On Foucault on Hume and Hegel, again.

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Near the end of the Birth of Biopolitics, in the final rushed lecture of April 4, 1979, Foucault claims, in an apparent aside, “there is Hegel—about whom I will not speak—and the state as the selfconsciousness and ethical realization of civil society.” (p. 309) It is the only explicit mention of Hegel in the Birth of Biopolitics.

Earlier, in lecture 4, on 31 January 1979, Foucault had given a kind of anticipatory summary of three-fold themes that what would follow in the lecture series: “Law and order, the state and civil society, and politics of life: these are the three themes that I would like to pick out in this broad and lengthy history of two centuries of liberalism.” (p. 78) Here the second theme, “the state and civil society,” is to a Parisian audience steeped in Kojève, Koyré, and Hyppolite a promise of a treatment of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, especially the third part, sections (2-3) on Civil Society and the State, roughly from paragraph 182 to paragraph 329.

In the course summary, Foucault writes about his own intentions that “Instead of turning the distinction between the state and civil society into an historical universal enabling us to examine every concrete system, we may try to see in it a form of schematization peculiar to a particular technology of government.” (319) While Foucault is explicitly relying on Paul Veyne’s (critical) terminology — ‘historical universal’ — he is again clearly alluding to Hegel, perhaps even historicizing Hegel, and suggesting that the distinction between state and civil society is itself a technique of governmentality. This is anticipated in the final lecture which he starts with the observation that ‘civil society’ is itself a “concept of governmental technology.” (296)

As an aside, when in the final lecture, Foucault analyzes this very concept, he does so by way of Ferguson (and Adam Smith). But as others have noted (see, for example, this astute essay by Samantha Ashenden), Foucault’s treatment of civil society leaves out a lot of Ferguson’s own concerns (with civic virtue, and the corruptions caused by commercial society), and has an awkward relationship with Smith’s text.

This all by way of set-up. Today, I want to return, again, to Foucault’s lecture of 28 March, 1979 (Lecture 11) of The Birth of Biopolitics.+ In it he claims that “the theory of the subject in English empiricism probably represents one of the most important mutations, one of the most important theoretical transformations in Western thought since the Middle Ages.” He goes on to claim that what is distinctive is that empiricism introduces “in the form of a subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable” and which constitute a self. While Foucault credits Locke with the innovation, he explores the topic in detail by way of Hume’s metaphysics of self. Foucault sums up the significance of his own treatment that “This principle of an irreducible, non-transferable, atomistic individual choice which is unconditionally referred to the subject himself is what is called interest.” (p. 272)

Now, I have noted that Foucault’s treatment of Hume here has a two-fold clear contribution to the wider narrative of the Birth of Biopolitics: first, it is part of a larger, explicit natural history of homo oeconomicus that Foucault weaves through his lectures; second, — and here Foucault echoes Halévy and Milton Friedman— Hume is inscribed as the progenitor of the Benthamite-Radical strain of liberalism that is revived in, and given a new mathematical formulation by, Becker-Stigler’s program of the ‘new’ Chicago economics. This strain is explicitly contrasted with an alternative strain that Foucault identifies with Rousseau and Kant. This contrast in Foucault oddly shadows’ Rawls’s social contract vs utilitarianism distinction, but is not identical to it.

So far so good. It’s easy to think that Foucault is fundamentally attracted to empiricism here because it represents a kind of rupture. In the span of a few minutes Foucault repeatedly emphasizes the novelty of the material he is describing: “one of the most important mutations, one of the most important theoretical transformations in Western thought since the Middle Ages…”; “What English empiricism introduces—let’s say, roughly, with Locke—and doubtless for the first time in Western philosophy”; “it reveals something which absolutely did not exist before.” (pp. 272-3)

But the significance here is not on the novelty of the material, but in the content. As Foucault puts it explicitly: “What is important is the appearance of interest for the first time as a form of both immediately and absolutely subjective will.” (P. 273, emphasis added, also here in the French: [L'important, c'est que l' intérêt' apparaît, et ceci pour la première fois, comme une forme de volonté, une forme de volonté à la fois immédiate et absolument subjective.]) Notice that in French, Foucault repeats himself here. The terminology is not Humean, but quasi-Hegelian.

Not to put too fine point on it but I now think Hume is here treated by Foucault as the ultimate contrast with Rousseau as re-interpreted (and one is tempted to say rationalized) by Hegel. For in Hegel a pure will (understood as a kind of form of thought) is posited as “the principle of the state.” (See Philosophy of Right, para 258). As Hegel puts it (in Knox’s translation):

Confronted with the principle of the individual [‘absolutely subjective'] will, we must remember the fundamental conception that the objective will is that which is rational in itself or in its concept, whether or not it is recognized by individuals and affirmed by their arbitrary wills. We must remember that its opposite, i.e. knowing and willing, or subjective freedom (the only thing contained in the principle of the individual will) comprises only one moment, and therefore a onesided moment, of the Idea of the rational will, i.e. of the will which is rational solely because what it is in itself it also is for itself.

To simplify a bit (and in general don’t trust me being sophisticated on Hegel), Rousseau’s account of the General Will— an idea that itself most be kept completely distinct from a mere summation of our particular interested wills —, in which each of us remains unified to a corporate body and simultaneously free as self-legislators is assimilated (and de-anthropomorphized) by Hegel and identified with the law-governed state. Here’s Hegel’s version: “The Idea of the state in modern times has a special character in that the state is the actualization of freedom not in accordance with subjective whim but in accordance with the concept of the will, i.e. in accordance with its universality and divinity.” (emphasis added.)

So, Hume’s account of the subject is dramatized by Foucault in order to sketch a vital contrast with the metaphysical anthropology of the subject presupposed by Hegel (and Hegel’s Rousseau). For, as Foucault implies the Humean subject is incapable of participating in or giving rise to (or grounding) such a General Will.

The critics of the Humean subject will emphasize the unreality of the atomistic individual. (This is what followers of Polanyi and Marx will point to; we are socially embedded.) But as Foucault discerns, the Humean is far more extreme than that: what’s atomistic is not the individual, but each choice within an economic or legal subject. Such choice is fundamentally ungrounded, but not because it is mere whim, but because it expresses or constitutes interest. It need not be whim, as Foucault shows when he gets to Becker, who treats such ungrounded choices in terms of “any conduct which responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment” as possible instances of rational agency.

I suspect that for Foucault, the significance of the Humean absolutely subjective will resides in its in principle opposition to any doctrine of the harmony of interests. But let me leave that in the margins here.

+Today’s post can be read as a kind of tortured post-script to this forthcoming paper (here):