The Other in Liberal Governmentality

Abstract

This chapter starts with an example of how conceptualizing government as a power relation can be used to articulate a poignant critique of liberalism, more explicitly of its central concept: freedom. It then proceeds to discuss why the dominant conceptualizations of liberalism as governmentality failed to achieve their theoretico-political potential as critiques of our governmental order. This analysis of governmentality studies also proposes a genealogical analysis of liberalism as event. The aim is to historicize the formation of liberal ideas about the good and the true in relation to the historically concomitant tactical shift in the discourses and power relations that define modernity in the West: science, colonialism, racism, eugenics, and so on. This discussion suggests that U.S. liberalism and, more generally, liberalism are not universal and procedural forms but always specific and substantive codifications of an order of reality structured by specifically modern foundational assumptions. The chapter then argues that the consequences of this structure of liberal governmentality are a series of unsurpassable inner tensions in the U.S. liberal project, tensions that express themselves in governing strategies such as othering.