«Liberalism and the culture of danger»

Michel Foucault’s Naissance de la Biopolitique, Gallimard, Seuil, 2004, p. 68

Foucault inserts a new conceptual acceleration of the passage to liberalism, through fear and danger. Danger becomes the prerogative of the liberal function, through a culture of stimulating and reproducing a notion of continuous danger to the actors of economic life.

This new view of the liberal mechanism had also been incorporated in Hobbes’ work, though in a different way. As Hobbes writes in Leviathan, [1] «Civil Law is an Obligation and takes from us the Liberty which the Law of Nature gave us». So, natural liberty and obligation are on one and the same matter inconsistent, while the liberty of subjects is similar with the notion of necessity or political obligation or obedience. Besides, as Hobbes believes, «the end of obedience to the Civil Law is protection and in the next step the security of the ‘polis’ or ‘subjects’’’. In this way, there is a connection between the notion of liberty and the notion of security or even the notion of danger and fear, and the link is the positive constraints and the punishment which liberalism poses. According to Hobbes, «the whole purpose of assigning the right of punishment to sovereign is to form the wills of subjects in just this way»and, as he adds, « even if the cause of will is fear, the actions he performs out of fear will still be free actions». This demonstrates exactly the way in which fear and liberty are consistent.

On the other hand, according to Foucault, liberty and security are of the same consistency and nature within liberalism. What Hobbes sees as by-product of the existence of the individual in the state of nature, is conceived by Foucault as a mechanistic artefact produced by a culture of danger (culture du danger). According to Foucault, fear lies in the heart of the challenges produced by liberty in governing the subjects. Liberty is organized and reproduced through a new governmental style –liberalism- through a series of economic, legal and social relations that form and divide personalities and thus create a culture.

The culture created in the framework of liberalism is distinctive. It refers to a governing logic, which gives away artefacts in the heart of the game between liberty and security. The collectivity becomes the corner stone of the protective ability of the new state, raising ethical and political abstracts that build upon the notion of danger. Thus, safety, security, insurance and liberty become a threshold under which a new moral technology is portrayed, a technology that governs the behaviour of individuals and populations. [2]

The juxtaposition of the specific culture of danger, as advanced by liberalism, with the preceding culture, is crucial. Indeed, the 19th century witnesses the gradual emergence of everyday dangers that fundamentally differ from previously dominating menaces of an apocalyptic nature. The examples of aspects of the new culture of danger, given by Foucault himself, are characteristic: replacing diseases, wars and similar large-scale disasters, it is social criminality, hygiene and sexuality that have dominated ever since. [3] As it has eloquently been suggested elsewhere, «Neoliberal governance goes hand in hand with a culture of risk». [4]

The reason for the above is that a fundamental question of the post-modern society remains unanswered: «Who is the ‘other’». There are no more borders between the external and the internal, there is no more ‘I’ and the ‘alter’. Through this diffusion, liberalism engages in a constant management of security and liberty, of fear and danger. The modern regime assumes and generates power in a different way: negotiating the very principles of the individual, of the differentiality, relativizing the ‘alter’, emulating every different aspect of the private space or of natural order.

This situation gives its way to new culture: the artefacts. These are constructed through senses, words, icons and notions that do not correspond to a given reality. They are flexible concepts and values that become a part of the perspective of the non-actual world order. In order for the latter to survive and exist, without meeting the finality of history, corrupting its own nature, it creates a matrix of micro-realities that have the ability to be nurtured inside a field of uncertainty and fear of danger.

Thus, the reality is dominated by the diffusion of the internal and external order into a game of degrees, intensities and artificialities. This artificiality is the phenomenon which processes perhaps the greatest impact on the liberal architecture.