Abstract

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, there has been renewed interest in thinking critically about the pro-market form of governance known as neoliberalism. Foucault’s 1978-9 lectures at the Collège de France – translated into English under the title The Birth of Biopolitics – have been central to this task. For, in spite of their title, these lectures have no explicit connection to the study of biopolitics, but instead map the emergence of different national trajectories of neoliberal reason from the mid-twentieth century onwards.