Abstract
This chapter engages with Foucault’s critical exploration of shifts and transformations in liberal frameworks of governmental rationality to consider how our understanding of the human subject has been transformed within development discourses. The focus is upon today’s human-centred approaches, in which individual autonomy or freedom is the central motif. The intention is to genealogically draw out the changing nature of Western discourses of development in order to examine how development and autonomy have been radically differently articulated in discourses of Western power and how today’s discursive framing feeds on and transforms colonial and early postcolonial approaches to the human subject.
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Notes
- 1.
For Marx, 1830 marked the turning point, from which point onwards the science of political economy, which reached its highpoint with Ricardo, could only degenerate and become vulgarized:
In France and England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic. (Marx 1954: 24–25)
- 2.
I prefer the term post-liberal to highlight the shrinking of the liberal world, analysed here, and to suggest that the shift from transforming the external world to work on the inner world, represents the end of the liberal problematic and the final stage of the Enlightenment project which gave birth to the human subject (see, further, Chandler 2010).
- 3.
Foucault argued that this was a practical as much as an intellectual project of constructing a ‘critical ontology of ourselves, of present reality’ (2010: 21): ‘I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’ (Foucault 1984: 8).
- 4.
For Marx and Engels, the idealism of the Enlightenment perspective, which Foucault so correctly highlights, was perceived to have been overcome through the materialist analysis of social relations and the emergence of a universal class, which needed to transform these relations in order to emancipate itself: the industrial proletariat. Of course, if this collective agent of self-transformation were not to appear or if it was to suffer a historical class defeat rather than achieve its ultimate aims, then it would appear that it was the Enlightenment which both gave birth to and foretold the death of the ‘human’ as a self-realizing subject. The inability of humanity to give meaning to the world through the Enlightenment and therefore the shift to conceiving of itself and its meaning-creating subjectivity as the problem in need of resolution is, of course, acutely articulated by Nietzsche (see, in particular, ‘Our Note of Interrogation’ 2006: 159–160).
- 5.
Foucault has been perceived somewhat negatively by some postcolonial theorists for having neglected non-Western social arrangements and the political problematics of colonialism and Eurocentrism (see, e.g. Spivak 1999; Shani 2010; Pasha 2010). This chapter suggests that these critiques, in their focus upon the ‘spatialized character of the liberal world’ (Pasha 2010: 214), can miss what is new and specific about the shift from universalist teleologies, which necessarily externalize the contradictions of liberalism, to post-liberal approaches which, lacking a telos or assumptions of universal progress, internalize these limits.
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Chandler, D. (2013). Where Is the Human in Human-Centred Approaches to Development? A Critique of Amartya Sen’s ‘Development as Freedom’. In: Mezzadra, S., Reid, J., Samaddar, R. (eds) The Biopolitics of Development. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1596-7_5
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