We are governed too much

**Some bits and pieces from the thesis' cutting room carpet. This off-cut is an attempt to delineate three responses to Neoliberalism**

There are two faultlines that run through writing on neoliberalism: effectively splitting comment and analysis of Neoliberalism into three camps. On the one hand are its supporters, who fail to see anything new or neo in what they consider to be Liberalism with its ‘traditional’ critique of government interference and belief in markets and civil associations as the storehouses and generators of human meaning and liberty. Secondly, there are those critiques of neoliberalism which identify its key method as the deregulation of state controls on capital and markets, a method which is articulated to other marketisations such as the privatisation of former state-owned enterprises, reductions in aspects of the social wage, and the installment of managerialist and casualisation regimes into state bureaucracies. For this second critical camp, the neoliberal project effects the removal of government from regulating and policing exchanges in what are often transnational market. This fostering of ‘the powerless state’ is cast by these critics as a de-democratising movement that reinstalls class divisions and deflects the costs of global trade and commerce unto the weakest and most vulnerable people. What is neo about Neoliberalism for these ‘Neoliberalism-removes-the-state’s-capacity to protect its citizens’ is that it is contra-Keynesian techniques of government [?]. The third stance on Neoliberalism arises out of Michel Foucault’s analysis, which initially coins the neologism governmentality in order to analyse a continuum of conduct ranging from techniques for ruling and guiding the self to those of states. The advantage of Foucault’s heuristic is that it brings to the surface the primary technique of Liberalism being a form of critique at being over-governed which constitutes a mode of self-government. In other words, the putative state of freedom from which the Liberal critique is issued is not outside government but is constituted in the act of the critique: an enacting of governmentality. Thus for political analysts and historians influenced by Foucault’s ideas on governmentality like Nikolas Rose Neoliberalism, advanced liberalism as he calls it, is a form of governing through freedom; a mode of governing that forms and guides conduct towards market rationalities but which is not the absence of government that either the first camp claim neoliberalism to be nor that which the second camp (inc Bourdieu, David Harvey, Michael Pusey) want to make present again through the modes of regulation familiar from the Keynesian period.

However, I don’t want to suggest that there is only the Foucauldian theory of Neo-liberalism, as the depiction of Neo-liberalism by the second camp is certainly descriptive of what constitutes a new attack on the Keynesian instruments of citizen support and formation. There has been a realignment in the wage-profit ratio since the mid-1970s when, proponents from the second camp like David Harvey argue, a redirection of capital into greater concentration occurred.