Governing others and governing oneself according to liberal political reason

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse liberal political reason in its two privileged arenas of deployment: the employment relationship in what concerns governing others and business agency in what concerns governing oneself. It suggests a theoretical framework for approaching the liberal political reason as a governmental reason and attempts to illustrate it through a number of analyses and specific empirical studies. Starting out from a critical reading of Foucault and governmentality studies, the basic aim of this article is to show the double imperative, which is not usually recognised, that liberalism is based on and which consists of increasing the exposure of individuals and populations to the market and subjecting both to the ever tighter discipline and controls which such exposure inevitably involves. In particular, the article shows how the employment norm has been weakened and partly replaced by a subject and conduct model driven by employability and activation policies, whilst large companies and businesses increasingly tend to become pure modes of agency dressed in shifting organizational forms and able to evade legal registration, statistical traceability and, in general, state control.