ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism has been called a rascal concept - promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Some are more used to the term neo-conservative to describe a certain recent form of the New Right, at least since the administration of President George W. Bush. Foucault's analysis alerts people to the plurality of forms of neoliberalism, their emergence within but movement across particular national borders and temporal contexts. Foucault demonstrates the worth of an intellectual-historical and even biographical study of the variants of neoliberalism and their key figures, which he himself recognizes as something of a departure from his usual methods. The problem of neoliberal subjectivity does not appear until halfway through the ninth lecture of The Birth of Biopolitics, which is also the first lecture concerning American neoliberalism. Foucault contrasts the treatment of labor in Marx and the human capital theorists.
