Governmentality accounts of the economy: a liberal bias?

Abstract

The governmentality literature offers a host of insights into liberal modes of government. A key theme in this literature is that the economy came to be seen as an autonomous domain requiring its own form of governmental reason. Yet the emergence of the economy has never been specified, in terms of both what would constitute an economy and how it was constituted. Instead, the appearance of an economy has been conflated with the general rise of liberal understandings of agency. In this paper I seek to provide an alternative and more precise account. This involves showing how the importance of Smith lies not so much in his formulation of a liberal version of agency, but in the disjunction he introduces between reason of state and political oeconomy. Crucially, despite his significance, Smith's arguments do not usher in an economy. For that event we have to wait for Ricardo's problematic of distribution. This alternative account is intended to weaken the association of the rise of liberal government with the emergence of the economy as an object of thought.