Concerned Leftists Rediscover Michel Foucault Might Not Have Been As Anti-Market as They’d Like

Jacobin magazine readers discover something Nick
Gillespie was telling
you here at Reason
at least as long ago as 2010: that lefty intellectual hero Michel
Foucault late in life found himself attracted to aspects of the
ideas of free-market thinkers such as Mises and Hayek, or, as the
lefties prefer to pigeonhole them, “neoliberals.”

Excerpts from an
interview with Daniel Zamora, a writer on Foucault who
“exposed” that their hero might have had a soft spot for the
liberating powers of free market:

I wanted to clearly break with the far too consensual image of
Foucault as being in total opposition to neoliberalism at the end
of his life. From that point of view, I think the traditional
interpretations of his late works are erroneous, or at least evade
part of the issue. He’s become sort of an untouchable figure within
part of the radical left….

Foucault was highly attracted to economic liberalism: he saw in
it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less
normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left,
which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in
neoliberalism a “much less bureaucratic” and “much less
disciplinarian” form of politics than that offered by the postwar
welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t
project its anthropological models on the individual, that would
offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state……

….Foucault was one of the first to really take the
neoliberal texts seriously and to read them rigorously. Before him,
those intellectual products were generally dismissed, perceived as
simple propaganda….

“One of the first” if you refused to read anything but
people you consider politically sympatico, I
guess. Foucault saw something in “neoliberalism” that anyone
who pretends to care about human liberty, possibility, or dignity
should respect. And Zamora understands this is a problem for the
left, their willful ignorance of their imagined intellectual
opponents:

Sequestered in the usual sectarianism of the academic world, no
stimulating reading had existed that took into consideration the
arguments of Friedrich
Hayek, Gary Becker,
or Milton
Friedman….

The intellectual left….has often remained trapped in a
“school” attitude, refusing a priori to consider
or debate ideas and traditions that start from different premises
than its own. It’s a very damaging attitude. One finds oneself
dealing with people who’ve practically never read the intellectual
founding fathers of the political ideology they’re supposedly
attacking! Their knowledge is often limited to a few reductive
commonplaces.

The interview goes on with Zamora noting that Foucault
dared question the totalizing social security system (“To
[Foucault’s] mind, the mechanisms of social assistance and social
insurance, which he put on the same plane as the prison, the
barracks, or the school, were indispensable institutions ‘for the
exercise of power in modern societies.'”) in favor of a
welfare state that was merely about ameliorating poverty, even
through a Friedmanite “negative income tax.”

This is an important point. As I’ve written before, a
welfare state that was just and only about making sure no one fell
below some level of near-absolute destitution would be far
preferable to our unimaginably complex quasi-totalizing system of
roundrobin income redistributions along multiple dimensions or some
leftist quest for “equality” as opposed to nobody dying in the
proverbial streets from poverty.

Zamora is uncomfortable with a line of thought from the
left that critiques more comprehensive social security, and he
gripes about “a certain ‘libertarian’ left” and in general is
disturbed by a Foucaultian emphasis on the marginalized and social
“power” writ large. That, he fears, takes our eyes from where he
seems to think they belong: on the supposedly lamentable fact that
some people are richer than others and the economic “exploitation”
that inevitably accompanies that fact.

Whole
interview very interesting for those wanting to see a
smart lefty grapple with the libertarian-ish temptation to a left
that he wants to stay Marxist or generally against a world with
free markets, private property, and the ineqaulity that comes along
with that freedom.