ABSTRACT
What can debates about public policies tell us about rival conceptions of how society should be defended in the face of the precarity and inequalities generated by neoliberal governmentality? This chapter engages this question by focusing on policy debates emerging in the late 2000s about regulating the commercialisation of healthcare in South Africa. It focuses on government and the for-profit health sector’s contrasting and sometimes overlapping policy arguments about the extent to which the commercialisation of healthcare is problematic, how this phenomenon impacts citizens and public institutions, and how society’s well-being can best be promoted given the political difficulties of reversing healthcare commercialisation. Thus, I illustrate how policymaking processes on seemingly technical questions also involve policy debates about broader philosophical questions regarding the boundaries and purposes of political communities.
