The Role of the Human Sciences in Neo-liberalism

Following Foucault's analysis, we can see where the discourses of neo-liberalism tend to situate the human sciences. In Foucault's reading of Gary Becker's theory of human capital, we see that neo-liberalism was concerned with developing a theory of labor in which labor would not be reduced to either "labor-power" (Marx) or to time (Ricardo then Marx). In neo-liberal economic discourse, labor is no longer solely a quantative measurement (e.g. congealed labor time), but something that has to be studied qualitatively (i.e. sociologically). As with modernization theory, a theory of social action is to be developed.

Neo-liberalism is marked not only by the expansion of economic rationality into spheres previously thought distinct from economic relations, but by the attempt to redefine and regulate behavior by instigating the active application of economic principles on the part of individual subjects. This is one aspect of what Foucault calls the "shift in point of view" (252). Neo-liberalism (particularly of the American variety) will try to discover the psychological and behavioral foundations for the search for work, and to actively produce economic subjects. The only poverty to be addressed is absolute poverty--the conditions under which a portion of the population sinks below the capacity to consume. Relative poverty (between different social classes for example) is dealt with by phrases like "Inequality is the same for all" (Roepke, 143). The effect of the penetration of such economic discourse into daily life through both knowledge and "social policy" is not only to naturalize or mystify existing class relations (which would be the usual Marxist interpretation), but to introduce a framework through which disparities of material well-being can be interpreted according to economic principles which rely on an idea of the individual human subject as homo economicus. Poverty is systemic, perhaps, but nonetheless the freedom of competition between individual enterprises must be defended in the last instance. The human being is almost genetically defined by its economic character.

Like all universal humanisms before it, neo-liberalism relies on a particular notion of the species-essence (Gattungswesen; translated "species-being" in Marx). Surprisingly, perhaps, the rudiments of neo-liberalism's species-essence are not too far off from Marx's own definition of man as fundamentally a laboring subject. To what degree does it matter whether this labor is defined as individual enterprise or as collective labor?