ABSTRACT
Key to liberalism is the idea of the self-regulating market. Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism investigated how this idea emerged in eighteenth-century laissez-faire philosophy and tactical strategies of government. Foucault traced how laissez-faire logics and tactics of government (i.e., governmentalities) carved out distinct fi elds of visibility-market, population, state-that came to be regarded as ontologically distinct social fi elds. Liberal governmentalities fostered the presumptive reality of these fi elds by governing the conduct of everyday conduct, shaping everyday actions and values. In effect, biopolitical expertise and technologies of the self are fundamentally entwined with liberal economic governmentalities (see Larsen, 2007).
