ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out Foucault’s analysis of liberalism, drawing upon his ‘governmentality lectures’ given at College de France in the late 1970s.1 In these lectures on early liberalism, Foucault drew particularly upon the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume and Adam Ferguson (Gordon 1991, Lemke 2001). The attempt was not, however, to write an ‘intellectual history’ of the work of any author, or set of authors. Foucault’s ambition was rather to write a social history of liberalism. More specifi cally, he wished to demonstrate a ‘deep historical link’ between three ‘movements’ in Western history: fi rst, the movement that replaced the ‘administrative’ state with a ‘governmental’ state; second, the movement that brought about the emergence of ‘the population’ as a fi eld of intervention and as an object of governmental techniques; and fi nally, the process which isolated ‘the economy’ as a specifi c sector of reality, and political economy as the principal form of knowledge of that fi eld of reality. Foucault intended this work as a ‘history of the present’. These three movements, he said, are not just of ‘historical interest’. They constitute “a solid series”, which “even today has assuredly not been dissolved” (Foucault 1991a: 102).
