ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how, from the end of the 1970s, Michel Foucault radicalizes his analytic of power by modifying the schemes and interpretive categories of Surveiller et punir. Philosophy has to dispense with the ghost of Leviathan, with the spectre of sovereignty, through an exorcism that frees philosophy from the obsession with power as well as the latter's influence on the philosophical potential for the imagination of freedom. For Foucault, liberalism is not a political theory. Rather, it is, concretely, a "technology", the way in which the existing configuration of the relation between the governors and the governed came about. The conflict that inaugurates the era of neoliberal politics is that between the governors and the governed. This lucid conclusion is not an option for "liberalism" on the part of the later Foucault.
