Governmentality

In his governmentality studies in the late 1970s, the philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault (1926–1984) held a course at the Collège de France on the major forms of neoliberalism, examining the three theoretical schools of German ordoliberalism, the Austrian school characterized by Friedrich Hayek, and American neoliberalism in the form of the Chicago school. Among Foucault’s great insights in his work on governmentality was the critical link he observed in liberalism between the governance of the self and government of the state—understood as the exercise of political sovereignty over a territory and its population. He focused on government as a set of practices legitimated by specific rationalities and saw that these three schools of contemporary economic liberalism focused on the question of too much ...

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