J.M. Keynes in “The Birth of Biopolitics” by M. Foucault

In his 1978–1979 lecture series at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault presents the figure of John Maynard Keynes as a “field of adversity,” emblematic of the tensions inherent in the crisis of governmentality. The Birth of Biopolitics centers on this crisis, understood as the proliferation of governmental interventions aimed at fostering freedom, which paradoxically result in its negation. Foucault’s genealogy of the new art of government reveals the intricate relationship between liberalism, political economy, and the limitation of governmental power, ultimately leading to the assertion of the impossibility of an economic sovereign. A closer examination of Keynes’s writings—particularly those from the mid-1920s—allows for the reconstruction of an alternative governmental rationality. This perspective articulates a distinctive relation among the critique of classical economics, liberalism, and sovereignty, seeking to address the endogenous dimension of crisis within capitalism.