Abstract
The article investigates and vindicates the surprising claim Foucault makes in his lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics that the philosophical roots of post-war German neoliberalism lie in Husserl’s phenomenology. I study the similarities between Husserl’s phenomenology and Walter Eucken’s economic theory and examine the way that Husserl’s idea of the historical a priori assumes a determinate role in Eucken’s economic thinking. I also return to Foucault’s lectures in order to show how a version of the historical a priori continues to operate in his history of governmentality, and how it functions as a counterpoint to the universalizing approach to the history of science, such as Husserl and Eucken’s. I conclude by rephrasing my initial question on the philosophical connections between Husserl’s phenomenology and German neoliberalism as a broader philosophical question on the political effects of our philosophical understanding of the history of science.
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Notes
Eucken’s most important book The Foundations of Economics contains explicit references to both Logical Investigations and Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, for example. See e.g., Eucken (1951, 321).
Planning was required, but it had to be planning for competition, not instead of it. The government had to construct the legal, institutional, and cultural conditions that gave competition between enterprises and entrepreneurial conduct maximal range. Böhm (1980, 115), one of founders of the Freiburg School along with Eucken, held that maintaining a well-functioning market economy required continuous nursing and gardening, comparable to creating and maintaining a highly cultivated park. Friedrich Hayek also formulates this principle explicitly in The Road to Serfdom (1944), for example. See e.g., Hayek (1944, 13; 27).
Miettinen (2015) also presents an interesting reading of Husserl’s 1920/24 lecture course on ethics, viewing it as a profound critique of a certain understanding of political idealism, such as that of the ordoliberal tradition. According to Miettinen, Husserl’s aim in these lectures was to problematize the notion that idealities in politics could be static and exact. Instead, political idealism could only be understood as a dynamic principle responsive to the concrete demands of a particular, historical lifeworld.
See, e.g., Husserl 1970.
Since its publication the book went through five more editions and was translated into several languages. Although it is hardly read anymore by contemporary economists—Rudolf Richter, for example, describes it as “tedious” and laments the way Eucken understood economics as a human science—it is nevertheless considered as one of the key texts of neoliberal economic theory. See Richter (2010, 2).
The Historical School refers to the influence of Gustav Schmoller and the Theoretical School to the economics represented by the work of Carl Menger.
According to Eucken (1951, 56–57), the fact that they had both been incapable of predicting and explaining the Great Depression disqualified them empirically.
Eucken’s other examples of centralized economies include the traditional Jesuit community and the society of the Incas. He writes that “We are concerned with an ideal type or pure form, which has not been discovered simply from considering communist states but from the study of the whole economic history. Traces of this type of economic system have been found throughout history, and we have abstracted the significant characteristics for constructing our model” (Eucken 1951, 178–179).
Physiocrats were a school of economists founded in eighteenth century France. Their key tenet was the curious belief that land was the source of all wealth, but they also advocated the idea that profoundly influenced Adam Smith and economic liberalism that government policy should respect and work accordance with the operation of natural economic laws. Foucault discusses the physiocrats in several instances in the lectures Security, Territory, Population—the lectures that preceded The Birth of Biopolitics.
Han (2002, 7) shows how the distinction borrowed from Georges Canguilhem between the actual predication of truth and the possibility for a statement to be “in the truth”, its acceptability as a candidate for a game of truth, becomes central in Foucault’s genealogies. Foucault seeks to identify the background conditions that make it possible for a set of propositions to be scientifically acceptable, and hence capable of being verified or falsified by scientific procedures.
References
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Eucken, Walter. 1951. The foundations of economics. History and theory in the analysis of economic reality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Han, Beatrice. 2002. Foucault’s critical project: Between the transcendental and the historical. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hayek, Friedrich. 1944. The road to serfdom. London: Routledge.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Husserl abbreviations
C The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. David Carr (Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
OG ‘Origin of Geometry,’ in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. David Carr (Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
Appendix 2: Foucault abbreviations
BB The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2008.
STP Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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Oksala, J. Foucault, Husserl and the philosophical roots of German neoliberalism. Cont Philos Rev 49, 115–126 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9361-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9361-1