What can economists learn from Foucault?

Abstract

A plain question of what economists can learn from historian and philosopher Michel Foucault suggests an answer based on a consideration of his elaborate and inter-related historical, political, and philosophical inquiries into knowledge, power, and ethics. First of all, economists, via reading Foucault, can aptly achieve a critical understanding of knowledge they engage with that the objects of their study such as individual, the market, the state, exchange, production, consumption, entrepreneurship, wage and profit have a political, normative and performative character. As such, mainstream economists’ general attitude towards economic knowledge as a neutral and representative tool of fact is replaced with an understanding that considers it as the constitutive element of reality. The distinction at this point between fact and reality denotes that fact being the state of affairs and things we see and sense, reality is the state we experience and live through at a moment of history under the regulations and power effects of the institutional and knowledge order. This way of understanding the political, normative, and performative character of knowledge posits economic knowledge itself as an element of reality in a manner that it is shaped by material practices and, in turn, influences actuality by giving it a line of development through producing a truth regime further than scientific explanations. Foucault helps us understand that with the rise of capitalism economic knowledge is carved out under the auspices of liberalism since the time of Adam Smith down to the present and has gained a constitutive political, normative, and performative character in the sense that it does not restrict itself to produce scientific explanations regarding the market and public economy. By extension and implication, it generates a type of knowledge beneficial to (neo)liberal political reasoning in governing the society at large within its human and non-human arrangements in accordance with and for the sake of the market economy and its principles. As a result, (neo)liberal economics for Foucault is a governmental