Abstract

The article seeks to understand the status of Foucault’s critiques of neoliberalism from the concept of biopolitics developed before his course La naissance de la biopolitique. Two theoretical presuppositions are mobilized to understand the passage from the issue of biopower to that of neoliberalism: Marx and the concept of relative surplus population, because Foucault’s questions on the concept of biopolitics centers around the concept of population. On the other hand, with Polanyi, we can understand how Foucault imagines the novelty of contemporary neoliberalism within an analysis of the contradiction of liberalism as historic capitalism. In the end, this article aims to analyze the categories of power in Foucault in the field of political economy.