Refusing the state is a concession to neoliberal rationalities that seek to drain the state of any power – radical resistance to authority is just more grist for the ideological mill of neoliberalism

(Kaspar and Mitchell, “State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism”, Constellations 19.3)

Governmentality, in short, is an analysis of the state and not something that lies beyond it. It shows the conditions of experience of the “state” as that which confronts an external domain – civil society – to which it must grant a measure of free action in order for government to function. It grows out of a diagnosis of the present as one in which the state has come to be regarded as essentially despotic, the source of evil in the world, and as a repressive force that deforms our subjectivity, from the inside as much as the outside, limiting our potentiality in the world. For Foucault, this is a view shared not only by the ultra-left that seeks a violent overthrow of the state, but also by variants of neoliberalism in the twentieth century. This view is rooted in the anti-state eschatology of the nineteenth century, which has the notion of civil society at its core.¶ In Foucault’s context, to reject a theory of the state was to reject a Marxist theory of the state and to take note of anti-institutional movements in both liberal democracies and those opposed to state socialism. Today, any rejection of analyses conducted in statist terms takes place in a changed context: in the context of the repeated mantra of “governance” theorists who speak of a shift from government to governance and of a “hollowing out the state”; against the backdrop of conceptions of globalization that claim that global flows of trade, finance, information, and culture have undone the “container” of the national state39; and in the presence of political analyses that claim that struggles directed toward the state have been displaced by grassroots movements conducting sub-, micro-, and transversal politics underneath, across, and above the territorial state. In short, to reject a theory of the state in favor of an analysis of local struggles in the 1970s marked a break with a prevailing left intellectual problematic and an attempt to open up the discussion of government and state. In our own time, to dissolve the concept of the state has the opposite effect: it merely reinforces what has become a kind of anti-political orthodoxy that has rendered the left a meaningless term. This dissolution easily makes an accession to political agendas fatally shaped by the militant intellectual and political “thought collective” of which Foucault was an early analyst – to neoliberalism.40