In "The Birth of Biopolitics," one of the course descriptions collected in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth [The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1] just out from the New Press, Foucault wrote: "...German liberalism of the second postwar period was defined, programmed, and even to a certain extent put into practice by men who, starting in the years 1928-1950, had belonged to the Freiburg school...and who had later expressed themselves in the journal Ordo. At the intersection of neo-Kantian philosophy, Husserl's phenemonology, and Weber's sociology, on certain points close to the Viennese economists, concerned about the historical correlation between economic processes and practical structures, men like Eucken, W. Roepke, Franz Bohm, and Von Rustow had conducted their critique on three different political fronts: Soviet socialism, National Socialism, and interventionist policies inspired by Keynes. But they addressed what they considered as a single adversary: a type of eocnomic government systematically ignorant of the market metchanisms that were the only thing capable of price-forming regulation. Ordo-liberalism, working on th basic themes of the liberal technology of government, tried to define what a market economy could be, organized (but not planned or directed) within an institutional and juridical framework that, on the on hand, would offer the guarantees and limitations of law, and, on the other, would make sure that the freedom of economic processes did not cause any social distortion." This was the topic of the first part of Foucault's course that year; the second was "what is called 'American neoliberalism': that liberalism which is generally associate with the Chicago school and which also developed in reaction against the 'excessive government' exhibited in its eyes, starting with Simon, by the New Deal, war-planning, and the great economic and social programs generally supported by postwar Democratic administrations." Does anyone know about the Ordo school Foucault spoke of? Two footnotes: (1) "biopolitics" is Foucault's term for the "endeavor, began in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems prsented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race..." (2) In his book on Foucault, James Miller says that Foucault developed, late in his life, a serious sympathy in Austrian economics and English liberalism as limits to state power, and strategies for maximizing the play of individual "will" (spectres of Nietzsche....). Doug -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer 250 W 85 St New York NY 10024-3217 USA +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>
