After virtù and fortuna: Foucault on the government of economic events

Abstract

The field of governmentality studies extends the analysis of power relations beyond the state, and has thereby widened the understanding of government. However, the dominant conceptualization of governmentality as conduct of conduct and the empirical focus on subjectivating modes of power limit the potential of the governmentality approach. In this paper I want to explore the possibilities of transcending this perspective by redescribing governmentality as event management. I will therefore draw attention to a couple of remarks on the government of events in Foucault's lectures on the history of governmentality. Foucault identifies a new mode of governing events in the texts of the Physiocrats, which he contrasts with the Machiavellian paradigm of virtù and fortuna. In contrast to Machiavelli's political concept of governing the eventful by relying on the virtuosity of the prince, the Physiocrats develop a genuinely economic rationality of event management based on the assumption that markets establish a nexus in which economic events are mutually neutralized. As I will show, this economic and proto-liberal concept of governing events is still present in neoliberalism, especially in the governmentality of financial markets. However, in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, critics associated with the neoliberal thought collective have (again) challenged this vision of mutual event neutralization by emphasizing the possibility of event amplification. Understanding governmentality as event management thus helps to analyze and critique current attempts to govern economic and financial crisis.