Abstract
TODAY I WOULD LIKE to try to finish what I began to say about post-war German neo-liberalism, that is to say, the contemporary neo-liberalism which actually involves us.
German neo-liberalism (II). Its problem: how can economic freedom both found and limit the state at the same time? ∼ The neo-liberal theorists: W. Eucken, F. Böhm, A. Muller-Armack, F. von Hayek. Max Weber and the problem of the irrational rationality of capitalism. The answers of the Frankfurt School and the Freiburg School. Nav’sm as necessary field of adversily to the definition of the neo-liberal objective. ∼, The obstacles to liberal policy in Germany since the nineteenth century: (a) the protectionist economy according to List; (b) Bismarck’s state socialism; (c) the setting up of a planned economy during the First World War; (d) Keynesian interventionism; (e) the economic policy of National Socialism. •-, The neo-liberal critique of National Socialism on the basis of these different elements of German history. ∼ Theoretical consequences: extension of this critique to the New Deal and to the Beveridge plans; interventionism and the growth of the power of the state; massification and uniformkation, effects of state control. •-, The stake of neo-liberalism: its novelly in comparison with classical liberalism. The theory ofpure competition.
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Footnotes
Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (born 1918), the Russian writer, author of a considerable body of work including, among the most well-known: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962), The First Circle (1968), Cancer Ward (1968), and The Gulag Archipelago (1974). The publication of the latter (translation by Thomas P. Whitney, New York/London: Harper and Row/Collins, 1974), an “experiment in literary investigation,” devoted to a detailed description of the Soviet world of concentration camps, earned its author arrest, deprivation of Soviet citizenship, and forced exile. It aroused a wide debate in the West on the repressive nature of the Soviet system. See in particular, A. Glucksmann, La Cuisinière et le Mangeur d’hommes. Essai sur les rapports entre l’État, le marxisme et les camps de concentration (Paris: Le Seuil, 1975) to which Foucault refers in his review of Glucksmann’s Maîtres penseurs (English translation as The Master Thinkers) in 1977: “The frightened scholars went back from Stalin to Marx, as to their tree. Glucksmann had the effrontery to come back down to Solzhenitsyn”; “Le grande colère des faits,” Dits et Écrits, 3, p. 278. In the first edition of Surveiller et Punir, in 1975, Foucault used the expression “carceral archipelago” (p. 304; Discipline and Punish, p. 298) in homage to Solzhenitsyn. See “Questions à M. Foucault sur la géographie” (1976), Dits et Écrits, 3, p. 32; English translation by Colin Gordon, “Questions on Geography” in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, translations by Colin Gordon and others (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), p. 68. Solzhenitsyn’s name is evoked here as a metonym for the concentration camp world and the Gulag.
Founded in 1894, in order to bring together books, pamphlets, and periodicals useful for knowledge of the “social question,” the Musée social brings together collections covering the social domain in the widest sense of the term. It is found at 5 rue Las Cases, Paris, in the 7th arondissement. This address was chosen as the registered office of the Centre d’études created as a result of the colloquium (see below, this lecture, note 14).
Compte rendu des séances du colloque Walter Lippmann (26–30 août 1938), Travaux du Centre international d’études pour la rénovation du libéralisme, vol. I, Preface by L. Rougier (Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1939). See P.-A. Kunz, L’Expérience néo-libérale allemande, pp. 32–33.
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), An Enquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937); French translation by G. Blumberg as, La Cité libre, preface by A. Maurois (Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1938). In an article published more than twenty years after the colloquium, L. Rougier presented the book of the “great American columnist” (for thirty years he wrote the column “Today and Tomorrow” in the Herald Tribune) in the following way: “This work rejected the identification of liberalism with the physiocrat and Manchester doctrine of laisserfaire, laisser-passer. He established that the market economy was not the spontaneous result of a natural order, as the classical economists thought, but that it was the result of a legal order postulating a legal interventionism of the state”; L. Rougier, “Le libéralisme économique et politique,” Les Essais, 11, 1961, p. 47. See the quotation from W. Lippmann used as an epigraph to the second volume of Karl Popper’s, The Open Society and its Enemies, The High Tide of Prophecy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966): “To the débâcle of liberal science can be traced the moral schism of the modern world which so tragically divides enlightened men.”
Louis Baudin (1887–1964): French economist, director of the series of “Great Economists,” and author of La Monnaie. Ce que tout le monde devrait en savoir (Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1938); La Monnaie et la Formation des prix (Paris: Sirey, 1947); Précis d’histoire des doctrines économiques (Paris: F. Loviton, 1941) and LAube d’un nouveau libéralisme (Paris: M.-T. Génin, 1953).
The other French members of the colloquium, apart from those cited, were R. Auboin, M. Bourgeois, A. Detœuf, B. Lavergne (author of Essor et Décadence du capitalisme [Paris: Payot, 1938] and La Crise et ses remèdes [Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1938]), E. Mantoux, L. Marlio (author of Le Sort du capitalisme [Paris: Flammarion, 1938]), Mercier, and A. Piatier. W. Eucken was invited but did not obtain permission to leave Germany.
Jacques Rueff (1896–1978): student of the École polytechnique, Treasury auditor, director of the Mouvement général des fonds (predecessor of the direction of the Treasury) at the time of the Popular Front. A liberal economist, who established experimentally the link between unemployment and the high cost of labor (the “Rueff law”), Rueff thought that a system of stable and effective prices was the central element of a developed economy and that in order to defend this economic policy had to combat its two main obstacles, the absence of competition and inflation. Before the colloquium he published La Crise du capi-talisme (Paris: Éditions de la “Revue Bleue,” 1935). His Épitre aux dirigistes (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) takes up and develops some of the conclusions of the colloquium. His main work is L’Ordre social (Paris: Librairie de Resueil Sirey, 1945). See his autobiography, De l’aube au crépuscule (Paris: Plon, 1977). Foucault met him several times.
Robert Marjolin (1911–1986): French economist, general commissioner of the Monnet Plan for Modernization and Equipment in 1947, then general secretary of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) from 1948 until 1955. See his memoirs Le Travail d’une vie, with collaboration of Ph. Bauchard, (Paris: R. Laffont, 1986).
Raymond Aron (1905–1983): philosopher and sociologist who after 1945, in the name of his rejection of communism, had to assert himself as one of the most committed defenders of liberal thought. At this time he had only published La Sociologie allemande contemporaine (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1935), and his two theses, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1938) and La Philosophie critique de l’histoire (Paris: Vrin, 1938).
More exactly, 30 August 1938 (see the Colloque W. Lippmann, p. 107).
More exactly: Centre international d’études pour la rénovation du libéralism (the initials CIRL were adopted at the end of the colloquium (see p. 110), but the record of the colloquium is published under the initials CRL). See the extract of the statutes published in the record of the colloquium: The object of research of the Centre International d’Études pour la Rénovation du Libéralisme is to determine and make known how the fundamental principles of liberalism, and principally the price mechanism, by maintaining a contractual regime of production and exchanges that do not exclude interventions arising from the duties of the state, in contrast “with the directives of planned economies, enable men to be assured of the maximum satisfaction of their needs and society to be assured of the necessary conditions of its stability and duration.” The International Center was inaugurated at the Musée social on 8 March 1939, with an address on neo-liberalism from its president, Louis Marlio, member of the Institut, and a lecture by Louis Rougier on “Le planisme économique, ses promesses. ses résultats.” These texts are reproduced, with the stenographic records of several contributions from later sessions, in the 12th number of the journal, Les Essais, 1961: Tendances modernes du libéralisme économique.
It was L. Rougier, in Colloque W. Lippmann, p. 18: It is only after having resolved these two prior questions [(1) without state intervention, is the decline of liberalism inevitable as the result of its laws of development? and (2) can economic liberalism satisfy the social requirements of the masses?] that we will be able to tackle the specific tasks of what we may call positive liberalism.” See also, L. Marlio, ibid. p. 102: I am in agreement with M. Rueff, but I would not like to use the expression ‘left liberalism’ [see J. Rueff, ibid. p. 101: ‘(M. Lippmann’s text) establishes the bases of a policy that I, for my part, would describe as left liberal politics, because it tends to give the greatest possible “well-being to the most deprived classes’] for this does not seem to me to be right and I think that there is at present more or less the same views on the left and right. [ … ] I would prefer us to call this doctrine ‘positive liberalism,’ ‘social liberalism,’ or ‘neo-liberalism,’ but not the word ‘left’ “which suggests a political position.”
F. Böhm, Die Ordnung der Wirtschaft als geschichtliche Aufgabe und rechgtsschöpferische Leistung (Stuttgart-Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1937) p. 10: “The principal requirement of any economic system worthy of the name is that political direction becomes mistress of the economy in its totality as in its parts; the economic policy of the state must master the whole of economic development both intellectually and materially” (translated and quoted by F. Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale, p. 173).
Foucault apparently reproduces fairly freely here a phrase of Leonhard Miksch taken from an article of 19–49, “Die Geldschöpfung in der Gleichgewichtstheorie,” Ordo, II, 1949, p. 327, quoted by F. Bilger, ibid. p. 188: “Even if the number of apparently necessary corrective interventions should turn out to be so many such that from this point of view there would no longer any quantitative difference with regard to the planners, the principle expressed here would not lose its value.”
Douglass Cecil North (born in 1920), The Rise of the Western World, in collaboration with R.-P. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); French translation by J.-M. Denis, L’Essor du monde occidental: une nouvelle histoire économique (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). See H. Lepage, Demain le capitalisme (Paris: Librairie Générale Francaise, 1978; republished “Pluriel”) p. 34 and chapters 3 and 4 (this book was one of the sources used by Foucault in the last of these 1979 lectures).
On this policy of the “as if” (Als-ob Politik), theorized by one of Eucken’s disciples, Leonhard Miksch, in his Wettbewerb als Aufgabe [Competition as duty] (Stuttgart-Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1937, 2nd ed. 1947), which enables the ordoliberal program not to be confused with the demand for a realization of perfect competition, see F. Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale p. 82, p. 155, and the whole of chapter 3 of Part 2: “La politique économique,” pp. 170–206; J. François-Poncet, La Politique économique de l’Allemagne occidentale, p. 63.
On the distinction between “conformable” and “non-conformable” actions (“actions con-formes” and non-conformes) see W. Röpke, Die Gesellschaftskrisi’s der Gegenwart (5th ed. 1948) pp. 258–264; The Social Crisis of Our Time, pp. 159–163; Civitas Humana, p. 29. See F. Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale, pp. 190–192 (“static” conformity and “dynamic” conformity in relation to the model according to Röpke). [The notions “actions conformes” and “ non-comformes” are translated as “compatible” and “incompatible” interventions in The Social Crisis of Our Time, but as “conformable” and “non-conformable” in Civitas Humana. I have opted for the latter translation throughout; G.B.]
W. Eucken, Die Grundsätze der Wirtschaftspolitik (Bern-Tübingen: Francke & J.C.B. Mohr, 1952).
Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926): professor at the University of Basle in 1871, then at Jena, in 1874, where he taught until his retirement. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1908. Among his main works are: Geistige Strömungen der Gegenwart (Berlin: Verleger, 1904); French translation by H. Buriot and G.-H. Luquet, with a foreword by E. Boutroux, Les Grands Courants de la pensée contemporaine (Paris: Alcan, 1912); English translation by R. Eucken, Main Currents of Modern Thought (London: Unwin, 1912); Hauptprobleme der Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1907); French translation by Ch. Rognard, Problèmes capitaux de la philosophie de la religion au temps présent (Lausanne: Payot, 1910); Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1908) French translation by M.-A. Hullet and A. Leicht, with a foreword by H. Bergson, Le Sens et la Valeur de la vie (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912); English translation by Lucy Judge Gibson, The Meaning and Value of Life (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1909). The description “neo-Kantian,” taken no doubt from F. Bilger’s presentation in La Pensée économique libérale, pp. 41–42, imperfectly defines his “philosophy of activity,” which is linked rather to the movement of vitalist spiritualism, tinged with religiosity, that was then opposed to intellectualism and scientism in Germany. See G. Campagnolo, “Les trois sources philosophiques de la réflexion ordolibérale” in P. Commun, ed., L’Ordolibéralisme allemand, pp. 138–143. The link Foucault suggests with neo-Kantianism no doubt refers to the Kantian distinction between “constitutive principles” and “regulatory principles” in the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1978) 1st Division, Book 2, ch. 2, section 3 (“Analogies of Experience”) pp. 210–211.
On this notion, see F. Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale, pp. 180–181: To the same extent that the ‘ordoliberals’ seek to restrict interventions in the process [object of regulatory actions], so they are favorable to the extension of the state’s activity on the framework. For the process functions more or less well according as the framework is more or less well adapted. ( … ) The framework is the specific domain of the state, the public domain, in which it can fully exercise its ‘organizing (ordonnatrice)’ function. It contains all that does not arise spontaneously in economic life: thus it contains realities “which, in virtue of the general interdependence of social facts, determine economic life or conversely suffer its effects: human beings and their needs, natural resources, the active and inactive population, technical and scientific knowledge, the political and legal organization of society, intellectual life, geographical data, social classes and groups, mental structures, and so forth.”
In the manuscript, Foucault refers here, following Bilger (La Pensée économique libérale, p. 181), to W. Eucken, Grundsätze, pp. 377–378. However, the reference is inexact, and Eucken does not deal specially with agricultural questions in this section of his work.
See Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale, p. 185: “Agriculture must be prepared for the free market by seeing to it that all the measures taken lead it to this end and do not have immediate harmful consequences on the other markets. To arrive at the final result, the state will be able to intervene on the facts previously listed and determining agricultural activity: the population occupied in agriculture, the technology employed, the legal framework of farms, the soil available, even the climate, and so forth.” See also the quotation on p. 181, taken from Eucken’s Grundsätze, p. 378: “There is no doubt a limit to the action of economic policy on global facts. But each of them can be influenced. Even the climate of a country can be modified by human intervention (Selbst das Klima eines Landes kann durch menschliches Eingrefen verändert werden). A fortiori other factors, like the size of the population, its knowledge, and its capabilities, etcetera. The broadest field of action is offered by the sixth fact, the legal and social order.”
Dutch politician, Sicco Leendert Mansholt (1908–1995), vice president (1967–1972), and then President of the European Commission (1972–1973), worked from 1946 on the construction of the Benelux countries and then on the Common Market. He developed two agricultural plans, the first in 1953, aiming to replace national policies with a common agricultural policy, and the second in 1968, in which he proposed a program for the restructuring of community agriculture (the “Mansholt plan”). See the Rapport de la Commission des Communautés européenes (Plan Mansholt…) (Brussels: Secretary General of the EEC, 1968).
Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959), British economist who opposed a welfare economy, defined by the maximum increase in individual satisfactions, to a wealth economy. He “was the author of Welfare and Wealth (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), ”which was profoundly revised in a 1920 re-publication under the title The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan). See K. Pribram, A History of Economic Reasoning (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983): Conceived of as a ‘realistic’ positive theory, economic welfare was to be studied in terms of quantities of values and their distribution. In a more or less axiomatic manner, Pigou assumed that—with the exception of some special circumstances—welfare was increased when the volume of aggregate real income “was enlarged, the steadiness of its flow better assured, the dissatisfaction caused by its production reduced, and the distribution of the national dividend changed in favor of the poor.”
See A. Müller-Armack, “Soziale Marktwirtschaft,” in E. von Beckerath and others, Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften, vol. 9, (Stuttgart-Tübingen-Göttingen: G. Fischer, J.C.B. Mohr, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956); republished in A. Müller-Armack, Wirtschaftsordnung und Wirtschaftspolitik; English translation, “The meaning of the social market economy” in A. Peacock and H. Willgerodt, Germany’s Social Mark.et Economy, pp. 82–86. Müller-Armack uses the term for the first time in 1947 in a report to the Chambers of Industry and Commerce of Nordrhein-Westfalen (reprinted in his book, Genealogie der sozialen Marktwirtschaft [Berne: Paul Haupt, 1974] pp. 59–65). It really enters into circulation after being included in the program of the Christian Democratic Union for the first election campaigns for the Bundestag (Düsseldorfer Leitsätze über Wirtschaftspolitik, Sozialpolitik und Wohnungsbau of 15 July 1949).
This expression is not found in the proceedings of the Colloque W. Lippmann (Foucault possibly confuses it with the expression used by L. Marlio on p. 102 (“social liberalism,” see above, this lecture, note 15). On the other hand, it is used by W. Röpke in Civitas Humana, p. 36: “This primary Liberalism might be described as sociological. The arms forged for the attack on the old purely economic form are blunted in the face of the new.”
See F. Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale, p. 111 (which does not identify the source). The term Gesellschaftspolitik seems only to appear in Müller-Armack’s work from 1960. See, “Die zweite Phase der socialen Marktwirtschaft. Ihre Ergänzung durch das Leitbild einer neuren Gesellschaftspolitik,” 1960 (republished in A. Müller-Armack, Wirtschaftsordnung und Wirtschaftspolitik, pp. 267–291, and in W. Stützel and others, eds., Grundtexte der socialen Marktwirtschaft pp. 63–78), and, “Das gesellschaftspolitische Leitbild de socialen Marktwirtschaft,” 1962 (republished in Wirtschaftsordnung pp. 293–317). He defines then the program, on the level of internal policy, of the second phase of the construction of the social market economy.
Jacques Chaban-Delmas (1915–2000): Prime Minister under the presidency of Georges Pompidou from 1969 to 1972. His project of a “new society,” presented in his inaugural speech of 16 September 1969 and inspired by his two collaborators, Simon Nora and Jacques Delors, provoked much resistance from the conservative side. Denouncing “the weakness of our industry,” he notably declared: “But here the economy joins up with the political and the social. In fact, the defective working of the state and the archaism of our social structures are obstacles to the economic development we need. ( … ) The new leaven of youth, creativity, and invention which is shaking our old society can ferment new and richer forms of democracy and participation in all the social bodies, as in a flexible, decentralized state. We. can therefore undertake the construction of a new society” [from: www.assemblée-nat.fr].
The date given by Foucault is no doubt based on the references Sombart gives to his earlier works in Le Socialisme allemand, French translation (see above, lecture of 7 February 1979, note 42), 1990 edition, p. 48, note 1, concerning the destructive effects of the “economic age” on “the men of our times” in the domain of “spiritual life”: “See my works: Deutsche Volkswirtschaft (1903) [Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im 19.Jahrhundert und im Anfang des 20Jahrhundert (Berlin: G. Bondi)], Das Proletariat (1906), Der Bourgeois (1913) [Der Bourgeois. Z.ur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen (Munich-Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot)], Händler und Helden (1915) [Händler und Helden. Patriotische Besinnungen (Munich-Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot)].” See also, Der moderne Kapitalismus, Part 3, ch. 53; L’Apogée du capitalisme, vol. 2, pp. 404–435: “The dehumanization of the enterprise.” On the different characteristics of capitalist society described by Foucault, see in particular, Le Socialisme allemand, pp. 49–52 and p. 56.
See W.Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, Part 1, ch. 1–2; L’Apogée du capitalisme, vol. 1, pp. 24–41: “The role of the head of the capitalist enterprise” and “The new leaders”; Gewerbewesen, 1: Organisation und Geschichte des Gewerbes, 2: Das Gewerbe im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (Leipzig: 1904; 2nd revised edition, Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 1929); and, “Der kapitalistische Unternehemer,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 29, 1909, pp. 689–758.
Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883–1950): it is in his Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung, published in 1912 (republished Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1934; English translation by Redvers Opie, The Theory of Economic Development [New Brunswick N.J. and London: Transaction Books, 1983]; French translation by J.-J. Anstett, La Théorie de l’évolution économique [Paris: Librairie Dalloz, 1935] with a long introduction by F. Perroux, “The economic thought of Joseph Schumpeter”), that the author of the monumental History of Economic Analysis sets out for the first time his conception of the creator of enterprise who, through his pioneer spirit and innovative capability, was the real agent of economic development. See also his article, “Unternehmer” in, Handwörterbuch der Staatwissenschaften (Jena: 1928) vol. VIII. This theory of entrepreneurial boldness is the basis of the pessimistic finding in 1942 in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Unwin, 1987) (see in particular, pp. 131–134, “The Obsolescence of the Entrepreneurial Function”) in which he predicts the coming of the planned economy. See below, lecture of 21 February 1979, pp. 176–178.
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Senellart, M., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (2008). 7 February 1979. In: Senellart, M., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (eds) The Birth of Biopolitics. Michel Foucault. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594180_5
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