Abstract

The genealogy of capitalism sketched by Foucault at the end of the 1970s shakes up whatever we thought we knew about liberalism. Adam Smith’s observation retains all its relevance : politics and the economy are neither to be superposed nor to be reconciled. Liberal governance attempts to face this fact. Its tasks of circumventing, encircling, reaching from the outside are mediated by two modalities of application, which correspond to two techniques of normalisation : the first one , predominant, deals with the bigger items ; the second one , active in the underground, deals with the details. It corners more closely the multiplicities, life and the conducts. A true politics of multiplicities would suppose an intervention “from the outside of” the agents we take for natural or spontaneous, but which are the objects of a constant care and re-institution : market, firms, workers