ABSTRACT
The period from the last third of the twentieth century to the present has seen a further significant transformation in the field. In many respects, today’s approach appears to be so far away from what was characterized as the ‘British System’ that it is hard to imagine that they are separated only by a few decades. In the British context, the changes have been dramatic and varied – the curtailment of doctors’ ‘right to prescribe’ in the late 1960s, the establishment of the new ‘clinic’ system in the 1970s, the rise of harm reduction and HIV prevention in the early 1980s, the emergence of a criminal justice agenda since the 1990s – such that it may seem foolhardy or unhelpful to try to find any pattern within this. Nevertheless, I will be arguing in this chapter that there is indeed a strategic coherence to the past 30 or 40 years in this area which can be best understood by locating developments in the drug field in the wider context of the unravelling of welfarist politics and the rise of neo-liberalism. I need, first of all, to elaborate a little on the nature of this transition
in liberal governance. There is some disagreement about terminology here.
John Braithwaite (2008: 4), for example, one of the surest-footed commentators on these matters on the planet, states baldly that ‘those who think we are in an era of neoliberalism are mistaken’. He prefers the term ‘regulatory capitalism’, which he borrows from the work of Levi-Faur and collaborators (e.g. Levi-Faur, 2005). He argues that this better captures the reality of contemporary governance where the state is very far from being ‘hollowed out’ and the trend is towards more regulation rather than less (he calls this the ‘myth of deregulation’). Amongst governmentality scholars, the other main theoretical reference point for this book, there are two different positions. Foucault himself uses the term ‘neo-liberalism’ in his influential 1979 Collège de France lecture course The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault, 2008; see also O’Malley, 2004; Read, 2009). Nikolas Rose (1999), on the other hand, prefers the term ‘advanced liberalism’, partly as a way of downplaying the more ‘epochal’ connotations implied by the ‘neo-’ prefix and also to accommodate better the diversity of contemporary liberal governance (see also Rose, 1996). I have been somewhat torn about which term to use in this book, not least because I agree with much of Braithwaite’s argument on this. But I have plumped in the end for the label ‘neo-liberalism’, primarily because it is the most widely understood and used term to describe the contemporary era, utilized not just across different academic disciplines but also in the public sphere. I tend to agree as well with O’Malley (2004: 76) that to the extent that this is mainly about terminology rather than substance, it is not a ‘matter over which I want to spill much ink’. What then are the main contours of this most recent mutation in liberal
governance? There is a vast and still growing literature here. Aside from the regulatory and Foucauldian perspectives referred to above, David Harvey’s recent book A Brief History of Neoliberalism offers an interesting and informative take on it which brings together a lot of this literature and is well worth reading (Harvey, 2007). I draw from this eclectic and diverse body of scholarship five key and inter-related dimensions of neo-liberalism. First, neo-liberalism involves a revival of certain elements of nineteenth-
century liberal capitalism, in particular, the renewed primacy of the idea of the ‘free market’ as a central mechanism in the effective and efficient operation of a capitalist economy. However, this ‘revival’ is not simply or solely a ‘return to the past’; neo-liberalism has a distinctive and new character (LeviFaur, 2005: 15). It certainly shares the valorizing of economic activity with its nineteenth-century counterpart, seeing the economic sphere as the dominant realm of society, but takes this considerably further. As Rose (1999: 141) suggests, the economic approach has come to dominate our entire understanding of human behaviour which is now reconceptualized as ‘calculative actions undertaken through the universal human faculty of choice’. Garland (2001: 190) calls this the shift from a social to an economic style of reasoning. What is new about neo-liberalism’s perspective on economic activity is that it focuses on competition rather than exchange (Foucault,
2008). Homo economicus is now recast as a ‘creature whose tendency to compete must be fostered’ (Read, 2009: 28). Second, with this new focus on competition, the central liberal formula of
‘laissez-faire’ is transformed. The optimal conditions for competition are not achievable simply by a passive strategy of ‘leaving markets alone’ and allowing Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ to work its magic. Rather, the conditions of the market need to be nurtured and protected by active intervention. Whilst exchange was something that occurred ‘naturally’ within markets, competition is an ‘artificial relation’ that has to be created and then sustained (Foucault, 2008; Read, 2009: 28). Third, this emphasis on competition has spread across diverse areas,
including the governmental sphere. Innovations like privatization and marketization have colonized many new areas – from prisons, to health care, to telecommunications, to transport. Contrary to some claims, this has been accompanied by a proliferation of regulatory instruments and technologies, rather than any overall trend towards deregulation (Braithwaite, 2008). This is not as straightforward as just saying that central state oversight and regulation have increased. The picture is a good deal more complex than that. Regulation now also occurs increasingly beyond the state in privatesector and non-governmental agencies, as well as in transnational networks. It is this thickening, extending and spreading of regulation and governance that characterizes contemporary neo-liberal capitalism and which is encapsulated in the idea of ‘regulatory capitalism’ (Levi-Faur, 2005; Braithwaite, 2008). Fourth, within neo-liberal capitalism, there has been a shift away from the
primacy of production towards a new emphasis on consumption – the rise of the ‘consumer society’ in shorthand (see Bauman, 1988; Miller and Rose, 1997; Rose, 1999: 85-89). This is connected with the new economic style of reasoning referred to above, as individuals are increasingly obliged ‘to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice’ (Rose, 1999: 87), with choices about consumption central to the construction of identities. Indeed, consumption has become a site for ‘symbolic competition’ between individuals about lifestyles and identity (Bauman, 1988: 58). Fifth, recent decades have also seen the ‘rise of risk’ (Garland, 2003) or the
emergence of a ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992), in the sense that risk has become a central organizing principle for life and hence a ‘defining characteristic of the world in which we live’ (Garland, 2003: 48). Again, there is a connection here with the idea of choice – risk requires the possibility of human choice. The two are thus ‘complementary’ and ‘parallel’ notions (O’Malley, 2004: 169). The neo-liberal incarnation of Homo economicus is a choice-maker, a consumer, a ‘competing creature’, required simultaneously to act responsibly by minimizing negative risks (O’Malley, 2004: 71-74) and to be entrepreneurial in taking risks in order to innovate (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992; O’Malley, 2004: 57-71).
