Don’t believe their benign articulation of neoliberalism. Biopolitical protection of capital markets can always find a justification for its interventions that circumvent the possibility of community building.

Sen’s methodological individualism and belief in the naturalness of the market is consistent with the ‘biopolitics’ (Foucault 2007, 2008) of liberal ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1991, 2008), which seeks, through the construction of rational, self-interested autonomous individuals, to reduce the great mass of culturally differentiated humanity to ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998; Shani 2010). Defined as ‘the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species become the object of a political strategy’, the origins of biopower or biopolitics, go back to the attempt, starting in Europe in the 18th century, ‘to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birth rate, life expectancy, race’ (Foucault 2008: 1). These problems, Foucault argues, are inseparable ‘from the framework of political rationality within which they appeared’: liberalism (Foucault 2008: 317). Liberalism, for Foucault, is neither an ideology nor a theory but a practice: ‘a principle and method of the rationalization of the exercise of government, a rationalization which obeys…the internal rule of maximum economy’ (Foucault 2008: 318). As a form of critical reflection on governmental practice, liberalism is based on the principle that ‘one always governs too much’ (Foucault 2008: 321, 319). This qualifies the pastoral impulse implicit in governmental rationality: the power to ‘make live’ which is itself a legacy of the pastoral individualising power of the Christian ecclesiastical pastorate (Foucault 2007: 364). Consequently, the ‘market’ role is crucial in deciding who lives and who is disposable. In Foucault’s words, it enters the governmentalising processes as ‘privileged site of experiment in which one can pinpoint the effects of excessive governmentality’ (Foucault 2008: 320). The market was considered by the classical political economists of the 18th century to be directed by natural forces. For Adam Smith, the development of a market economy is the outcome of a natural propensity within people to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ in pursuit of their material self-interest. Our instinctive desire to better our condition produces mutually beneicial outcomes through the operation of (God’s) ‘invisible hand’ and universal laws governing prices and wages (Smith 1976). Through concepts such as the ‘true price’ that is formulated by the natural workings of the economy, the market appears as a site of ‘veridiction’. Since the sovereign is thought of as incapable of fully grasping the ‘truth’ of the market, classical economists were therefore opposed to mercantilist restrictions on the free low of goods and service and considered the proper role of government to ‘let things follow their course’ (Foucault 2007: 48). Although they appeared as ‘external’, the limitations on sovereign power imposed by the ‘market’ were, consequently, internal to the process of governmentality. Consequently, liberalism appears as ‘the principle of the self-limitation of governmental reason’ (Foucault 2008: 20). Like Adam Smith and the other classical economists, Sen accepts the (internal) limitations placed on governmentality as ‘natural’ and, therefore, external to it. Human development, he argues, can only take place through participation in a market economy, which is the best guarantee of freedom. Where he departs from the neoliberal (but not the classical) tradition is in his insistence that the state and other governmentalising agencies can – and should – play an active role in the developmental process within the constraints imposed by the market. Whereas Smith and the other political economists considered homo oeconomicus to be a natural description of the human individual under conditions of freedom, Sen – in common with contemporary neoliberalism – believes that he or she has to be constructed through a discourse of ‘empowerment’. As a strategy of governmentality, ‘empowerment’ creates the liberal subjectivity needed for capitalism by ‘emancipating’ the individual from prior social and cultural arrangements and inculcating the skills and resources needed to participate in a market economy. The state, in Sen’s view, is pri marily responsible for the production of this liberal subjectivity through the dissemination, via compulsory education, of what Smith referred to as ‘habits of industry’: autonomy, calculation and relexivity. The ‘empowered’ individual is expected to be ‘unencumbered’ (Hopgood 2000) by communal and social ties and to possess the ability to calculate and the capacity for relexivity. A well-educated, healthy workforce made up of autonomous, calculating and relexive individuals will thus have the ‘capability’ (neoliberals prefer ‘capital’) to attract foreign direct investment and to generate economic development. For neoliberals, however, the state – particularly in the global South – has become a signiicant barrier to development. The state’s responsibility for executing the liberal project of modernity is entrusted instead to the private sector and a plethora of international, non-governmental and quasi-governmental organisations. This new institutional architecture is designed to allow neoliberal ‘governmentality’ (Ong 2006) to operate on a global scale. Neoliberal governmentality seeks to maximise market allocation at the expense of the state by making the market mechanism the sole legitimate means of allocating resources in society, thus rejecting the fundamentals of classical and ‘embedded’ liberalism. It responds to the biopolitical problems which beset human beings collectively as ‘a set of living beings forming a population’ by individualising them: as active informed citizens, individuals, and not the state, are made primarily responsible for their own welfare. Furthermore, the dominant ‘Chicago School’ of neoliberalism seeks ‘to extend the rationality of the market…to domains which are not exclusively or primarily economic’ (Foucault 2008: 323). This includes forcibly imposing ‘the rationality of the market’ on ‘populations’ living in indebted ‘developing’ societies through IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). SAPs seek to create the disciplinary mechanisms needed for the construction of homo oeconomicus by transforming institutional structures and creating autonomy; inculcating certain habits such as calculation and relexivity, and developing the capacity of the state so that it can undertake these tasks (Williams 1999: 90). Speciically, this entails ‘disciplining’ the state through privatisation of state-run industries, economic liberalisation, deregulation of the economy, rolling back of welfare, reduction of expenditures on public goods, tightening of fiscal discipline, favouring of free lows of capital in order to attract foreign direct investment, strict controls on organised labour, tax reduction and unrestricted currency repatriation. The disciplined neoliberal state consequently favours strong individual property rights, the rule of law and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade (Harvey 2007: 64) This ‘global disciplinary’ neoliberalism, as Stephen Gill has pointed out, requires a juridical-political dimension in order for it to appear as hegemonic: a ‘new constitutionalism’ that seeks to ‘lock in’ the ‘rights’ of investors and privilege the ‘security of capital’ over ‘human security’ (Gill 2003). The new political architecture of the global political economy is provided by international institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which ‘disciplines’ member states for pursuing policies detrimental to the interests of (multinational) capital, the World Economic Forum at Davos, which provides an arena where government, business and media leaders can meet and coordinate policy goals, and, perhaps most importantly, the Group of Eight (G8) and now the Group of Twenty (G-20) inance ministers and central bank governors, who met in London in April 2009 to discuss the world-wide economic crisis. Their objectives are ‘to create a set of long-term economic and political reforms that gain constitutional status, thus underpinning the extension of the disciplinary power of capital on a world scale’ (Gill 2000).