Simon Kuznets, the inventor of the concept of GDP, noted in his first report to the US Congress in 1934:

the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.^[3]

In 1962, he also wrote:

Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and returns, and between the short and long run...Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.^[4]

Wiki

 

ZAMORA

 KÉVIN BOUCAUD-VICTOIRE

What is the contribution of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism?

DANIEL ZAMORA

His analysis is remarkable in that it represents one of the first attempts to closely study neoliberalism as a thought collective — the things that united it as well as the great differences that coexisted within it. We often forget that between Friedman and Hayek there was an intellectual chasm. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that more researched studies of the intellectual history and analysis of neoliberalism appeared. So Foucault offered one of the first interesting interpretations of its main concepts and ideas.

In particular, he distinguishes it from classical liberalism, in that it isn’t a form of “laissez-faire” but, on the contrary, an active politics of market construction. There isn’t the domain of the state on the one hand and the free play of market forces on the other hand. Foucault observes quite rightly that for the Austrian neoliberals the failure of nineteenth-century economic liberalism led them to see their own doctrine as one of actively and conscientiously constructing the market, an entity that was in no way natural. “There will not be the market game, which must be left free, and then the domain in which the state begins to intervene,” he explained in his lectures, “since the market, or rather pure competition, which is the essence of the market, can only appear if it is produced, and if it is produced by an active governmentality.”

Another interesting element of his analysis, in this case bearing mainly on American neoliberalism, is that it sees this new neoliberal mentality as “environmental.” It wasn’t aiming to produce subjectivities but to stimulate individuals to behave in certain ways, mainly by acting on their economic environment. Neoliberalism as a “technology of the environment,” he said in his lectures, heralds a “massive withdrawal with regard to the normative-disciplinary system.” Foucault observed that for someone like Gary Becker, crime should be dealt with by acting on economic incentives and not by constructing criminal subjectivities. In the neoliberal view, the criminal is merely someone whose cost-benefit calculus inclines them toward crime.

As a result, the goal of economic action should be to alter these variables so as to “optimally” reduce the “incentive” for crime. Foucault thus understands neoliberalism not as the withdrawal of the state, but as the withdrawal of its techniques of subjection. It wasn’t trying to assign a certain identity to us, but simply trying to act on our environment.

For the premier thinker of modern techniques of normalization, that’s saying something! This analysis explains the deep connection between the deployment of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality in mid-1970s France and Foucault’s championing of the invention of new subjectivities. Far from being opposed, in his eyes the two go together. Neoliberalism, being more open to pluralism, seems to offer a less constrictive framework for the proliferation of minoritarian experiments.

But all of this represents less a critique of neoliberalism than a way of making its rationality intelligible. On this point, it’s significant that Gary Becker, one of the fathers of American neoliberalism, found himself in perfect agreement with Foucault’s analysis of his own texts. Critiquing neoliberalism means not mirroring its own image of itself, but, on the contrary, deconstructing the mythology it’s built for itself.

KÉVIN BOUCAUD-VICTOIRE

Would you agree with Jean-Claude Michéa when he says Foucault is the cultural complement of Hayek, Friedman, and Gary Becker?

DANIEL ZAMORA

I would say, more than “complementing” Hayek and Friedman, the problem with Foucault is that he implicitly embraced their representation of the market: that of a less normative, less coercive, and more tolerant space for minoritarian experiments than the welfare state, subject as it is to majority rule. Friedman always liked to say that “the ballot box produces conformity without unanimity” while “the market produces unanimity without conformity.” In his eyes, the market by definition represents a more democratic mechanism than political deliberation because it protects the plural nature of individual preferences.

Implicitly, I think Foucault helped to disseminate this false dichotomy. By that, I don’t mean we ought to jettison struggles against certain kinds of normalization or coercion — the art, as Foucault said, of “not being governed so much.” It’s true that the postwar welfare state aimed to reproduce a certain model of the family, and the justice system certain criminal “profiles.” But by definition, all politics — whether statist or neoliberal — is normative. And it’s good to contest these mechanisms. But that doesn’t mean that we can dispense with normativity. If we decide to grant everyone a basic income instead of free medical care, we’re substituting one normativity (which defines certain subjects through certain “social rights”) for another (which prioritizes individual “choice” in the market). But Foucault, in the context of French “anti-totalitarianism,” generally associated such mechanisms of normalization with the state, and in that way, he implicitly viewed the market as a site where normativity could be more easily subverted.

However important Foucault’s elaboration of the ways institutions like social security or the justice system could assign us to a certain conception of ourselves, he completely missed the normativity and coerciveness of the market. In his eyes, it was politics conceived on the model of sovereignty, especially via majority rule, that was essentially the space of coercion and normativity; the impersonal and decentralized signals of the market were a seductive alternative to political deliberation in that they seemed to protect minoritarian choices, precisely through the supposedly “environmental” way in which they acted.

Every economic or institutional configuration is normative — the important thing is to figure out what type of institutions we want. In a recent book, the philosopher Martin Hägglund wrote quite rightly that to be free does not mean being free from normative constraints, but rather being free to negotiate them, to transform them, to contest them. It’s the ability to build democratic institutions within which we might collectively define the norms that should govern society. The market does not offer an alternative to normativity, it merely loosens normativity’s grip on those with enough capital to enjoy the “choices” it offers.

 

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt concludes that political regimes ought not to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world. (1965, 279).

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

 World building and the normate figure

Eugenic world building depends on the imagined cultural figure I have termed the normate (Garland-Thomson, 1997). Both the cultural image and the human version of the normate embody the form, function, behaviors, and appearances that conform to all of the culturally valued traits in the social systems of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability. The normate is medically and socially hypernormal, displaying the markers of that status and collecting resources and status from this embodied form of social capital. The term normate,^ I suggest, usefully designates the social figure [through] which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings^ (8). So narrow, however, is the range of traits that marks normate status that only a minority of actual people^ qualify (8). In the 1960s, sociologist Erving Goffman gave shape to the normate by showing how actual people fell short of its standards. There is, Goffman wryly writes, only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports^ (1963, 128). Goffman's work in sociology suggests the way bodies seemingly naturally carry social capital in flesh, comportment, behavior, appearance, position, and history along with the shame that the image of the normate invokes from those who feel they deviate from this phantom majority figure. The image of the normate that Goffman lays out is, to use Paul K. Longmore's phrase, severely able-bodied^ (GarlandThomson 2005, 33). As rare and unattainable as complete^ normate status is, such a character nevertheless has great cultural influence. We all recognize this figure; many of us aspire to achieve it; few attain it. Normate status is more aspirational than realized. Actual people seldom fully qualify as normates and, when they do, fall quickly from its fulfillment. Those who for a brief moment in time and space can conform to the normate’s static image assume the authority and wield the power that normate status grants until the human condition inevitably revokes it. The normate figure serves the work of eugenic world building in several ways. First, it provides the bodily template of the ideal citizen, the imagined definitive person for whom the built environment is designed. Architecture and designers have traditionally focused on aesthetics rather than the actual use of buildings, thus tacitly assuming that the occupants of these spaces and the users of these products are normates (Hamraie 2012). The development of universal design — in response to disability rights legislation and the emergence of feminist architectural criticism — offers an explicit critique of the implied normate user as an exclusionary concept. The more recent emergence of user-based design or what might be called diversity of access architecture and design has attended to how human physiological variation determines the ways in which the built environment is used and, thus, who it admits and who it excludes. Second, the normate figure underwrites eugenic world building in the broad, influential modern project of medical normalization.6 The figure of the normate hovers behind the newborn citizen as an imagined potentiality. The promise of a newborn is that it will become a normate — that it will carry out an expected future enabled by normate embodiment. The largely unquestioned concept of beginning life as a "healthy baby^ anchors the projected normate future understood as a right of citizenship...Undervalued or stigmatized human variations understood broadly as disabilities or disadvantages are identified and marked for eugenic elimination...What is suppressed in the fictional future of the normate...is the inherent contingency of human embodiment as it moves through time and space in the journey we call life.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Thomson

''The headmistress, Ishiguro tells us in the novel, addresses Tommy and Kathy as poor creatures,^ alluding to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Ishiguro 2005, 254). The French teacher reveals to the couple that, despite the care and education they received, there have always been questions about whether these healthy human specimens were properly human^ (263). In fact, she goes on, We’re all afraid of you. I myself had to fight back my dread of you almost every day I was at Hailsham…I'd feel such revulsion…^ (269). For all of their normate function, capability, and appearance, Kathy and Tommy are irrevocably repulsive. Revulsion and fear are, of course, stock responses of the supposedly able-bodied to the supposedly disabled, the stock figures of eugenic rhetoric. The headmistress and teacher steadfastly retain their position of superiority in this perverse quartet as benevolent caretakers of the poor creatures.^ The sacrifice of the carers, the donation of their labor for the benefit of the ungrateful and undeserving recipients of care, is another stock disability narrative that is both enforced and reversed in the narrative confusion of donors and recipients, worthy and unworthy, human and inhuman''.

"Never Let Me Go is no sci-fi thriller, however, but rather an elegy haunted with a melancholic longing for the lost innocence of the idyllic childhood lived at Hailsham, as well as the lost companions, friends, and lovers who have completed^ by the end of the story — as the narrator herself will soon do. The novel and film press us to consider who we let go, why we let them go, and how we let them go. The program at this haunted English boarding school, we come to understand as the story unfolds, cultivates the so-called students’ well-bred beauty, intelligence, and their artistic, athletic, and interpersonal qualities. This grim reversal of the accepted criteria for the fully human becomes poignantly apparent as we come to identify with the clones and against their caretaker/captors, who increasingly display a perverse efficiency reminiscent of Nazi eugenicists and death camp bureaucrats. Our own melancholy develops as we realize that these talented, capable, and sensitive young people will die before they can fulfill the potential that their careful upbringing and natural gifts promise. Moreover, these sensitive, capable youths are resigned to their eventual fate, confinement, and limitation, apparently accepting it all as inevitable. The lonely Kathy H. accedes to the duties of "carer,^ which is a short reprieve from donation as she attends to donors whose organs are harvested until they eventually complete^ while still in the prime of youth and health (Ishiguro 2005, 2-3). The arc of the narrative forces them — and us — to realize that no matter how amply they demonstrate their humanity, their capabilities, and their valued qualities, there is no possibility of "deferral,^ no reprieve from organ donation for clones (Ishiguro 2005, 151). The predetermined fate — the absolutely closed future for the kinds of people we think of as having an absolutely open future — creates a quietly tragic memento mori to all of our fates. By inverting the positions of normate and disabled, Never Let Me Go makes the world of the narrative strange, thus calling into question the reigning logic of our ordinary world. So, the suddenly confusing world of the story challenges several assumptions fundamental to the ability/disability system. Perhaps the most perplexing and therefore arresting of the story’s strange inversions is that the uber-fit and healthy young Hailsham donor clones Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy — the main triangle of the story — are biologically fiercely able-bodied but socioculturally disabled in the disordered world of the story. In other words, they paradoxically possess normate embodiment and disabled status. These reversals make apparent and challenge three interrelated assumptions about the lives of disabled people and the lives of normates that are transmitted and received through acculturation and circulated through attitudes and public discourse so as to seem sensible, true, and self-evident.10 The work of the broad disability rights movement has been to question these widely accepted premises and show how such narratives contribute to a culture of discrimination against people with disabilities. These assumptions are, perhaps, most harmful in that they underpin the eugenic logic of eliminating disability and people with disabilities from the world. The first commonplace assumption about normate and disabled lives that Never Let Me Go challenges with its strange reversals is the belief that a meritocracy based on ability, physical and intellectual capital, and accomplishment structures the social order. This belief in a just universe, organized either by a higher power or Darwinian survival of the fittest, both blames and credits people for their status in the ability/disability system. In this worldview, normate and disabled status seem to be deserved states of advantage or disadvantage. Normate status — according to the logic of meritocracy — is earned privilege, whereas disabled status, even when it is not understood as volitional, confers natural inferiority and indisputable biological disadvantage. The Hailsham world initially appears to be a meritocracy, as any typical elite institution claims. However, the school turns out to be a perverse laboratory that first sets up and then reverses our understanding of a proper meritocracy. In fact, Hailsham is part of a system that reverses meritocracy’s logic by victimizing the healthy and fit — those who most closely approach normate status. Indeed, in the Hailsham world, neither achievement nor ability will redeem these deserving, accomplished donors from their ineluctable fate — from ending up at the very bottom of this social hierarchy — even while they possess all the bodily and intellectual capital that might put them at the top of the social order. The Hailsham world turns around the fundamental premise of eugenic world building by sacrificing normates for the benefit of people with disabilities. The second assumption about disabled people and normates that Never Let Me Go confounds is the conviction that the quality of life for people with disabilities is lower and that people with normate status enjoy a higher quality of life. The human variations we think of as disabilities are imagined to significantly reduce the quality of one's life due to functional limitations, bodily conditions, and/or physiological/psychological impairments. In other words, one’s bodily state is understood to be the source of life quality for people with disabilities and normates. In the strange world of Never Let Me Go, however, the clone donors — who are bred, treated, and nurtured from conception foreword to be hypernormates — have a substantially lower quality of life than the disabled recipients of their donations. Despite the fact that life at Hailsham is idyllic and amply provides basic life needs, such as good food, comfortable shelter, healthcare, and sustaining interpersonal social networks, the clones are essentially orphans with no sustaining family structure or capacity to make decisions for their own lives. They lead restricted lives, segregated from the public sphere, and have no access to the rights or obligations of citizenship that the larger population of potential recipients or caretakers can exercise. A group from which they are excluded on the basis of physiological distinctions determines the shape and content of their lives. The border between donors and recipients is absolute and structures the quality of life for both groups. In contrast, the citizen recipients of the clones’ donations, represented in the story by the Hailsham headmistress, have access to the resources and opportunities of full citizenship, social and geographical mobility, self-determination, and health decisions. Indeed, the fundamental premise of the narrative in which the healthy and fit clones are sacrificed for the benefit of disabled and unfit citizens reverses the traditional hierarchies of social value in which disabled people are taken to have lower quality of life and life chances while nondisabled people are imagined to have higher quality of life and increased life opportunities. Regardless of the clones’ embodied capital — their wide array of physical, appearance, and educational capital — they occupy a very low status position in the inverted order of Never Let Me Go. Their confinement and lack of agency to determine the course of their own lives isolates them completely from full members of the society. As adults, they don't know how to interact with nonclones or to use public space in any way. In the film, they wander around the town, incompetently looking in windows trying to figure out how other people who seem like them act, interact, and use the larger the world of the village. On the other hand, the supposedly disabled, who are the recipients of the clones’ biological capital, do not heavily bear the stigma of disability because their disabilities will supposedly be cured by the harvesting program that will deliver them back to normate status. Thus, those considered fully human in the world of Never Let Me Go will only ever be temporarily disabled. So even though the reigning majority will eventually transition into the category of disabled, the stigma of that status is relieved, or even removed, through the potential to shift back toward normate status as they literally take on the bodies of the clone donors''.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Rawls

The publication of A Theory of Justice (1971), by the American philosopher John Rawls, spurred a revival of interest in the philosophical foundations of political liberalism. The viability of liberalism was thereafter a major theme of political philosophy in English-speaking countries.

According to the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, liberalism is the conjunction of two ideals: (1) individuals should have liberty of thought and speech and wide freedom to live their lives as they choose (so long as they do not harm others in certain ways), and (2) individuals in any society should be able to determine through majority rule the laws by which they are governed and should not be so unequal in status or wealth that they have unequal opportunities to participate in democratic decision making. Various traditional and modern versions of liberalism differ from each other in their interpretation of these ideals and in the relative importance they assign to them.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls observed that a necessary condition of justice in any society is that each individual should be the equal bearer of certain rights that cannot be disregarded under any circumstances, even if doing so would advance the general welfare or satisfy the demands of a majority. This condition cannot be met by utilitarianism, because that ethical theory would countenance forms of government in which the greater happiness of a majority is achieved by neglecting the rights and interests of a minority. Hence, utilitarianism is unsatisfactory as a theory of justice, and another theory must be sought.

According to Rawls, a just society is one whose major political, social, and economic institutions, taken together, satisfy the following two principles:


1. Each person has an equal claim to a scheme of basic rights and liberties that is the maximum consistent with the same scheme for all.

2. Social and economic inequalities are permissible only if: (a) they confer the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society, and (b) they are attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

The basic rights and liberties in principle 1 include the rights and liberties of democratic citizenship, such as the right to vote; the right to run for office in free elections; freedom of speech, assembly, and religion; the right to a fair trial; and, more generally, the right to the rule of law. Principle 1 is accorded strict priority over principle 2, which regulates social and economic inequalities.

Principle 2 combines two ideals. The first, known as the “difference principle,” requires that any unequal distribution of social or economic goods (e.g., wealth) must be such that the least-advantaged members of society would be better off under that distribution than they would be under any other distribution consistent with principle 1, including an equal distribution. (A slightly unequal distribution might benefit the least advantaged by encouraging greater overall productivity.) The second ideal is meritocracy, understood in a very demanding way. According to Rawls, fair equality of opportunity obtains in a society when all persons with the same native talent (genetic inheritance) and the same degree of ambition have the same prospects for success in all competitions for positions that confer special economic and social advantages.

Why suppose with Rawls that justice requires an approximately egalitarian redistribution of social and economic goods? After all, a person who prospers in a market economy might plausibly say, “I earned my wealth. Therefore, I am entitled to keep it.” But how one fares in a market economy depends on luck as well as effort. There is the luck of being in the right place at the right time and of benefiting from unpredictable shifts in supply and demand, but there is also the luck of being born with greater or lesser intelligence and other desirable traits, along with the luck of growing up in a nurturing environment. No one can take credit for this kind of luck, but it decisively influences how one fares in the many competitions by which social and economic goods are distributed. Indeed, sheer brute luck is so thoroughly intermixed with the contributions one makes to one’s own success (or failure) that it is ultimately impossible to distinguish what people are responsible for from what they are not. Given this fact, Rawls urges, the only plausible justification of inequality is that it serves to render everyone better off, especially those who have the least.

Rawls tries to accommodate his theory of justice to what he takes to be the important fact that reasonable people disagree deeply about the nature of morality and the good life and will continue to do so in any nontyrannical society that respects freedom of speech. He aims to render his theory noncommittal on these controversial matters and to posit a set of principles of justice that all reasonable persons can accept as valid, despite their disagreements.

Despite its wide appeal, Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism soon faced challengers. An early conservative rival was libertarianism. According to this view, because people are literally the sole rightful owners of themselves, no one has property rights in anyone else (no person can own another person), and no one owes anything to anyone else. By “appropriating” unowned things, individuals may acquire over them full private ownership rights, which they may give away or exchange. One has the right to do whatever one chooses with whatever one legitimately owns, as long as one does not harm others in specified ways—i.e., by coercion, force, violence, fraud, theft, extortion, or physical damage to another’s property. According to libertarians, Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism is unjust because it would allow (indeed, require) the state to redistribute social and economic goods without their owners’ consent, in violation of their private ownership rights.

The most spirited and sophisticated presentation of the libertarian critique was Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), by the American philosopher Robert Nozick (1938–2002). Nozick also argued that a “minimal state,” one that limited its activities to the enforcement of people’s basic libertarian rights, could have arisen in a hypothetical “state of nature” through a process in which no one’s basic libertarian rights are violated. He regarded this demonstration as a refutation of anarchism, the doctrine that the state is inherently unjustified.

Rawls’s theory of justice was challenged from other theoretical perspectives as well. Adherents of communitarianism, such as Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer, urged that the shared understanding of a community concerning how it is appropriate to live should outweigh the abstract and putatively impartial requirements of universal justice. Even liberal egalitarians criticized some aspects of Rawls’s theory. Ronald Dworkin, for example, argued that understanding egalitarian justice requires striking the correct balance between individuals’ responsibility for their own lives and society’s collective responsibility to provide genuine equal opportunity for all citizens.