2025/03/01 by Iker Jauregui · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Critical Theory and Philosophy #Foucault, Power, and Ethics
paper · doi:10.1353/cul.2025.a957076
openalex publication_date 2025/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract: This article explores the cross-reading of Michel Foucault and Gary Becker on neoliberalism and human capital theories. Situating Becker's 2012 interview with François Ewald and Bernard Harcourt on Foucault as a fulcrum, this article's aim is to analyze Becker and Foucault's works from a series of discursive spaces: American neoliberalism's critique of labor, human capital theories' approach to the economic universe of individuals (consumption, household, time, wage), and the place of the subject in political economy texts. As the article argues, the common thread of these accounts is the redefinition of the economy as subjective (i.e., as an economy where work, the distribution of income, and social reproduction in general are approached on the basis of the individual). The article concludes with analysis of the political translations of these human capital discourses.