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April 14, 2007
The ideas of neo-liberalism have had a profound influence on Australian public policy since the 1980s. In Neoliberalism as a Political Rationality: Australian Public Policy Since the 1980s Mark Beeson and Ann Firth say that neo-liberalism may best be thought of as representing a distinctive ‘political rationality' and that the emergence of a neo-liberal political rationality in Australia is a manifestation of new ways of thinking about national economies and their possible management.
They say that political rationalities are particular and historically specific instances of what Michel Foucault calls ‘governmentality’. Foucault used the term ‘governmentality’ to refer to a particular way of thinking about government which emerged in Western Europe in the eighteenth century and which has its object the economic security and prosperity of the state itself.
They add:
....government is a complex activity, which cannot be viewed simply as the implementation of any particular political or economic theory. The incorporation of economic doctrines or political philosophies into governmental practice is always partial and necessitates connection with administrative techniques and forms of
calculation which modify, if not transform, the theories and their objectives. Rather than the realisations of political or economic philosophies, political rationalities are more accurately viewed as amalgams of political expediency, policies, ‘commonsense’, responses to public opinion, economic doctrines and notions of human rights
liberalism as a political rationality makes individual freedom an artifact of particular strategies and modes of regulation, rather than the absence of government intervention. So analyses, which conceive of liberalism as a political rationality, focus upon the ways in which a variety of governing authorities, both state and non-state, seek to promote a form of life characterised by personal autonomy and rational choice.
The emphasis is upon the ways in which liberalism proposes to govern through the self-regulation of individuals who are at once the object and partner of those technologies of government through which political reason becomes practical.
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