From the beginning of the 1970s, Michel Foucault studied power. Repressive, ruling, and dominating, discipline, his first developed concept of power, is an essentially negative mechanism. Foucault seems to strive to escape the binary and overbearing idea of power he inherited from the theories of sovereignty. By the mid-’70s, he balances and nuances this understanding. Power is no longer likened to a prison panopticon, but to the government—in the narrow sense, and in the broad sense to a behavioral technology applied to free individuals. But again, Foucault is encumbered by this regal rationality which influences the contemporary understandings of power he continues to criticize. He makes three exceptions: the first is Christian pastoral care, the second is the Ancients’ formulation of self-government, and the third is managerial governmentality, which Foucault sketches very briefly and incompletely, and which we will discuss here.
Tag: Foucault (Michel)
Neuroscience and public policy: Toward a new economic interventionism?
Neuroscience is used in economics to improve the description and comprehension of individual choice behavior. It can also serve as a means of evaluating decision-makers’ rationality and regulating their behaviors. This paper analyzes the normative implications of neuroeconomics, i.e. the contributions of neuroscience to welfare economics and public economics. The economic interventions advocated by neuroeconomists (e.g. Bernheim and Rangel 2004) are interpreted as neoliberal politics in Michel Foucault’s sense (1978b). Neuroimaging techniques do not allow the “brain-manipulation” of decision-makers. They can detect pathological or irrational behaviors. This assessment calls for a behavioral regulation of welfare, which has to be distinguished from Sunstein and Thaler’s libertarian paternalism (Sunstein and Thaler 2003). The intervention targets the environment rather than the individual in both cases, but the theoretical justification is not the same. As for neuroeconomists, irrational behaviors such as addictions do not come from an individual’s cognitive bias but from an interaction with a pathological environment. The normative reflections in neuroeconomics continue the theoretical history proposed by Foucault in his works on biopolitics and neoliberalism (Foucault 2004b). Our analysis can thus be regarded as a contribution to studies on governmentality. It claims that there is a specific non-reductionist relationship between knowledge and power in Foucault’s thought.