Theoretical fundamentals of neoliberalism: some notes from Foucault, Dardot and Laval
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The anti-democratic turn produced by neoliberalism is, without a doubt, a sign of our times. But here we intend to show that studying it as a logical consequence of a new political rationality results in the painting of a total apocalyptic picture (1) for democracy, (2) for politics and (3) for the subject. If we could continue to think of neoliberalism as an ideology, whose field of forces would work with very well-defined mechanisms, but not as a radical transformation of the modes of political domination, it would be possible to understand the de-democratization that characterizes our time in the context in which which is currently understood as thinkers inscribed in the Marxist tradition, i.e., as a new chapter in the historical tension between capitalism and democracy. In the present paper, we intend to reconstruct the notion of rationality, in Foucault, as it began to appear In Defense of Society and the way in which this notion is definitively associated with neoliberalism in The birth of biopolitics, with a view to specifying the way in which its novelty is articulated there. In a second moment, we present the conflict between this new form of government and democratic politics, suggested by the texts of Dardot and Laval. Last but not least, we point out the epistemological limits that the Foucauldian perspective has to study the democratization processes that permeate contemporary capitalist societies from the concept of neoliberal rationality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.070 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".