. In the last chapter,
much time was spent on describing how neo-liberalism analyses all questions from an
economistic perspective. But to say that an actor’s behaviour and motivations are
amenable, epistemologically, to economic analysis is also to imply that the subject in
question is, in one form or another, ontologically economic. It follows that this actor, be it
an individual, a social institution or the state, can not only be studied economically but
257 Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, Op. Cit.: 1-8.

258 Wendy Lamer, Op. Cit.: 6.
259 Ibid.: 12.
104
also be made to function in an economic fashion. In this vein, neo-liberal governmentality
is based on specific forms o f subjectivity and freedom it fosters and requires. More
precisely, it represents a form of power based on fostering, empowering and mobilising
this choosing and interested subject.
But first things first. Before it can act as a reform program, neo-liberal
governmentality projects a representation of the self and o f social reality as a whole; in
other words, it draws a topography and schematisation o f the world and how it ought to
be governed.260 The neo-liberal definition o f an ‘economy’ here breaks with the
Keynesian understanding which views the economy from the elevated and macro
perspective o f the Social. It also parts with the legacy o f classical liberalism which, as we
already explained, categorised ‘economic man’ as a natural motivation of human beings.
Within the classical framework, governing was economic insofar as it traced a limit to the
action of the state and criticised the megalomania o f raison d ’etat. Economic reality was
to be laissez-faire, to be preserved, but it could not represent a universal and operational
principle of government since its natural character also made fortuitous any plan to foster,
reproduce or even mimic its logic. Neo-liberalism’s new conception o f the economy, its
generalisation of the economy and its constructivism, can be understood as a desire to
govern more fully and more rationally; as Rose says paraphrasing Nietzsche, it emerges
from a “will to govern”. Before being governed as consumers, entrepreneurs and
partners, individuals must first be judged and assessed from an individual rather than
social level, and they must be conceptualised as sharing the same market-based
rationality. Under neo-liberalism, reality is represented as economic and the economy is

261 Ibid.: 4.
105
in turn understood as an unlimited network o f markets and consumers in perpetual
reconfiguration and construction.262
Individualising control
By disseminating market values to all institutions and individuals, neo-liberalism
ultimately seeks to integrate the market to the self as the standard from which to evaluate
all choices and behaviours. The world is to be seen as a multiplicity o f markets, from the
market of love and beliefs to the market o f criminality and softwood lumber. People are
told that they live in an active society, where they must finally come to maturity, reject
the idea of society, embrace the iron law o f supply and demands and accept their
responsibilities as market players and partners. The key words o f neo-liberal
governmentality are choice, freedom, and responsibility. While its rationality, its logic,
remains the same, neo-liberal government’s forms o f intervention and discourse are
multiple and adaptative: “Neo-liberal strategies o f rule, found in diverse realms including
workplaces, educational institutions and health and welfare agencies, encourage people to
see themselves as individualised and active subjects responsible for enhancing their own
welfare.” The expansion o f the economic is thus not only apparent across spheres of
activity, academic disciplines, or in our outlook towards history, but also in the
conception we hold of individuality and society, and the encouragement of a specific
form of individual subjectivity and behaviour grounded in economic rationality. With
regards to politics, neo-liberal subjects are encouraged to behave as consumer-citizens,
engaging in political debates and decisions within an economistic mindset, voting as they
262 On the discursive character o f governmentality see Ibid. : 4-6.

263 Wendy Lamer, Op. Cit.: 13.
106
shop and shopping as if it was political.264 Likewise, in the model of politics construed by
Chicago theorist o f human capital Gary S. Becker’s, interest and pressures groups are
seen as the important players of the political game. According to Becker, these interested
participants, whether individual or collective, enter the public arena with a certain
political capital they seek to maximise. They compete for influence and public benefit the
same way an economic agent compete for capital and profit. Becker and other
economistic theorists o f politics regard the public sector like as a black box. To them
states are public markets whose primary function is to factor-in the influence of the
different participants and maximise political utility accordingly, within the constraint of
the scarcity o f political resources (feasible taxes, realistic subsidies, etc.).265
Unsurprisingly, the main concern o f these theorists is not substantive but methodological.
Their minds are primary occupied with finding how to adjust and translate the
mathematical functions and the technical terms used.
Since individuals’ choices are seen as optimal when calculating costs and benefits,
neo-liberal government values above all other norms a form of agency akin to private
consumption. In the end, neo-liberalism advances the idea that utility-maximising
individuals (from this perspective, everybody) would make more enlightened and fruitful
choices in an environment reproducing the structure o f the capitalist free-market. The
neo-classical conception o f the mind as a benefit maximisation machine is also
constitutive of neo-liberalism foundations:
The second [presupposition o f neo-classical theory] is a conception of the mind,

the mind o f the autonomous individual who, in his numbers, postulates the
264 It is interesting to note that even the resistance to neo-liberalism is often formulated in the language o f
consumerism. For example, the last decade has seen the popularisation o f ethical and fair-trade
consumerism.
265 Gary S. Becker, Theory o f P olitica l B ehavior (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1981), 31-32.
107
economy o f private choice and free exchange. Mind is understood as

approximating the perfect instrument o f pleasure and pain, work dissatisfaction
and consumption satisfaction, utility optimising, preferences balancing, cost
minimising calculus with cost differentials, opportunity sets, wants, utilities or
preference relationships taken as a given.266
Albert O. Hirschman, who critiqued economic theory as omitting relevant non-economic
forms of behaviours like collective political action, offers this concise yet comprehensive
definition of the neo-liberal self:
Economics as a science o f human behaviour has been grounded in a remarkably

parsimonious postulate: that o f the self-interested, isolated individual who
chooses freely and rationally among alternative courses o f actions after
computing their prospective costs and benefits.267
Revolving around this axis of choice, interest and economic rationality, the neo
liberal subject is mobilised and encouraged to work and maximise himself or herself as a
compound of human capital. Foucault uses the term ‘subject’ purposefully, to stress the
active stance o f late modern governmentality where individuals are both subjected to
power and made subject, both normalised and individualised. Increasingly
responsibilised, neo-liberal subjects are empowered to make choices in their health,
education, employability, and so forth. Neo-liberal governmentality criticises the
inflexibility and the absence of individual motivation characteristic o f welfare society.
Instead of governing population as a homogeneous mass, neo-liberalism attempts to
govern through the choices of individuals.
To say that the neo-liberal subject is economic in nature is of course too general a
qualification. To be more precise, one could say that if the archetypes o f classical
liberalism, welfare interventionism, and socialism are the worker and in a more limited
266 Robert A. Solo, “N eoclassical Economics in Perspective,” in Warren J. Samuels (ed.), Op. Cit., 54
267 Albert O. Hischman, “Against Parsimony, Three Easy Ways o f Complicating Some Categories o f
Econom ic D iscourse” cited in David Kiron, “Economic and the Good, I: Individuals,” in Frank Ackerman
and others, (eds.), Human Well-Being an d Economic G oals (Washington: Island Press, 1997), 165
108
importance the capitalist (a producer and a possessor of surplus value), the paradigmatic
neo-liberal identities are the consumer and the entrepreneur.
In relationships with others, the neo-liberal subject appears as a consumer,
evaluating its choices in a maximising economistic grid. In neo-liberal modernity,
consumer rationality is projected as underlying all other dimensions and complexes o f the
neo-liberal self, which are themselves projected as ‘life-styles’, ‘identities’ and ‘skills’
that can be chosen, consumed and agenced in a perfectible manner. Unlike classical
liberalism, neo-liberalism is not content with barely securing from the state a space of
liberty. It brings the idea of spontaneous order to another level by seeking not only to
reconcile government with freedom but to govern by creating, working through or
utilising freedom.268 Because o f the central place given to markets and rational (read
economic) choice, the boundary between a consumer decision and the decision leading to
a vote, a civil union, a contract, or any other decision becomes blurry. Again, the
difference between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism comes to the fore: while early
liberalism sought to govern the social, the neo-liberal project seeks to govern its subjects
more directly, by mobilising them as ‘responsibilised’ and empowered agents.269 The
market stops being a material institution and is personally integrated, becoming a sort of
filter of intelligibility, a nexus linking the working, desiring and willing self to the
external world. In sum, the consumer becomes more than an identity, this role is assumed
as the way a sensible and well constituted person engages reality and responsibilities.
Correspondingly, the economistic imperialism typical o f radical economism is not
268 M itchell Dean, “Liberal government and authoritarianism,” Econom y an d Society 37, No. 1 (February
2002): 38.
269 Barbara Cruikshank, “Revolutions within: self-government and self-esteem ,” in Barry, Andrew and
others (eds.), Op. Cit., 234 and Nikolas Rose, “Governing "advanced" liberal democracies,” in Ibid., 57-58.
109
restricted to the state and the social sciences but extends to the individual who must apply
an economistic cost/benefit framework to all his or her activities and behave as if life
itself was comprised o f a multiplicity o f markets.270
Towards his or her own person, the neo-liberal subject often adopts the stance of
an entrepreneur, maximising not only the profit that can gain from his or her engagements
with other people and institutions, but also his or her own potentialities. Neo-liberal
governmentality responsabilises the subject to be engaged in his/her own governance by
harnessing a concern for his/her own perfectibility and maximisation to an increased
freedom of choice. Confronted with the image o f an ever changing world and a very
competitive environment, the individual must constantly work on him or her self to
succeed or simply catch up to the demands of the marketplace. Like social reality in
general, the self is thus seen as a malleable and improvable capital, a capital which can be
supplemented through different strategic choices and techniques like continuing
education, the improvement of professional skills, cosmetic surgery, individual
management of one’s risks, care for one’s health and psychological self-help. In sum,
neo-liberal governmentality applies, to the individual, paradigms o f strategic decision
making hitherto reserved to macro-level realities such as the firm. The individual is thus
an entrepreneur of one’s self and an individual-enterprise. The following passage might
be long, but it certainly captures the specificity o f neo-liberal governmentality as an
individualising and radically economistic regimen o f rule:
Whereas classical liberalism articulated a distinction, and at times even a

tension, among the criteria for individual moral, associational, and economic
actions (hence the striking differences in tone, subject matter and even
prescription between Adam Smith’s Wealth o f Nations and his Theories o f
270 Graham Burchell, “Liberal government and techniques o f the self,” in Ibid., 27-29.
110
Moral Sentiments), neo-liberalism normatively constructs and interpellates

individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every spheres o f life. It figures
individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured
by their capacity for “self-care” - the ability to provide for their own needs and
service their own ambition; it relieves the discrepancy between economic and
moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a matter o f rational
deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences. 2 7 1
This reflexivity characteristic of neo-liberal rule, this perpetual working on one’s self, is
not directed like the askesis of previous ages towards ascetic self-control, virtue,
happiness and tranquillity, but at the creation o f a human capital capable of being
competitive in the marketplace o f life. This is coherent with the late modem
understanding o f nature and humanity: nothing is permanent, time is historical, and
272
humans are creators o f values and o f themselves.
In comparison, Smith’s conception o f the spontaneous order points to an ever-
changing reality, but a natural reality nonetheless. In his account o f the invisible hand of
human passions, whether acquisitive or not, Smith portrays nature like Machiavelli, albeit
in a more positive light. Nature is similarly described as a pre-rational flux which reveals
its power when free from human action; but contrary to Machiavelli, it is not a chaotic,
vengeful, or destructive fortuna, but a pre-social harmony rendering possible social virtue
even in the less civic oriented individuals and making possible sociability even in the self-
centred life of the city. The spontaneous order o f the market and its reflection in the self-
governing homo economicus on the opposite are addressed by neo-liberals as a
constructed reality. In its later version, homo economicus is a manipulable subject who is
271 W endy Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End o f Liberal Democracy,” Theory an d Events 7, No. 1 (2003):
4.
272 George Grant, Time as H istory (Toronto: University o f Toronto Press, 1995).
Ill
fostered by market arrangements and who, in turn, reacts to its environment. As Colin
Gordon reflects, economic government here “joins hands with behaviouralism.”274
Consider in this light Becker’s view o f human capital and the neo-liberal
understanding o f work. With the Chicago School occurs in economic theory a radical
shift in the perspective from which the phenomenon o f work is addressed. The classical
theory o f work understood the worker as a partner in the double sided process of
production and consumption and regarded work as only one part o f a complex process o f
capital accumulation, investment, production, etc. This understanding of work is judged
lacking by neo-liberal theorists like Becker since it relies on a macro-level and socially-
rooted conception o f the economy they explicitly reject. Remember that the Chicago
School enlarged the concept of the economy by conceptualising it as a form of
maximising rationality and decision process in a world of scarcity instead o f the process
of production and exchange of goods and services. As neo-liberal theorists internalise the
economic in general as a form of rationality, they also internalise work and begin to study
this activity from the perspective o f the worker. Neo-liberals reject the birds-eye-view
perspective which understands work as the worker selling his or her labour power or as
participating in the process of production. For American neo-liberals, this is an
abstraction which fails to grasp the reality of the worker. From the standpoint o f the
worker, neo-liberals argue, a salary is not the added-value or the price of one’s labour
power, but simply revenue one can gain.275 The capital from which this salary is a
revenue is composed o f inborn and acquired competencies and assets, it is a machine
273 M ichel Foucault, N aissance de la biopolitique, Cours au C ollege de France. 1978-1979 (Paris:
Gallimard Seuil, 2004), 274.
274 Colin Gordon, “Governmental rationality: an introduction,” in Graham Burchell and others (eds.), Op.
Cit., 43.
275 M ichel Foucault, Op. Cit., 230.
112
creating a flux of salary.276 As Foucault clarifies, the neo-liberal model o f the homo
oeconomicus differs from its classical counterpart in that it is no longer a partner in
economic exchanges but an entrepreneur of one self: “substituer a chaque instant, a
l’homo oeconomicus partenaire de l’echange, un homo oeconomicus entrepreneur de lui-
meme, etant a lui-meme son propre capital, etant pour lui-meme son propre producteur la
source de [ses] revenus.”277 In a similar manner, the consumer is not seen as another
social identity but as another facet o f the same ‘machine’.278 The consumer, for human
capital theorists like Gary S. Becker, is not to be opposed to the worker since the
consumer is also an entrepreneur o f one-self, producing, out o f the same rationality and
the same human capital, a satisfaction.279 Moreover, as with all machines, this compound
of human capital can be more or less efficient; most often, it follows a curve of
experience and obsolescence. Foucault illustrates this individuation o f work as the
functioning o f ‘competence-machine’ with his usual analytic detachment:
[...] il faut considerer que la machine constitute par la competence du travailleur,

la machine constitute par, si vous voulez, compttence et travailleur
individuellement lits ensemble, va tout au cour d ’une ptriode de temps etre
rtm u n trt par une strie de salaires qui vont, pour prendre le cas le plus simple,
commencer par etre des salaires relativement bas au moment ou la machine
commence a etre utiliste, puis vont augmenter, puis vont baisser avec
1’obsolescence de la machine elle-meme ou le vielliessement de l’individu en
tant qu’il est une machine. 280
276 Ibid., 230.

277 To substitute at every instant to the homo oeconom icus partner in exchange, the homo oeconom icus
entrepreneur o f him-self, being to him self his own capital, being to him self his own producer, being to
him self the source o f his revenues. [My Translation] in Ibid., 232.
278 As a machine producing revenues and satisfaction, human capital is inseparable from the individual
processing it, and one can therefore not talk o f the alienation o f one’s labour. See Ibid., 230.
279 Ibid., 232.
280 We must consider that the machine constituted by the competence o f the worker, the machine constituted
by, if you wish, competence and worker individually linked together, w ill throughout a period o f time be
rewarded by a series o f salaries which w ill, to take the most simple case, begin by being relatively low
when the machine begins to be used, which w ill then rise, then will fall with the obsolescence o f the
machine itself or the aging o f the individual as he is him self machine,” [My Translation] in Ibid., 229.
113
Neo-liberal governmentality thus internalises and individualises the economic and
through this process brings a new reflexivity to the government o f conducts. Where
populations were once administered, managed and governed, through macro programs or
policies, the individual is now delegated responsibilities and faces directly the dire
consequences o f individual inadequacies. In this neo-liberal environment, as Lemke
explains from Foucault’s notes, auto-containment o f economic freedom is done at three
major levels.281 In the first instance, neo-liberal rationality makes uniform all social
phenomena by generalising all realities as economic.282 Secondly, the market-based

283
rationality o f costs and benefits calculation serves as a norm to judge all behaviours.
In this logic, the agency behind the individual’s behaviour is inoculated by reducing
choice and reason in a uni-dimensional fashion. Finally, the generalisation of economic
rationality opens a new mode of containment which we could call a form of ‘environment
alteration control’. If actors are basing their choices on the sole basis o f a unique ratio (in
our case the cost/benefit calculus), one needs only to alter one of these two variables to
change the subject’s decision or policy. 284 As family policies or taxes on tobacco
products reflect, ‘free’ consumers need only the right incentives to make the consumption
choices that public good demands. In this sense, market-based rationality does not
unleash unbounded choices, freedom, and subjectivity. Much to the contrary, neo-liberal
governmentality’s principle is precisely the mobilisation o f individual choices towards
self-rule and the projection of an individual subject “whose freedom is a condition of
281 Thomas Lemke, “The Birth o f Bio-Politics - M ichel Foucault’s Lecture at the C ollege de France on
Neo-Liberal Governmentality,” Econom y an d Society 30, No. 2 (2001): 198-201.
282 Ibid.
283
'lb id .\ 198.
284 Ibid.-. 201.
114
subjection.”285
As we repeated on several occasions, neo-liberal governmentality shows
rationalistic and totalising tendencies. It seeks a more thorough autonomisation o f social
reality and a rationalisation o f the means and ends o f government (privileging the use of
freedom as a mean to the achievement o f a government o f freedom instead o f discipline,
law, sovereignty, etc.). However, the neo-liberal governmental utopia o f a self-governed
subject can only be realised in principle, never fully actualised. In reality, the self is never
one; we never arrive at a final stage o f liberty or administration where one can speaks o f a
fully realised autonomy or fully managed uni-dimensional subjectivity. What the neo
liberal subject is then is a particular model o f the governed self (in this case self-
governed) which is summoned, constructed, and then taken for granted.
To state that this subjectivity of self-interest, maximisation, and choice is a model of
government implies that other forms o f subjectivity which do not correspond or even
comply with this model can participate in its coming to being. In our case, it signifies that
older modes o f subjectivity such as the figure of the civic minded gentleman, the
disciplined ego, the social citizen and more ancient modes o f rule such as sovereignty,
discipline, and pastoral d ir ig is m e do not disappear under neo-liberalism. On the contrary,
neo-liberal subjectivity and government are made possible by the support of these other
social formations that stand as sedimentary foundations o f a well-tempered self. Illiberal
technologies o f discipline and symbols o f sovereignty are incorporated into liberal
government. In one o f his most influential lectures, Foucault explains that the rise of
governmental power should not be interpreted as a rejection o f discipline or sovereignty.
Instead of providing yet another version o f the three ages historiography, dividing social
285 Mitchell Dean, “Sociology after Society,” in David Owen (ed.), Op. Cit., 216.
115
history into the succession o f the stages o f ‘sovereignty-discipline-govemment’, Foucault
presents these three categories as co-existent and self-supporting. Foucault gives the
imagery of a triangle explaining that one can understand a mode of power like neo
liberalism as being primarily based on government but still drawing support and stability
from the two other poles:
Accordingly, we need to see things not in terms o f the replacement of a society

of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a
disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle,
sovereignty-discipline-govemment, which has as its primary target population
and as its essential mechanism the apparatus o f security.286
In sum, Foucault cautions his students not to believe that the prominence o f governmental
rule means the complete disappearance o f older structures o f power (discipline and
sovereignty). 287 While neo-liberal government encourages our selves to conduct our lives
as consumers and entrepreneurs in all contexts and situations, this represents an
impossible governmental project because choice is too boundless and unstable to be the
sole principle o f political subjectivity. As Duverger posits, rule is Janus-faced, sharing
both the power o f integration and of division. While the neo-liberal project seeks to
solve this tension by placing freedom as the vector o f government, it remains dependant
on discipline and sovereignty. In the case o f sovereignty, the volatility o f the homo
oeconomicus is tempered by the injection o f public forms o f subjectivity into the
character of the consumer. If neo-liberalism’s radical ideal conceives o f the homo
oeconomicus as the prime political-economic identity, its real-world application demands
the perpetuation o f citizenship. As Valverde argued about political freedom, the neo
liberal self-maximising individual is being granted freedom mostly because he or she
286 M ichel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell and others (eds.), Op. Cit., 101.
287 Ibid.
288 Maurice Duverger, Introduction a la politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 22.
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“can be trusted to make the right sort o f decision” 289 and because he or she has
internalised limits to the field o f economic action. Sovereignty is thus re-framed and
internalised to support the exercise of freedom in a ‘constructive spirit’. Neo-liberalism
places the accent on choice, freedom and interest, but there is always the proviso of
responsibility. To be responsible is to be normalised, and to possess a will and self-
discipline strong enough to avoid radical asocial behaviours.
Discipline also remains an active principle o f rule. Mechanisms and devices operating
according to a disciplinary logic, from the school to the prison, produce in fact the
conditions, the form of self-mastery, self-regulation and self-care, necessary to govern a
population now composed of free and ‘civilised’ consumer-citizens.290 Paradoxical as it
may seem, liberalism and neo-liberalism are, according to Foucault, made possible by a
closer and more thorough disciplining of bodies and behaviours.291 In this logic,
punishments continue to be exercised under neo-liberalism. The rationality behind
punishment, however, is displaced. In criminal sentencing, neo-liberal forms of
punishment no longer mark with a red iron the exclusion o f the abnormals o f society, but
distribute the ‘justly deserved’ retribution to those who do not use responsibly their
freedom.292 Crime itself is reframed in an economistic paradigm as an enterprise like any
other and a condition of Pareto optimality is sought between the demands o f crime and
the supply of punishment.293
289 Mariana Valverde, “Despotism and ethical governance,” Economy an d Society 25, No. 3 (1996): 364.
290 Nikolas Rose, “Governing "advanced" liberal dem ocracies,” in Barry, Andrew and others (eds.), Op.
Cit., 44.
291 Maria Bonnafous-Boucher, Lin Liberalism e sans Liberte, du terme «Liberalism e» dans la p e n se e de
M ichel Foucault (Paris: L ’Harmattan, 2001), 28.
292 Pat O ’Malley, “Risk and responsability,” in Barry, Andrew and others (eds.), Op. Cit., 198.
293 Gary S. Becker, The Econom ic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: The University o f Chicago
Press, 1976), 39-55.
117
This can partly explain the supporting role played by discourses o f nationalism,
patriotism and citizenship in neo-liberal governmentality. We have indeed to account for
the fact that economistic movements like neo-liberalism rarely reject entirely the
vocabulary and institutions associated with sovereignty and political existence. This
question would certainly warrant a thesis on its own and we cannot pretend to solve it in
this one. With this limitation in mind, we can still advance the idea that discourses and
practices of citizenship give content and direction to the neo-liberal appeal to
responsibility. As Dean explains, liberalism, in all its forms, is troubled by the necessity
of reconciling the subject o f choice and agency it promotes and the subject o f right and
sovereignty enshrined in constitutions and the institution o f political citizenship.294 In this
regard, the problem at the heart o f liberal and neo-liberal government is how to integrate
and stabilise the “agencies it depends upon.”295 In most circumstances, the neo-liberal
subject is called upon to decide in an economistic mindset without any regard to the
country or nation he or she lives in. Brands, life-styles, costs, benefits, and such
universalistic factors are the privileged parameters o f decision making. Once in a while
however, this person is reminded that he or she also belongs to communities o f value and
attachment, some of those political in name. The consumer-like subjectivity is thus
grounded in space, collective identity and community. The self is to behave as a
calculating and maximising consumer, but as a ‘good’ and well-tempered consumer
nonetheless. Citizenship in its current form should therefore not be confused with genuine
political existence. Effectively, neo-liberal discourses and technologies of citizenship are
not associated with an opening o f the public sphere, a renewed interest in republican
294 Mitchell Dean, “Sociology after Society,” in David Owen (ed.), Op. Cit., 217
295 Ibid., 210.
118
citizen activity or demands for positive liberty. Rather, citizenship here responsibilises
and tempers the neo-liberal subject and serves as the parapet o f neo-liberal choice. In her
famous research on self-esteem, Barbara Cruikshank precisely notes that technologies o f
citizenship aim at “persuading citizens to tie their self-interest and their fate to society
voluntarily” in order to bring about stability.296 As we are constantly enticed to act as
consumers and entrepreneurs-of-ourselves, we are constantly reminded of our duty
towards an imagined ‘public’ and o f our responsibility towards an idealised political
collectivity. Through recurring elections, civic commemorations, political discourses and
many other ways, the sense of civic belonging is maintained alive and we are prompted to
re-aggregate periodically. Neo-liberal citizenship internalises boundaries of choices and
identities to “produce a sense of oneness among increasingly heterogeneous populations”

297
and reconcile the loyalties to “market economics and parliamentary democracy.” It is
as if Rousseau’s ‘General W ill’ and the ‘W e’ o f the American Constitution remain alive
and act as useful skeletons maintaining ourselves ruly. In this sense, this ideal of
citizenship, based on technologies o f empowerment and participation, effectively tempers
the anti-social drives of individualism and consumerism. To borrow the language of
Giddens, citizenship partly alleviates the disembedding effect of neo-liberal
governmentality by keeping alive this civic model o f ontological security.298
Classical liberalism also sought to reconcile rule and freedom. The originality
o f neo-liberalism is that it tries to govern primarily, and not only incidentally,
through choice, individuality and subjectivity. The function o f these principles
296 Barbara Cruikshank, “Revolutions within: self-goverm ent and self-esteem ,” in Barry, Andrew and others
(eds.), Op. Cit., 243.
297 Toby Miller, The W ell-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, an d the Postm odern Subject (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
298 Anthony Giddens, “The Contours o f High Modernity,” in Anthony Giddens, M odernity an d Self-
Identity: S elf an d Society in the Late M odern A ge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
119
changes fundamentally, from negative limitations to sovereignty to the core of
governmental activity. Neo-liberalism develops, in other words, a positive version of
the Voluntary Submission La Boetie lamented about centuries earlier.
120
In different religions o f Antiquity, the stones (terminus) dividing private domains
were believed to embody spirits.299 To move these stones without proper ritual was
considered a serious sacrilege. Today however, in this modem age where “all that is solid
melts into air,” 300 we can wonder if such boundaries still make sense and on what ground
radical economism can be criticised. But if the distinctions between these categories of
existence must be understood as at least partly constructed and if they can no longer be
regarded as sacred, limits, frontiers and boundaries remain the necessary condition for
meaning to emerge. The question is not whether the political and the economic exist as
metaphysical entities. Existentially we do not only inhabit undifferentiated stuff but a
world of people and things, and our lives can make sense only by reflecting limits,
perspectives, a way of Being-in-the-world, an horizon. By reflecting on the writing of
Arendt and other theorists who have been preoccupied by the question o f the political, we
want to make explicit the change o f horizon that occurred with radical economism.
Arguably, radical economism represents a retreat of the political as a mode of existence
and an obscuring of its very possibility. This reflection thus seeks to shed some light on
what radical economism eclipses, in other words, what is the specificity, autonomy and
inextricable reality of the political that is rejected when the market takes over as the
primary mode of interaction. A philosophical interpretation of radical economism is
especially important since this phenomenon claims for the economic a position similar to
that traditionally attributed to the political and wishes to replace politics by economics in
the role of architectonic science, the organising principle o f the collectivity. No longer
299 Fustel de Coulanges, Op. Cit., 70-73.

300 Karl Marx, The Communist M anifesto (N ew York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 58.
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seen as a mean to another end, radical economism purports that the economic is the
genuine domain o f freedom, the nexus between individuality and collectivity, the matrix
which should organise social life and provide order. To conclude this chapter we will ask
ourselves how it is possible that everything, in this radically apolitical world, seems to be
open to critique and to politicisation. Returning to the distinction we made in the first
chapter between zoe and bios, we will suggest that neo-liberal govemmentality is a form
o f bio-politics through which everything is politicised as manageable, which amounts to
saying that the political is vitiated of its specificity and that nothing, in fact, is specifically
political any more.
Turning to Arendt for guidance is particularly appropriate considering the
centrality the question o f the political occupies in her writings. Arendt constantly
criticised the western philosophical tradition for being incapable o f grasping the
significance o f the political as anything other than a realm subordinated to metaphysical
thought. Educated as a philosopher, she often remarked that she preferred being called a
political theorist since she wrote on ‘M en’ rather than ‘M an’. Perhaps she was marked by
the fact that her mentor, Heidegger, otherwise a philosophical genius, was accomplice to
the Nazi terror and, many say, a ‘moral idiot’.
Arendt: a dialog with Aristotle and Heidegger.
Hannah Arendt’s theory of public space and action is best understood as the
projection of the Heideggerian idea o f authenticity into a public space which is contrasted
with the everyday realm of the Social. From this angle o f analysis, it can be argued that
Arendt develops an original political theory through a philosophical engagement with the
concepts o f Heidegger and Aristotle. Arendt’s emphasis and radicalisation of the
Aristotelian categories separating politics from economy, praxis from poesis, gives her
122
the opportunity to present the public sphere as the source o f human meaning and the
actual realm of authenticity. Arendt’s theory makes central Aristotle’s categories, thus
lifting-up the public sphere as the primordial space of appearance and meaning, while
replacing the Aristotelian teleological approach to political praxis by the Heideggerian
concepts of existential authenticity and ontological disclosure o f Being.301
The concept of the public sphere, so central to Arendt’s thought, emerges from an
elaboration on Aristotle’s Politics’’ differentiation between the political and the economic,
the public and the private, the good life and the mere life. Radicalising the divisions
elaborated by the Stagyrite Philosopher, Arendt opposes politics with labour and work by
presenting the former realm as more existentially revealing.
Beyond their affinity, Aristotle’s account o f the political is not fully satisfying for
the author o f The Human Condition. For one thing, Aristotle’s hierarchy of human
activities places political action as a lower endeavour than the contemplative life. While
politics is seen as the architectonic science and an activity linked to human freedom and
excellence,302 theoretical study, and not action, is considered by Aristotle to be the
supreme and most virtuous human enterprise.303 The depreciation of the vita activa in
favour for the vita contemplativa is a common trend of western philosophy that Arendt
resists. In her perspective, the political must be valued in itself, not as stepping stone
towards the quasi-divine qualities of the theorem. Because Aristotle’s philosophy
presents contemplation - a quiet communion with the truth o f Being - as the telos of
human life, it already upholds a depreciated view of all ‘unquiet activity’, a position
301 For Arendt, A ristotle’s teleology still places praxis into a means-end logic which risked conflating
politics with instrumental reason, see Dana Richard Villa, Arendt an d H eidegger: The F ate o f the P o litica l
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
302 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, Second Edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 1-2.
303 Ibid., 163.
123
which will only grow with Christianity and Modernity.304 Without any doubt, Aristotle
counts as one o f the most political o f all philosophers, yet even he contrasts negatively
human activity with the beauty and permanence o f the cosmos.305 The dignity and worth
o f the vita activa has been consistently lowered from the trial o f Socrates to modem
philosophy, all philosophers wanting to partake in the transcendent and perfect quality o f
the Beyond. Indeed, the lovers o f wisdom have tended to prefer the eternity o f ideas to the
immortality of the heroic deed.306 Even thinkers o f temporality and critics o f the tradition
like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Arendt argues, leave the supremacy o f the theoretical
untouched: “It lies at the very nature of the famous “turning upside down” o f philosophic
systems of currently accepted values, that is, in the nature o f the operation itself, that the
conceptual framework is left more or less intact.” 307
The philosophers’ rejection of political opinion (doxaj in favour of metaphysical
knowledge (episteme) is also reflected in all forms o f rationalistic organising o f society
along the line of a unique and atemporal source o f order and meaning, be it God, history
or the market. The political is thus always threatened, being (rightly) seen as messy,
imperfect and all too human. With our longing for perfection, the temptation is always
present to escape the political and to replace the role of the political actor by a more stable
and unitary subject like the idea o f man created in God’s image, the concept o f humanity
fulfilling its destiny, the proletariat, the homo oeconomicus...This temptation to pure
ontology has, from Plato’s onward, threatened to eat the political from the insides out. As
we will explore further in the paragraphs that follow, the political is a highly tragic
304 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1998), 15.
305 Ibid., 14.
31)6 Ibid., 19-20.
307 Ibid., 17.
124
phenomenon. It can be qualified as tragic because it represents an existential tension
seeking its own resolution, an activity directed at its own disappearance. Political space
and existence can be symbolised as a tension between difference and communality. The
space of freedom it opens and which constitutes the substance o f the political is made
possible precisely by the impossibility o f entirely reconciling difference. Albeit the
centrifugal force o f government and policing, dissonance and resistance endures in speech
and action. As long as politics is political, the direction it gives itself - the common good
- never subsumes completely the plurality o f opinions and forces. On the other side, this
objective, the common good, contains the dream o f an apolitical politics, a post-historical
management. This tendency of the political to fantasise about its own enclosure is
reflected in the phenomenon of bureaucracy, the ‘politics o f rights’ and the enthusiasm of
the masses with the replacement o f public debate with expertise and market-base
efficiency grids.
Consumer society and the return of the homo laborans
Still, according to Arendt, the greatest threat to the possibility of political
existence in our age is the rise o f the Social and the victory o f the homo laborans over
other modes o f existence. In the Human Condition, Arendt elaborates on this astonishing
observation: labour, which has always been depreciated as meaningless, has now become
the primary mode o f human activity, at the expense o f work and action. The victory o f the
homo laborans, which in neo-liberalism is personified as a consumer or an ‘entrepreneur
o f one-self, means nothing less than a flattening o f meaning, the celebration o f an
univocal self and the withering o f political freedom. Interpreted in light of Arendt’s
writings, the passage from classical liberalism to neo-liberalism corresponds to the
victory of the homo laborans over the homo faber. The archetype o f early modem
125
modernity, homo faber, is engaged in economic activity as the fabricator of discrete
objects. Typical of the age of the industrial and scientific revolutions, the homo faber
TftQ
stands towards his or her work in the split subject/object relation. His or her creative
power, ability and force created this thing which now stands incontestably as distinct and
even partly alien. One o f the German words used for ‘thing’ reflects that dialectical
relation. In the root o f the German noun Gegestand lies the verb gegen: to oppose. Homo
faber creates a world o f things full o f meaning from which people can recognise each
other as sharing a common reality and a common experience. The return in force o f homo
laborans implies a completely different relation to economic activity. In contrast to work,
the process o f labour might produce ‘stu ff but only incidentally, as a residue o f the
process. The focal point of labour is not its product but the process itself and the logic of
growth behind it. In this society o f jobholders and consumers Arendt assimilates to the
homo laborans, the focus is displaced from the ‘w hat’ to the ‘how ’. As we saw earlier,
the importance is placed on the maximising rationality and the market as an ideal matrix
of cost and benefits. In this environment where labour and consumption are part o f the
same cyclical logic, the old subject/object distinction collapses: there is no worker and
production, but life consuming life and capital labouring capital.
In this waste society where everything is ‘stu ff, individuality is an early casualty.
Engulfed in the Social, the modem labourer is asked to be one with the economic process,
the organisation, the firm, the market. Arendt provides an image o f the inauthentic self
resembling what her teacher Heidegger denounced as the reign o f das Man ,309 In
308 Ibid., 309.

309 D a s Man is difficult to translate in the English language. More easily understood in French, it means
something similar to ‘les gen s'. For example, the question “Kann Man sagt das?” would be translated by
“can som eone say that?” This ‘som eone’ is not an active ‘W e’ but a convention uncritically accepted.
126
Heidegger’s words, the inauthentic selves follows thoughtlessly the ‘neuter’ - the
average type or norm {das Man) - instead o f being guided by oneself, one’s leader or
one’s people: “we meet them at work, that is, primarily in their Being-in-the-world.
[.. .The Other] ‘standing around’ is an existential mode o f Being - an unconcerned,
uncircumspective tarrying alongside everything and nothing [.. ,].” 310 For both Heidegger
and Arendt, it would be inappropriate to speak o f freedom in the case o f das Man since its
condition is simply a tranquilised “letting go”. While early liberalism reduced freedom to
a negative phenomenon (freedom from), in the most rationalised and radical form of
economism it is defined as escaping the realm of human action, as a force passing behind
humans’ back (the neo-liberal credo: we are free, but there is no alternative...). Clearly,
the images used by Arendt to represent the modem homo laborans are better suited for
Fordist mass society than neo-liberal government. It is not that the advent of neo
liberalism refutes Arendt’s condemnation o f mass society, but it forces us to be more
attentive to the subtler ways normalisation is now fused with individuation. In
contemporary neo-liberalism, authentic individuality, the public performance o f ‘w ho’
one is authentically, remains obliterated. The calls to personalisation and choice are
indeed heard everywhere but the individuality it markets is a mere modulation on the
universal theme o f the market and an internalisation o f the economic self. Das Man now
uses many masks and brands but it still walks the line.
For this advocate o f a greater and more active public space, consumer society
represents the monopolization of all open spaces by questions o f necessity and pre
political concerns linked to the biological cycle o f the specie. By clearly separating
conceptually labour, work, and action, Arendt demonstrates that modem society is
310 Martin Heidegger, Op. Cit., 156.
127
marked by the victory of the homo laborans over all the other modes o f Being. What this
radical takeover signifies is the reduction o f human activities and endeavours to the
category of life processes. In radical economism, or what she calls consumer society,
what was specifically human, such as philosophy or politics, becomes meaningless:
What was not needed, not necessitated by life’s metabolism with nature, was
either superfluous or could be justified only in terms of a peculiarity of human as
distinguished from other animal life - so that Milton was considered to have
written his Paradise Lost for the same reasons and out of similar urges that
compel the silkworm to produce silk.311
This condition resembles what Foucault called bio-politics and what Kojeve prophesised
as the coming o f the re-animalised man, humans return to the cyclical pattern o f the bios,
which the polis was once able to overcome. In Foucault’s constructive view o f power,
modem government is bio-political insofar as its object is life itself. Naked of the artifices
o f sovereignty bio-politics manages life itself, whether the objective takes the form o f the
production o f a docile and productive individual body or the growth o f populations and
312
the specie. In the caustic sarcasm o f Kojeve, the finality of homo laborans and
consumer society is the coming to end o f history and the re-animalisation of ‘M an’ where
action as negation would disappear and where a fully satisfied homo sapiens sapiens
would construct buildings as birds making their nest, playing music as frogs or cicadas
and making love as wild beasts do.313
This return to ‘mere life’ is not a homecoming but an alienated way of Being. The
modem version o f the animal laborans loses itself into the interminable cycles o f labour
and consumption, incapable of escaping the hustling of modem life and of reaching back
311 Hannah Arendt, Op. Cit., 321.

312 Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow and M ichel Foucault, B eyond Structuralism an d Hermeneutics,
Second Edition (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1983), 134.
313 Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction a la lecture d e H egel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 436.
128
to what constituted authentic human existence and meaning.314 In the process of labour,
humans do not fabricate a world out of genuinely new things but simply navigate through
natural cycles o f desire, consumption, stuff, and mere life. In the words o f Kateb,
labouring masses and consumerist bourgeois, subsumed by natural processes, are seen by
Arendt’s elitism as human in name only. The homo laborans is incapable o f standing
apart from his environment and it is quite difficult to assert whether he labours to
•3 1 c
consume or consumes to labour. The term ‘natural’ should not mislead us, Arendt’s
critique of the homo laborans applies equally to radical economism and the ascendancy
o f the neo-liberal consumer-entrepreneur we tried to show in the preceding chapters:
“nature is in the ascendant as much in the daily life o f ‘jobholders’ in our economy of
waste, superfluity, and advance technology as it was in the ‘hidden’ life lived in pre
modem times.”316 Even though neo-liberalism rejects naturalism and considers markets
as human artefacts, it presents the same circular logic Arendt perceived in labour. At this
level of interpretation, whether one is busy on the land or as a neo-liberal consumer is a
detail.
Reading Arendt by placing the accent on her valuation of agonism, a reader can
interpret ‘labour’ as a certain sensibility, a Dasein opposed to the different sensibility
necessary for political existence. From this angle, the labourer is not only encountered as
a peasant or seen in the private sphere, but can also take the identity o f a CEO or come to
occupy governmental offices. Proposing a radicalised and anti-essentialist reading of
Arendt, Bonnie Honig contrasts in this spirit the univocal self of the homo laborans to the
314 Hannah Arendt, Op. Cit., 137.

3,5 George Kateb, Hannah Arendt, P olitics, Conscience, E vil (Totowa, N ew Jersey: Rowman & Allanheld,
1984), 4.
Ibid.
129
multiple acting self. Arendt, it is true, opposes the biological body that is one (the body
which cries ‘I desire!’ in a most unambiguous manner) and which is essentially identical
to all other bodies with the public personae o f the political actor. In the public light, the
public actor might wear different masks, but these masks are for Arendt more
authentically reflexive o f his/her identity than the private desires or the inner depth of
his/her self. Itself the terrain of agonistic struggles, the multiple self resists the unity
imposed by the tyrannical desires of the body and the normalisation o f government. The
political actor achieves (temporary) identity unity only as a performative production not
as a naturalised category or through an ontology o f Being.317 As with the “We hold” of

318
the Declaration o f independence, political subjects are bom with their own speech-act.
Unlike the univocal self o f radical economism who follows the rule o f the market and the
identity of the consumer, the political self is always fragmented, tom between public
participation and private comfort, debating with himself/herself, contesting opinions and
interests, divided by distinct and often clashing faculties (thinking, willing, and
judging).319 This is why for Arendt the political self never rules or dominates others but
only act with others.
Political relations, rooted as we said in isonomia, are too reflexive and agonistic to
take such a simple and unidirectional form. Economic motives, in comparison, compel
behaviours in a despotic and irresistible manner: the urge for gain comes to the economic
self as an incontestable calling, a self-evident direction to follow. Whatever the ways
317 Bonnie Honig, “Towards an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics o f Identity,” in Bonnie
Honig (ed.), Fem inist Interpretations o f Hannah A ren dt (University Park: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1995), 137.
318 Ibid.
319 Ibid., 141-142.
320 Ibid., 137.
130
economism rationalises the commands o f the marketplace (utility, profit, performance,
etc.), those are not welcoming debate and questioning.
The significance o f Arendt’s oeuvre however is beyond a lament o f modernity and
a critique of the Social. Her theorisation o f the vita activa also offers us an account o f the
public realm, political existence and citizenship that reveals positively what radical
economism erodes: the integrity of the political and the potential for action. By engaging
a dialog between Aristotle and Heidegger, Arendt emphasises the importance of the
political as the genuine space o f authentic existence, as the activity revealing human
identity qua human. The reason human existence is not reducible to mere natural and
biological life lies in the fact o f human plurality and in our capacity to rise above sheer
necessity. These two characteristics are intrinsically linked. Under the light o f the public
sphere, through action (praxis) and speech (lexis), the fact o f human plurality comes to
the forefront. The political actor is recognized as a unique being: a person irreducible to a
group but who nonetheless exists as part o f a body politic (inter hominess esse), as one in
a plurality o f public selves.
In the public forum, a diversity o f people confront their differences in defining a
common good, recognizing each other as a pluralistic ‘W e’ and projecting themselves in
the future. Confronted by diverging opinions and finding solidarities and common ground
they did not expect, citizens experience the political realm as division and integration.321
A common ground is sometimes found, but the synthesis is always opened to
contestation, never resting. Pecharman words are aptly chosen to describe this
phenomenon: “Le politique - ce qui conceme les citoyens dans leur totalite - est un
321 Like in the first chapter, we are here influenced by Duverger and his imagery o f politics as Janus-faced.
See Maurice Duverger, Op. CH., 22.
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universel qui n ’est connu de tous que parce que chacun l’eprouve comme tel, en tant
qu’objet commun manifeste et vise par des discours antithetique.”322 This public space
opened in politics stresses commonality but is engaged through dissonance; conceptions
o f the common good always remain abstractions and our opinions o f it should therefore
not be traded for dogmas. Arendt also makes this point when she teaches that “men
organize themselves politically according to certain essential commonalities formed
within or highlighted from an absolute chaos o f differences.” 323 The political, thus
conceived as a space o f agonism and commonality, lies not, as Aristotle would have it, ‘in
M an’ (as practical reason), but between humans as a relationship, an existential
potentiality, a mode o f Being-with-others. For the Ancient Greeks, the economic is
simply incapable o f reflecting in this way the fact o f plurality. In this regard, neo
liberalism is original since it claims to complete that integrating function. Departing from
the naturalistic approach o f classical liberalism which saw everything from the macro
level, neo-liberalism personalises the economic function o f the worker and the consumer.
The logic at the basis of economic activity moves from belonging to self identity. This
change is evident in the so-called new management. The individual is not defined by his
or her corresponding class or station but by his/her lifestyle and individual potential; in
the office he/she is called a partner, an associate; elsewhere he/she is taught to be flexible
and creative and to follow the ideal o f the autonomous worker. Supposedly, the multiple
markets of life will modulate differences. Since this so-called difference and individuality
is only an alternate version of the same (a certain position in relation to a market and a
322 The political - that which concern citizens in their totality - is a universal that is known by everybody
only experience it as a common object each because recognise manifested and directed at by antithetical
discourses, [my translation] Martine Pecharman, “L ’idee du politique,” in D enis Kambouchner (ed.), Op.
Cit., 93.
323 Hannah Arendt, The P rom ise o f P olitics (Schocken Books: N ew Y ork, 2005), 93.
324 Ibid.
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marketing of one-self), Arendt is right to reject it as more cosmetic than authentic. Still,
this government through choices and individuation pretends, as we highlighted in the
preceding chapter, to be capable o f ‘managing’ people without the aid of political action
and speech. It effectively offers a model of order predicated on the idea of self-pacifying
passions, where differences are first inoculated as market inputs. Presenting the economic
as the genuine realm o f differences and innovations, radical economistic movements then
reject political conciliation of human plurality as superfluous.
Seen in this spatial dimension, the political also precedes classification o f regimes,
including democracy. Contrary to common opinion, the concept at the foundation of the
political experience is not the rule o f the people, which as we know from Toqueville can
fall into mere conformism or soft despotism, but this condition the Greeks called
isonomia, equality in speech. Literally translated by the potentially misleading term
‘freedom of speech’, isonomia originally meant that those who engage in political activity
[whether everybody, an aristocracy, a limited citizenry or an oligarchy] do so as

325
equals. Contrary to the definition o f isonomy Hayek has used to support his critique of
democracy, this old concept does not mean that the authority o f the law is prior to the
power o f the people but rather that “all have the same claim to political activity.”326 This
political recognition beyond status and family breaks with the traditional and tribal
bounds o f the community. Blood and rituals are displaced by reasoned speech {logos) as
the unity of the polis. The fact that the Ancient Greek word for citizenship, the citizen
body and the constitution of the polis is the same (politeia) speaks volume on the very
political nature o f the Greek institutions. It reflects “the unity o f the citizens, not only the
325 Martine Pecharman, “L ’idee du politique,” in Denis Kambouchner (ed.), Op. Cit., 94.
326 Hannah Arendt, The P rom ise o f P olitics (Schocken Books: N ew York, 2005), 117.
133
sum of the individuals, but the living body composed of rulers and ruled, and the political
life that was the very life and being o f the citizens.”327 The separation civil society/state
that is predicated in the modem conception o f social citizenship was alien to the Greek
polis. Beyond a mere juridical unity, the concept o f citizens as politeia implied the
existence o f a healthy political sphere: the citizens were the polis, the polis was the
citizens. With the reforms of Cleisthenes, the family and the tribes lose some power and
the city-state is re-articulated around citizenship and the immanent dialectics o f individual
voices and the public (koinon)?2%Before Cleisthenes, other statesmen tried to instill in
Athens a national identity, like Solon, Athens’ first great lawmaker when he forbade
neutrality in trials. However, in 508 B.C, Cleisthenes goes further with his reform and, as
Herodotus immortalised, “took the demos into partnership”.329 To break the bounds of
private interests and tribal ties that divide the city in opposing clans and place kinship
before citizenship, Cleisthenes abolishes the old ten Ionic tribes and creates ten new
330
ones. As always in ancient times, the political act o f foundation is imbued with
religious undertones. Cleisthenes is keen to associate each o f these new tribes with the
worship of eponymous heroes drawn from Attic legends. In so doing, religion is displaced
from a source of division to symbols attesting to the sacred union of Attica and the
necessity o f a common polity.331
In the political sphere, the link between plurality and unity can be forged in the
form o f the active citizen. Through citizenship, the resolution between what is my voice
and what is the common good is idealised as an internalised sentiment of commonality in
327 Victor Ehrenberg, The G reek State (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1960), 39.
328 Ibid., 31.
329 A. H. J. Greenidge, A H andbook o f Greek Constitutional H istory (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911),
157
134
difference, from a fragile sense o f belonging to a fusional Rousseauan General Will. In
economic processes, by contrast, the integration is enacted through the market. The homo
oeconomicus signifies his/her needs and what he/she has to offer but remains an
essentially private being; the resolution o f the tension between ‘I ’ and ‘W e’ does not pass
through his/her identity but through the equilibrium function of the market.
But lest we be complete romantics, we need to acknowledge that the political
space is not only positive. The determination of a ‘W e’, a shared public space and a
common good leaves in its shadow a ‘They’, a rejected ethos, an ‘other’. From its
beginnings, citizenship is discussed in terms o f exclusion: that o f the poor, the women,
the slaves, the barbarians. But this process o f political ‘othering’ does not mean that
political existence is more exclusionary than other modes o f Being, much to the contrary.
In the political sphere, the limits of the political community are themselves political
questions. Questions like “Who are we?”, “what is it to be a citizen?” and “who is/are to
rule?” are not supposed, in a polity, to be left to tradition or sacred books alone. The
German jurist Carl Schmitt was right to emphasise the agonistic edge o f political
332
identity. The political is unthinkable in the absence o f the categories of the ‘u s’ and the
‘they’, of the distinction between friends and enemies. The idea o f the common good, o f a
human end o f all ends, entails in itself a negation. Since the political domain claims to
reflect a community o f values and give to it direction and form, it necessarily engages in a
dialectical or antagonist relation with an ‘other’. Somewhere, somehow, a way o f Being-
in-the-world is partly or completely rejected. In this sense, the government o f a
homogeneous and universal state could no longer be called political. However his insight
332 Carl Schmitt, The Concept o f the P olitical, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University o f Chicago
Press, 1996).
135
into the dark side of the polis, Schmitt confuses the a priori conditions with the substance
o f political existence. By emphasising enmity and opposition, Schmitt does not do justice
to the dialectical movement o f politics, there is as much philia as agon in the
determination o f the common good.
While affirming one self implies negating an ‘other’, the human longing behind
political activity is not only negative. Central to the public space of appearance that is the
political sphere is the human desire to be remembered beyond death. The active citizenry
idealised by Arendt is comprised of lovers o f excellence who, like Achilles, seek to gain
some of the immortality (permanence) that is normally reserved to biological species or
pagan gods.333 Public space is conducive to such public engagements and agon. Dossa
analyses convincingly Arendt’s thought when he explains that behind the human striving
to do well, excel and gain public glory lies an innate repugnance to futility:
For Arendt it is their repugnance to futility which prompts men to do well and
that doing well is a public claim, not a private one. [...] Doing well is to excel in
the public arena, in the esteem of fellow men, preferably one’s peers. No one can
be said to have done well if he does not venture into and elicit the approval o f the
public in the public realm. Hence doing well is the same as actualizing the
capacity for freedom and action inherent in men.334
Wishing to escape futility, the political being does not wish to be forgotten as a simple
reflection o f the group or mass but, on the contrary, longs to be recognised and reckoned
as a meritorious and active member o f a political community o f actors. This citizen,
aware of its existence and finitude, cannot be content with the impersonal permanence
accorded by the cycle o f reproduction and evolution’s aggrandisement o f the species and
life in general. For Arendt, it is our mortal nature which entices us to strive beyond the
333 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1998), 18, 25.
334 Shiraz Dossa, The Public Realm an d the P ublic Self: The P o litica l Theory o f Hannah Arendt (Waterloo,
Ont., Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989), 86.
136
private satisfactions o f the household and the cycles of labour and consumption and to
project ourselves in the future through an engagement in the “good life” and freedom o f
the polis.335 We put ourselves under public light and enter the realm o f action because the
polis is capable o f offering remembrance and thus to preserve for some time the
uniqueness o f our individuality.
In this interplay of act and speech, o f contest and recognition, public space makes
visible the individuality of the actor. Living politically, one can reveal, through principled
positions and acts, his/her distinctiveness and thereby live a more authentic life. Arendt’s
phenomenological theory defines the political as the human capacity to act, whether with
or against others. According to her theory, we come into the world not primarily through
the negation o f an ‘other’ (although this is an inevitable dimension o f identity formation)
but through the affirmation of one’s uniqueness through speech and deeds. For her, the
capacity to take an initiative and put an original movement into motion (to create a sui
generis reality), what she refers to as natality, represents the true miracle of human
existence.336 Speech and action, when deployed in the public realm, reveal our
distinctiveness - this “paradoxical plurality o f unique beings” 337 - and present us with the
incredible opportunity to give birth and be bom again in the act. While our physical and
bodily uniqueness is a given, our coming to appearance into the human world as unique
actors and the distinctiveness of the spiritual dimension o f our identity only unfold
through free acts and speeches. These two primordial human activities uncover the
identity of the human actor beyond its attributes, qualities or its function in the world. In
Arendt’s republican ideal, the proper answer to the liberal and more generally modem
335 Hannah Arendt, Op. Ch., 18-19.

336 Ibid., 178.
337 Ibid., 176.
137
hyper-individualism is not to be found in the nation or the ethnic group, but in this in-
between space where citizens engage dialectically with their political community:
In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique
personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while
their physical identities appear without any activity o f their own in the unique
shape of the body and sound of the voice. This disclosure o f “who” in
contradiction to “what” somebody is - his qualities, gifts, talents, and
shortcomings, which we may display or hid - is implicit in everything somebody
says and does.338
Because of their revealing power, public speech and action stand in opposition with the
interchangeable self of mass society and the neo-liberal atomised-individual.
The political against policing
Since it sheds light on the authentic personae of public actors, the political is also
the stage of resistance to governmental subjectivities, discipline and policing. Because of
the common association between politics and the state, people quickly equate political
activity with the elite, the established order, laws. In Canada, the image of Parliament Hill
typically comes to mind. But since the political occurs in a m eta x y (a line o f tension
between individuality and universality, difference and equality), it also possesses a
rebellious dimension. Arendt’s account of politics as authentic action and speech
illuminates the amiable side of the political, but it does not account for its more radical
side. On this question, we can turn for guidance to the French philosopher Jacques
Ranciere who lays open the internal tension between the political and policing. To be
political, Ranciere reminds us, is to stand in between individuality and universality,
solidarity and heteronomy. Here again, the distinction between a political actor and the
market agent is evident. To stand as a political actor is to refuse complete policing and to
adopt the often uncomfortable position of an ‘in-between’, someone that does not accept
338 Ibid., 179.
138
uncritically the conventions of the land, common-sensical definitions or the essentialism
of identities. Ranciere gives us the example of a French woman who asks herself if a
Franqaise is included in the generic term Franqais used in laws and statutes. We could
also give in example the figure o f Socrates whose form of citizenship involved
questioning conventions and acting like a political gadfly. In this critical zone where the
political confronts police and government, ‘equality in plurality’ is made possible. To
live politically, in this sense, is also to resist complete policing in the determination of
one’s life; it is the immigrant who refuses deportation by reclaiming the name American;
it is the woman who questions her inclusion in the noun homme o f the Declaration
universelle des droits de I ’homme; the worker who calls him self a proletarian; the student
activist who refuses to limit his/her action to so-called ‘student politics’ and who
discovers, through action and solidarities, what was previously unthought-of, or see those
who were previously unseen, that he is also a citizen. Clearly, there cannot be political
existence without some form of order, and the political is always concerned with its
preservation, but it also refuses, resists, rebels against the categories or subjectivities
delimited by the powers that be. As Arendt says, the political is concerned more with the
question ‘who are you’ than with the paradigmatically social preoccupation ‘what are
you’. To live a political life is therefore not merely to take impersonal positions on some
issues after reasoned deliberations but to ‘take a stand’, and often a polemic one. This is
why the Greeks understood entering political activity as an adventurous and risky move;
to enter the political realm was to abandon the secure realm o f the household where one
exercised dominion and where one’s identity was left unquestioned. To be recognised as
first among equals, in this space o f appearance and contest where excellence was so much
139
prized, one had to risk his life in the public.339 There, in the eyes o f his peers, the citizen
could not claim the sort o f private dominion imposed on women, children and slaves,
unless he became a tyrant and forbade access to the political realm. To claim greatness,
one could neither rely solely on family connections or personal fortune.
To many readers, this conception o f public space will seem very far from their
reality and appear as an idealisation o f the past. But Arendt’s idealization o f the Greek
polis and the political is not without value. Without falling into complete utopia, Arendt’s
concepts of public space and action help us to recover, through strong contrasts and
imageries, a certain possibility of Being which might not appear possible at first sight.
Conscious of the difference between an ontological and existential ideal, Hansen rightly
distinguishes Arent’s idealisation o f the Greek polis from pure idealism:
If Arendt is utopian she is a utopian o f the ‘here and now ’: If there is an

utopianism to her thought, it is not a mystical yearning for distant shores. It is
what I would call an utopianism o f the ‘here and now ’ : an immanent utopianism
rooted in the articulation of currently existing human capacities and competencies
as they are manifested in actually existing societies, even in a distorted form.340
Hannah Arendt’s return to the Greek ideal o f heroic politics also has the virtue of
providing an alternative version of individualism. Against the backdrop of mass society’s
atomised and thoughtless individualism, Arendt projects the ideal o f a individualism
finding its uniqueness and authenticity in public engagement rather than in the futility of
consumerism or in the vacuous search for the depth o f the inner self. As Villa explains,
Arendt’s modernism, her understanding o f the importance o f what Taylor has called the
‘politics of authenticity’ and which others have encountered as ‘identity politics’ is in her
339 Hannah Arendt, The P rom ise o f P olitics (Schocken Books: N ew York, 2005), 122.
340 Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt, Politics, H istory and Citizenship (Standford: Standford University
Press, 1993), 8.
140
political theory conjugated with an ancient wisdom associating the care of the self with
the concern for others. According to her, real individuality shines not in the private but in
the eyes of others. This form o f authentic individuality however, is not cheaply acquired.
It cannot be bought or marketed, but requires an ongoing engagement: “It is one thing to
presume one’s uniqueness (as we modems are wont to do), quite another to demonstrate it
in a worldly and disciplined way. This is achieved through the opinions and consistent
perspective an individual communicates to his/her fellow citizens “in the bright light of
the public sphere.”341 Unlike Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau and modem
communitarians, Arendt does not value the public sphere and citizenry because they are
essential conditions for virtue, but on their own, as some of the primary ways to be
human, opening a realm of freedom where the world we live in is illuminated, not
dimmed out or flattened by the fusion of our various perspectives.
Many scholars, even sympathetic ones, have criticised Arendt’s rigid dichotomy
of the political and social sphere and the lack o f nuance in her rejection of ‘social
politics’. Indeed, one can rightly wonder how Arendt can, on the one side, mark the
private as a pre-condition for the public and, on the other side, reject with an aristocratic
attitude its politicisation. While the private is not the public, the limit o f the political with
the private must be politicised. The question is o f high importance since it determines
who has access to political life and on what grounds. In our opinion, Arendt is
contradicting herself on this point. One the one hand, it is tme, a citizen is simply
someone who lives as one and, in this sense, all those lacking the leisure to access the
public sphere are not, as a matter o f fact, political beings. On the other hand, Arendt
herself grounds the existential possibility o f the political in the human condition, in the
341 Dana Richard Villa, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 251.
141
human potential to make anew, to act in the fullest sense o f the word. Seen from this
second perspective, political existence is a universal potentiality and citizenship cannot be
denied on the ascriptive basis o f class, gender or race. Moreover, while social conditions
enabling people to access the public sphere as equals might not be political as such, in the
sense o f a participation in the common good and the realm o f public speech and action,
they represent a sine qua non condition o f the emergence o f the political sphere and for a
citizenry that is not simply the reflection o f class or private interests. What is at stake is
the vitality and access of the koinon, the public, which precedes the appearance of the
political. Before being enfranchised, made citizens, the demos must first be invited to the
symposium.342 In order to develop educated opinions rather than mere prejudices and in
the spirit of isonomia, citizens must first be freed from necessity, carved a space of
individuality allowing them to differ o f opinions from the mass, and must be educated
through a multiplicity o f social institutions such as the widespread participation in civil
society Toqueville notices in Revolutionary America. In sum, as long as they are thought
o f as means and not as ends, social questions do not have to impede political existence
and can even encourage it. We do not have to resist radical economism in a negative or
reactionary spirit, rejecting all that is economic as deserving of contempt. Our hope for
the political should not be transformed into a renewed hatred for the body, the old
metaphysical resentment against the world of ‘mere appearance’. Rejecting the claims of
economism to represent the totality of Being and to take the role of the new master
science, we can nevertheless recognise the importance o f the economic for sustaining
material needs and to make possible the formation o f a public realm. The political must
342 Pauline Schmitt-Pantel, “C ollective Activities and the Political in the Greek City,” in Oswyn Murray and
Simon Price (eds.), Op. Cit., 201.
142
not become a new name for this metaphysical ideal that philosophers and believers have
looked for in the heavens. If the polis is the citizens that compose it, these citizens are not
incorporeal gods. The political agora must be distinguished from the marketplace, but we
must not fool ourselves. The public sphere remains a space where living humans meet;
humans with bodies that work, eat, sleep, love and die. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf,
before entering the public sphere, one first needs a room o f one’s own, the social
conditions rendering materially possible a public life and a private space which can
protect the citizen from the tyranny of the ‘They’.343
Before concluding this final chapter there is one important question that we need
to address, even if only briefly. The question presents itself as such: how is it that
everything is today presented as political if it is true that the political retreats at the profit
of the economic? We cannot deny that all topics are now considered opened to political
debate and criticism, that people even talk o f ‘food politics’ for instance. In reality, the
same phenomenon of radical economism that eclipses the possibility o f the political
existence344 is associated with the process o f democratisation that clears the way for the
public participation of everybody and the questioning of all topics. Although the word
power and government should in our opinion be preferred to avoid misconception, one
could say that everything is now politicised if by that statement this person merely wants
to signify that everything is imbued with power and contestable, or on a more negative
level, that everything is govemmentalised. In this sense, careless assertions o f the fact that
‘everything is political’ point both to the loss o f distinction o f the political sphere and
highlight a democratisation of critique, the fact that no human reality escapes critical
343 Virginia W oolf, A Room o f O n e’s Own (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001).
344 Understood in the Arendtian definition o f the political as the realm o f action, active citizenship, public
space and the common good.
143
discourse and that power relations, wherever they are, can be asked to be justified and
explained.345 This reflection can lead us to a second question: would a renewed political
sphere be better sustained by returning to a strict delimitation o f the public by isolating
the social from the political or would it be best to encourage a form o f radical citizenship
which would, in an Arendtian spirit, involve debating and acting in concert on all
questions concerning the common good and the community’s distinct mode o f Being-in-
the-world? Arendt was tempted to define rigidly the domain o f political debate because
she believed including social issues would corrupt the exercise. We are sympathetic to her
motivations and also wish to bring economic and social questions back to their proper
place. However, excluding the economic from the scope o f political deliberation might
prove it-self not only impossible but unwise. To continue with the imagery o f realms or
spheres of existence, should not the master science be allowed to rule over its main
frontier? Should it not be allowed to deliberate and take action on what we previously
referred as the koinon, the ensemble o f institutions of sharing and equality which must
exist for isonomia and the public sphere to emerge? If political existence is such a
fundamental dimension to being human, perhaps it is legitimate to encourage the
conditions fostering such a life.
345 O f course the econom ic sphere has also been affected by the enlargement o f the field o f critique. W e
must not forget that the word consumerism does not only mean civic apathy and the erosion o f a
consciousness o f the common good but is also used to define a social movement. A new form o f activism
appearing in the 19lh century and gaining momentum in the 20th, consumerism forced big businesses to take
into account the health and interests o f its ordinary consumers and occupied a discursive field - the
econom y - hitherto reserved to the elite. In so doing, consumerism manifested the counter-movement
typical o f econom ism and all totalising movement. If w e can legitimately talk o f a colonisation, a retreat or
an erosion o f the political w e must be aware that there is also the return o f the pendulum. W hile we behave
increasingly as consumers and entrepreneurs, we also introduce ethical questions and concerns to our
consumer choices. See in particular David Horowitz, The M orality o f Spending: Attitudes to w a rd the
Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1985) and
Robert N. Mayer, The Consumer Movement: Guardians o f the M arket-Place (Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1989).
144
Conclusion
Throughout this thesis, we demonstrated that neo-liberalism is a form o f radical
economism, a movement expanding the reach o f the economic realm in a rationalistic and
even totalising manner, and therefore represents a retreat o f the political. The
transformation in the understanding o f the boundary and hierarchy separating the
economic from the political realm - leading to the ultimate amalgamation o f the two in
neo-liberalism - is striking. The word radical does not appear exaggerated to qualify the
departure of neo-liberalism from the previous conceptions o f oikonomia, which
designated the private domain concerned with the fulfilment o f the community material
needs, and the classical liberal understanding o f the market as the natural force leading to
the accumulation o f wealth. As defined in the writings of the Chicago School of
Economics, economic activity encompasses a far wider range of activities than what is
commonly called the ‘economy’. A maximising rationality, neo-liberalism conceives of
the economic sphere as pervading everything, in the form o f the market, and ascribes to it
the capacity to provide us not only with subsistence and material growth, but with a basis
for order and meaning. In sum, radical economism claims for economics the role of
architectonic science once reserved to politics.
In the opening chapter, we gave a sketch o f the relation between the economic and
political spheres o f existence as conceived in the European Antiquity and Middle Ages.
The purpose o f this important yet brief overview was to highlight the contingent character
o f economism and to make evident that the present primacy o f the economic realm was
not always accepted or approached as a given. By contrasting contemporary reality with
such a different standpoint, one can see how classical liberalism, even though more
moderate and balanced than neo-liberalism, still represents a clear advance o f economism.
145
Secondly, through a short genealogy of the birth o f political economy, we showed
how economism takes root in early modernity and is not coextensive with neo-liberalism.
This chapter allowed us to distinguish the rise o f economism from its most radical
manifestation, neo-liberalism, and provided a second point o f comparison, strengthening
our analysis. Interpreting Adam Smith as a moderate thinker seeking to preserve the
ideals o f Enlightenment against its own rationalistic delusions, the positions o f the
founder of modem economics are much more balanced and nuanced than the ideology
and program advanced by the Chicago School o f Economics. Contrary to the mistaken
but widespread opinion on Smith and his famous ‘invisible hand’, a close reading of his
corpus makes clear that while this author ascribed an important role to the economic as a
part o f the pre-rational and natural order, he upheld the specifically human and stoically-
oriented ethical life as superior. A critic of Bernard Mandeville, Smith conceived o f civil
society as a multilayered and rich fabric o f which the economic is only one dimension.
The third chapter represents a turning point in our analysis. Dedicated to neo
liberal thought, this section focuses on the Austrian School o f economics and the Chicago
School of Economics. The first scholar analysed in this section is a major theoretical
figure o f neo-liberalism, the Austrian economist and philosopher o f science Friedrich von
Hayek. Although Hayek philosophical subtleties are rapidly tossed aside by its American
counterparts, the Chicago School o f Economics inherits his doctrine o f the market, which
conceives it as a spontaneous order superior in all points to human planning. Devoid of
Hayek anti-rationalism however, American neo-liberalism brings economism to its most
extreme form by generalising market rationality to all actors and institutions and applying
its logic to things so different as education, crime and love. In sum, this chapter
demonstrated the radical dimension o f neo-liberal economism. Using the writings of the
146
Chicago School o f Economics and the different applications o f its doctrine by new
institutionalist theories, we demonstrated the tendency o f neo-liberalism to expend the
reach o f the economic in a rationalistic, totalising and imperialistic fashion.
In the fourth and fifth chapters o f this thesis we further analysed neo-liberalism
from the perspectives o f Foucauldian sociology and Arendtian philosophy in order to
understand the significance of this movement in terms o f both power and meaning.
Approached as an original form o f govemmentality, neo-liberalism was shown to
represent the instrumentalisation o f market rationality and its projection as an ideal self-
generating order. As it was made clear, symbols o f sovereignty and disciplinary
techniques remained active, thereby creating a form o f subjectivity based on interest and
choice that is nevertheless normalised, well-tempered and docile. Although interesting on
its own terms, the Foucauldian analysis of neo-liberalism as an individualised mode of
power equally sheds light on the dethronement o f the political as the realm o f order,
stability, freedom and difference. Understanding economics as a science of order, radical
economism claims that the imperfect activity o f politics is at best superfluous and
proposes in its stead the use of market mechanisms in the determination of governmental
policies and programs. The sociological analysis o f neo-liberal govemmentality is hence a
significant contribution to the understanding of radical economism. The primacy o f the
economic is predicated o f this claim to provide not only wealth but also identity, freedom
of choice and a non-coercive structure o f order. Turning then to Hannah Arendt, we
discussed the integrity and significance of political existence. In so doing, we brought
back to the fore this mode of Being-with-others that economic rationality ignores. While
there is power and government in neo-liberal economism, the experience of the political
147
and active citizenship recedes as does the possibility for authentic difference, action, and
human plurality.
Considering the broadness o f our thesis, it should not be read as a definitive
account on the subject. Clearly, each period studied is so rich and complex that it would
have warranted a thesis o f its own. We decided to privilege such a broad overview
because we thought it better suited to the large subject that is the rise o f economism. In
our opinion, discussing such a wide spectrum o f historical periods and ideas, ranging
from Archaic Greece to contemporary society and from Plato to Milton Friedman, is at
the same time the source o f this thesis’ potential shortcomings and what makes it
interesting. Another limitation o f this thesis lies in the impossibility o f reconciling
completely Foucault and Arendt. On one side, Foucault’s post-structuralism refuses to
engage such categories as the political, the economic, the human or existence; such all-
encompassing categories are precisely what Foucault tries to problematise by showing
how knowledge is intertwined with power. On the other side, approaching such categories
as spaces or modes o f existence, Arendt’s phenomenology awakens us to the distinction
between political activity and neo-liberal government and the flattening of meaning
represented by radical economism. The ideas advanced by these two intellectuals cannot
be completely harmonised and, in the end, it can be asked why they should be. The
persisting difference between these interpretations should not lead us to sterile debates on
w ho’s approach on economism is right and w ho’s is wrong. Foucault and Arendt write
from different traditions, with different languages; we can either choose a camp or enrich
our understanding of both teachings, we chose the second option.
The limitations of this thesis should be taken as opportunities for further research
and study. One concept that warrants further attention is the koinon, this common domain
148
o f peers. We believe political theory can learn from classicists like Pauline Schmitt-Pantel
who describe how this space of equality and shared experience appeared in Archaic
Greece with the citizens’ participation in private yet collective activities like hunts,
banquets and sacrifices. These collective practices created the common space necessary
for the later emergence of political institutions and isonomia. In the language o f Schmitt-
Pantel, “to have a share in citizenship is to have a share in a banquet.”346 Further study o f
this liminal space could improve our understanding of the integration o f the private and
the public spheres and allow a more relational and less essentialist conception of the
political. Enriched by the concept o f the koinon, a phenomenology o f the political sphere
could preserve the integrity and distinctive reality o f this realm without conceptualising
the boundary of these domains as fixed and sealed. We think this conception of the
political as a way o f ‘Being-with-others’ provides more insights than does its uncritical
adoption as an essentialised category.
It is our contention that the question o f the political has become more important
than ever. Even thought we did not touch this subject upfront, writing this thesis has lead
us to reflect on the possibility of a different form o f socialism where the primacy o f the
political is affirmed and active citizenship is fostered. In essence, we came to agree with
Arendt that the substance of politics is freedom and that political existence is justified on
its own. Considering radical economism as one of the most serious threats to human
action, we believe it would be time for the emergence o f a political and agonistic
socialism, one that does not take its answers from an all encompassing ideology (or waits
for a new little red book) and that is not paralysed by nostalgia or resentment. We are all
346 Pauline Schmitt-Pantel, “Collective Activities and the Political in the Greek City,” in Oswyn Murray and
Simon Price (eds.), Op. Cit., 200-201.
149
too aware that socialist movements have generally been predicated on an economistic
conception o f the revolutionary subject and have valued the political only instrumentally
as a mean to economic socialisation. We believe this hierarchy can and must be inverted,
and the political taken seriously.
On a more general level, the urgency o f the question o f the political is closely
related to the modem condition of cultural nihilism. We are living in a paradoxical epoch.
In this age marked, as we saw, by the disappearance of the distinction between life and
mere-life, action and behaviour, government and politics, the possibility of political
existence seems closed from the onset. On the other hand, the modem predicament we
live in, namely the collapse o f transcendent sources o f order, makes being political more
necessary then ever. With the Death o f God, the guiding light must now be our own, and
we can either lose ourselves into the meaninglessness and existential void of mass society
or have the courage o f living political lives. Certainly, political existence is not the
panacea to all our problems and misgivings; in fact, to be political is also to carry the
burden of the past and to see the limits imposed by the present. Yet deliberations and
debates over the common good or the good life will simply not take place lest we
distinguish politics from marketplace and citizens from consumers. In this light, it is not
sufficient to critique neo-liberalism as an ideology advocating ideas and policies we
reject. The generalisation and prioritisation o f the market advanced by neo-liberalism
must be unmasked and decried for what it is: a radically anti-political movement that
closes the public stage from political ideals, discourses and actions. Resisting this
flattening of human existence, we do not look at the past in nostalgia or for a return to a
paradise lost, but to remind us that things can change and to reverse the burden of proof
of those who preach the primacy of the economic.
150
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Neo-liberalism and the Rise of Radical Economism

By Andre Munro, B.A.

Department of Political Science

© Andre Munro 2006

Published Heritage Direction du

395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington

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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur

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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires

grandement la qualite de ce memoire. I am also indebted to Professor Maben W. Poirier for

Council for having supported this thesis project.

By contrasting neo-liberalism with liberal and more succinctly classical-medieval

application of economic rationality to an increasingly larger field. Particular attention is

II. Looking to another age: the ancient primacy o f the political 8

III. Classical liberalism: in search o f balance 24

IV. Neo-liberalism and the totalisation o f the economic 67

V. Neo-liberal govementality: the market as a matrix o f order 99

VII. Conclusion 144

VIII. Bibliography 150

In our age o f advanced economic globalisation, understanding the moving

global corporations and the powerlessness o f national governments in matters o f trade,

spheres as distinct modes of existence.

most potent contemporary competitor, the economic domain. By contrasting neo-liberal

thesis exposes neo-liberalism as a form o f radical economism, which is the unlimited

application of economic rationality to an increasingly larger field.1 Whereas classical-

state or the simple repetition o f Adam Smith’s Liberalism. It represents, in short, an

guide, neo-liberalism will be analysed as a specific gouvernmentalite (a rationality and

technology o f power) based primarily on an economic subject of individual choice (homo

pre-modem forms o f sovereignty and to classical liberalism, neo-liberal govemmentality

is a rationalistic and totalising mode o f power. The economic subject is encouraged to

evaluate everything in terms o f consumer-based rationality and behave accordingly.

economic. Notwithstanding their differences and disagreements, it is believed that both

theorists help us understand, through Foucault’s concept o f bio-political govemmentality

o f ‘mere life’ (zoe) as the ultimate object o f government.

Epistemologically, this thesis draws mainly on the genealogical and

phenomenological approaches. On the one-side, we will avoid presenting political action,

and change. Although our study is based on a quasi-ontological conception o f the

relations. Indeed, by demonstrating the demotion o f the political in favour o f an

categories. On the other side, we will present in the tradition of existential

activities and modes o f Being-in-the-world that are revealed to our collective

and self-understanding. Such an anti-essentialist interpretation does not mean that

possibilities, spheres o f existence rendering possible certain modes o f Being-in-the-world

might be, remain open to speech and action.

language-game o f neo-liberalism, the reconfiguration o f what is ‘economic’ is associated

comparison to neo-liberalism, it still represented an advance o f economism in the larger

of Adam Smith, draws a portrait of the political/economic relation as conceived by

the accumulation of wealth.

perspective adopted. In the third chapter, a general overview o f neo-liberalism is given to

a rationalistic and totalising manner. In the fourth chapter, neo-liberalism is approached

College de France, neo-liberalism can be presented as a mode of govenmentality, a mode

o f power primarily based on the self-governance o f maximising subjects. Although

accurate description of consumer society and the flattening of meaning which

action. Although very different, we believe the sociological analysis o f neo-liberalism as

an economistic mode o f government and the more philosophical interpretation of radical

consequences of this movement in terms o f existential meaning; both approaches are

The classical primacy of the political

subservient to the later.5

o f the community as a whole. As we have learned from the substantivist school o f

or the contemporary encouragement o f entrepreneurs as creative leaders, the money