Ideology or rationality? Epistemological questions about the relationship between neoliberalism and democracy from the foucaultian perspective

Abstract

In this paper I propose to deploy some aspects of the epistemological discussion about how to understand neoliberalism, with the goal of rethinking its relationship with democracy, departing from some texts identified with M. Focult’s critical tradition. In order to do that I expose Foucault’s critics to the concept of ideology from where the perspective of neoliberalism as a rationality. The foucaultian perspective —that I focus in the second section of the paper— is taken up by contemporary thinkers such as W. Brown, C Laval and P. Dardot, who study neoliberalism as a new mode of government of people, but they go further Foucault by wondering about the effects of this new rationality on democracies. Indeed, the hypothesis shared by these authors is that the extension of neoliberal reason undoes every space for democratic politics so that there would be an immanent relationship between anti-democratism and neoliberalism. In the last section, I feature some epistemological limits of the rationality perspective to study the state of contemporary democracies, rethinking the concept of ideology’s power to understand contemporary neoliberalism.