After his critical engagement with phenomenology in the archaeological works of the 1960s, Foucault did not engage directly with phenomenology again in his analyses of power and governmentality in the 1970s. An exception is the curious and brief detour to Husserl’s thought that he makes in his lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics. In the fifth lecture of this series, he discusses post-war German neoliberalism and argues that its philosophical roots lie in Husserl’s phenomenology. The aim of my paper is to investigate and vindicate this surprising claim and to show what is at stake in making it.

This much is historical fact: A key figure in the group who programmed the new economic policy after the war in West Germany was Walter Eucken, the head of the German neoliberal school. Eucken was appointed as the professor of political economy at Freiburg University in 1927. There he formed the school of economists called the Freiburg School, or the “ordoliberals,” after the journal Ordo, which he directed. Eucken met Husserl in Freiburg and biographical sources confirm that the two men became close friends meeting regularly to discuss politics, socio-cultural trends and philosophy. There are also several explicit citations of Husserl’s texts in Eucken’s work.Footnote 1

Foucault discusses Eucken’s economic thought in his lectures in some detail in order to bring out the difference between liberal and neoliberal governmentality. His key argument is that what essentially characterizes neoliberal governmentality in distinction from classical liberalism is the conclusion that the neoliberals drew from the principle of competition as the organizing form of the market. For them, the conclusion was not laissez-faire economics. This would have meant, “being in the grip of what could be called ‘naïve naturalism’” (BB, 120). The market cannot be understood as a given of nature, something that emerges and develops spontaneously and which the state must only respect without interference. Instead, neoliberal governmentality implied that the market must be produced by active governmental intervention.Footnote 2 Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism is thus distinctive from the current point of view because he traces its earliest forms to German ordoliberalism. In today’s political discussions, neoliberalism is usually associated with the rhetoric of laissez-faire whereas the ordoliberals were explicit in their belief that the legitimation of the market was best accomplished via an expansion of state capacity. According to them, earlier market liberals had been simply wrong to advocate laissez-faire.

Foucault claims that we can identify the influence of Husserl underlying this key neoliberal principle—the breaking with naïve naturalism.

Just as for Husserl a formal structure is only given to intuition under certain conditions, in the same way competition as an essential economic logic will only appear and produce its effects under certain conditions, which have to be carefully and artificially constructed. This means that pure competition is not a primitive given. It can only be the result of lengthy efforts and, in truth, pure competition is never attained. Pure competition is and can only be an objective, an objective thus presupposing an indefinitely active policy. Competition is therefore the historical objective of governmental art and not a natural given that must be respected (BB, 120).

Foucault attempts to show that neoliberal governmental intervention was not “no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than in any other system” (BB, 145). Only the domains and methods of governmental intervention were new. The government should not interfere with the effects of the market, nor should it try to correct its destructive effects for society retroactively. It had to intervene in the very being of society in order to make competition the dominant principle for guiding human behavior and to actively oppose all inferior methods of coordinating individual efforts, such as central planning.Footnote 3

Foucault’s claim about the decisive influence of Husserl on Eucken’s economic thinking has also been contested, however. Klump and Worsdorfer (2011) argue that although it is undeniable that Husserl was quite indispensable for Eucken’s thought—especially for his methodology—his influence should be relativized rather than exaggerated the way Foucault does. They take Foucault to be arguing that Husserl was the sole influence behind Eucken’s philosophy of science, and oppose such a reading by showing the philosophical importance of other sources for Eucken’s thought, especially the influence of his father, Rudolf Eucken, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. Foucault does not claim anywhere that Husserl was the sole influence on Eucken, however. He merely points out a fundamental similarity in their methods, a similarity that Klump and Wörsdörfer essentially confirm.

Other commentators have also been quick to point out the incompatibility of Eucken and Husserl’s political and ethical views on such issues as the liberal conception of the atomic human being, the desirability of free market capitalism and the role of the State (see e.g., Miettinen 2013).Footnote 4 For Eucken and the neoliberals, free market economy was not only the most efficient way of distributing goods, but when understood as a non-discriminating, privilege-free order of competition, it was also inherently an ethical order. For them, any form of centralized economy represented the concentration of power in a central authority, which formulated economic plans and thereby controlled the actions of the other members of the community, who for their part were left without power or freedom (see e.g., Eucken 1951, 265). Hence, although Eucken’s method could perhaps be characterized as a form of eidetic phenomenology, his political views, as well as the essences that he finds, such as ‘competition,’ are his own and bear no relation to Husserl’s work.

With these caveats in mind, it is my contention that the connection between Husserl’s and Eucken thought is nevertheless much more than a superficial resemblance. Even if it is clearly farfetched to hold Husserl responsible for the birth of neoliberalism, my aim is to show that there is nevertheless an elective affinity between Husserl’s eidetic method and the kind of economic thinking enabled by it. I will argue that the appropriation of Husserl’s eidetic method in economics inevitably leads to a false naturalization of certain economic structures, whereas Foucault’s method leads in the opposite direction by radically historicizing all ontological assumptions.

The argument proceeds in two stages. I begin by studying in more detail the similarities between Husserl’s phenomenology and Walter Eucken’s economic theory and examine the way that Husserl’s idea of the historical a priori assumes a determinate role in Eucken’s economic thinking. Commentators such as Klump and Wörsdörfer (2011, 561) argue that Eucken relies mainly on Husserl early, pre-phenomenological work, such as Logical Investigations, and that he thereby neglects or misses many central aspects of Husserl’s late philosophy, such as intersubjectivity and life-world theory.Footnote 5 However, my aim is to show, through a discussion of the historical a priori, that there is an essential affinity between Eucken’s project and Husserl’s late views on the philosophy of science. In the second section, I will return to Foucault’s lectures in order to show how a version of the historical a priori also continues to operate in his history of governmentality, but how it functions as a counterpoint to the universalizing approached to the history of science, such Husserl and Eucken’s. I will conclude by rephrasing my initial question on the philosophical connections between Husserl’s phenomenology and German neoliberalism as a broader philosophical question on the political effects of our philosophical understanding of the history of science.

1 The essences of economic history

The philosophical influence of Husserl’s phenomenology can be clearly detected in Eucken’s most important work, The Foundations of Economics. History and Theory in the Analysis of Economic Reality (Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie), originally published in 1940.Footnote 6 The key aim of Eucken’s book is to establish a solid epistemological foundation for economics as a discipline. Similar to Husserl, Eucken’s aim is no less than to lay a radically new and scientifically rigorous foundation for economic knowledge—to establish economics as a rigorous science.

Eucken’s method bears also striking similarities to Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology. Economic inquiry has to begin by going back to the things themselves: The economist has to observe neutrally and dispassionately the historical and empirical reality around her, the multiplicity of individual economic phenomena in their apparent disjointedness and incoherence. Eucken begins the book with a Cartesian meditation and imagines sitting by a stove. Observing the stove and bracketing all use-values from it, he is led to pose questions about the origin of the stove, its production as well as its particular role and function in the great economic system of which it forms a part.

The epistemological starting point of economics thus has to be the everyday economic life and the facts derived from it. Starting with daily economic experiences, the economist will note, however, that at all times and places they enclose phenomena with a high degree of uniformity and generality. The economist must disclose the invariant general form of such phenomena and describe their essential elements, their essences. Economics, no less than philosophy, must become an a priori eidetic science: a science of essences.

Such eidetic investigation is particularly challenging in economics, however, which has to deal with a multiplicity of historical and empirical facts. Eucken’s theory opposed two influential approaches to economic research at the time. The Historical School held that we needed to trace the economic development of a country directly to the historical, social and political processes, which characterize the period. The Theoretical school, on the other hand, held that any recourse to history was unnecessary and that abstract economic theory could explain the interrelationships within an economic system.Footnote 7 Eucken argued that both of these approaches were mistaken.Footnote 8 He wanted to develop an intermediate position, which was capable of connecting economic theory with economic history and thereby overcoming what he called ‘the Great Antinomy in economics.’ The economist had to recognize economic events as being “a part of a particular individual-historical situation,” but, at the same time, he also had to understand them as presenting “general-theoretical problems” (Eucken 1951, 41).

We can see how Husserl’s idea of historical a priori offers a solution to Eucken’s antinomy. Husserl introduced the idea of the universal historical a priori in The Origin of Geometry in order to reveal the essential structure of the necessary historical horizon of all sciences, “the historical a priori as the universal source of all conceivable problems of understanding” (OG, 373). He too opposes two approaches in philosophy of science: historicism, which relativizes all human cultural products, and a formal approach, which completely denies the relevance of history for our understanding of epistemology. Neither one of these approaches can offer a satisfactory answer to the question of how a science like geometry is possible. The formal approach would insist that to understand geometrical knowledge it is unnecessary to attempt to trace its history. The concepts and propositions of geometry that are currently available already contain their meaning and truth in themselves and no particular understanding of their historicity is necessary. Husserl argues that this view is blind in the sense that it implicitly presupposes the historicity of geometry, as well as every other cultural fact constructed through human history, and that the activity of making geometry self-evident today can be nothing less than “the disclosure of its historical tradition” (OG, 371). Historicism, on the other hand, is equally unable to reveal the historicity of science because factual history, which merely draws its “conclusions naively and straightforwardly from facts” cannot make “thematic the general ground of meaning upon which all such conclusions rest, has never investigated the immense structural a priori which is proper to it” (OG, 371).

Husserl argues that we need an investigation of the historical a priori—the invariant supratemporal structure that subtends our present as well every past or future present. The historical a priori “lays claim to strictly unconditioned and truly apodictic self-evidence extending beyond all historical facticities” (OG, 373). The disclosure of the historical a priori is thus necessary for all rigorous historical inquiry because all factual history presupposes it. In contrast to the ahistorical character of the Kantian a priori, Husserl’s historical a priori makes possible the experience of history: It makes it possible to recover the original, historical evidences of geometry and to reactivate their meaning. Although geometrical idealities are fundamentally historical for Husserl in the sense that they can only originate in concrete historical events, they only become understandable as idealities on the basis of a universal and apodictic horizon of meaning. Genuine historical explanation must be brought together with an epistemological grounding of the sciences. “We stand, then, within the historical horizon in which everything is historical, even though we may know very little about it in a definite way. But it has an essential structure that can be revealed through methodological inquiry” (OG, 369).

The phenomenological method for investigating the universal and apodictic horizon of meaning and for revealing the historical a priori is free variation. “In running through the conceivable possibilities for the life-world, there arises, with apodictic self-evidence, an essentially general set of elements going through all the variants, and of this we can conceive of ourselves with truly apodictic certainty” (OG, 375). Even if we know almost nothing of the surrounding world of the first geometers, we do know that it had an invariant, essential structure, which can be revealed to us through the method of free variation. Hence, the original meaning of geometry can be rediscovered and reactivated, because in its invariant structures “the human surrounding world is the same today and always” (OG, 378).

Eucken follows Husserl closely here: He too advocates a form of free variation as the method for identifying the essential economic structures underlying different historical societies. He writes that “the further we look back into the past, and the more we look at other economic cultures, the better equipped will be our morphological and theoretical system” (Eucken 1951, 307). Such a comparative study of factual economic history will enable the economist to identify the pure structural elements out of which all actual, historical economic units or structures are built (Eucken 1951, 118). Eucken compares his ‘morphological system’ to an alphabet. Similar to the way a variety of words of different composition and different lengths can be formed out of a limited number of letters, similarly an almost unlimited variety of actual economic systems can be made up out of a limited number of pure forms (Eucken 1951, 109). Hence, although the essences or ideal types in their pure form are always only analytical conceptions, Eucken argues that any actual system is made up of a combination of them. The economist is thus able to develop a suprahistorical morphology of all possible economic systems. He concludes that

it was possible to resolve the antinomy because an exact study of individual economies showed that economic systems with their almost unlimited variations and multiformity can be reduced to uniform types. In this sense there appears to be a certain kind of invariability of the general form of the economy as a whole, that is, a uniformity in the basic forms of organization. This is what makes theoretical analysis and the application of theoretical propositions possible, and thus the solution of the real problems of the economic process (Eucken 1951, 240).

Eucken’s method ultimately leads him to two pure elemental forms of economic order, which he claims can be found in whatever historical period we study: the centrally directed economy and the exchange economy. These forms are suprahistorical; in other words, they form the historical a priori of economic thinking. They can only appear in history, but when they appear, they always appear in essentially the same form. Eucken heaps scorn on economists who use concepts such as ‘capitalism,’ ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’ and he places these words inside quotation marks throughout the book. For him, they are just catch phrases or labels with no real explanatory power. There is no historical uniqueness to capitalism; it is simply one historical variant of the ideal type ‘exchange economy,’ just like communism is just a historical instantiation of the pure type of ‘centralized economy.’Footnote 9

The model thus constructed enables the economist to make predictions about the future. The theoretical model can be applied to economic reality making it possible to understand and explain everyday life and therefore to eventually modify and frame it via economic policy. Eucken describes this procedure as a twofold synthesis in which first a number of purely formal elements are combined together into one economic system, and secondly, the economic system is fitted in its geographical, intellectual, political and social surroundings (Eucken 1951, 229). This means that both theoretical apodicticity and historical facticity are respected. The historicist’s objection that “abstractions and theories only have meaning in the context of a particular historical situation,” is, according to Eucken, “a historical prejudice” (Eucken 1951, 234). Economic understanding is obtained precisely by applying theoretical propositions, which are not limited in relevance to any particular period.

To sum up this section, Husserl and Eucken’s views on philosophy of science have in common a strong criticism of historicism and positivism. While Husserl’s model for apodictic science is geometry and his project of founding a rigorous science is directed to philosophy, Eucken turns to economics. But they both insist that anything meriting the label ‘science’ must be established on eidetic cognition and its discoveries must be characterized by apodictic truth and universal validity. They both therefore attempt to isolate the suprahistorical, invariant essences that underlie the manifold experiences of historical reality.

2 Foucault’s history of governmentality

By adopting Husserl’s historical a priori as a key concept in his archaeology of knowledge in The Order of Things (1994) Foucault both appropriated and criticized Husserl. He acknowledged Husserl’s critique of naturalism and historicism: Empirical methods and factual history alone were unable to reveal their own conditions of possibility and to clarify philosophical questions about the fundamental background conditions of our knowledge, perceptions and experience. However, for Foucault, these background conditions themselves had to be understood as radically historical: The task of the archeologist was to chart their transformation in history.

While the concept of the historical a priori disappeared from Foucault’s genealogies of power and governmentality in the 1970s, the attempt to depart from factual history and to engage in something that could be characterized as ‘historical ontology’ or ‘ontological history’ does not disappear, however. Foucault’s genealogies must still be read as attempts to map the historical background conditions for specific forms of knowledge and particular technologies of power. As Beatrice Han (2002, 7) argues, in his genealogies Foucault “gives the old historical a priori a new identity” in the form of a regime or game of truth. He does not examine a purely discursive level any longer, but rather the collection of practices in which truths are produced.

Foucault’s “history of governmentality,” which emerges from his lectures at the College de France in 1978 and 1979 and of which his investigation of neoliberal governmentality forms an essential part, is a peculiar kind of history. It is not political or economic history in the usual sense, nor is it simply a factual history of the development of the modern administrative state. Foucault studies a set of texts, programs, explanations and theories on the art of governing from the end of the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. Through this historical study he shows how the idea of governing a state emerged as a reflected practice at a certain point in history and how the historical development of modern states became inseparable from this theoretical reflection. He explains the methodological peculiarity of his “genealogy of the modern state” by comparing it to astrophysics.

It is a bit as if I were to say to you: My aim has not been to give you the history of the planet Earth in terms of astrophysics, but to give you the history of the reflexive prism that, at a certain moment, allowed one to think that the Earth was a planet. It is the same kind of thing, but with a difference however… It goes without saying that the fact that since a certain point in time we have known that the Earth is a planet has no influence on the Earth’s position in the cosmos. However, the appearance of the state on the horizon of a reflected practice at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century has been of absolutely capital importance in the history of the state and in the way in which the institutions of the state actually crystallized… (BB, 276–277).

The textual material under study is thus now understood to form a part of the complex strategies and technologies of power that not only have historical and political conditions of possibility, but also concrete political effects on the reality they purport to merely make intelligible and governable. The circular relationship between practices of power and knowledge implies that while the historically varying background conditions, the historical a priori, determine when a set of propositions can be recognized as true, this recognition then in turn will influence those practices. In other words, the state as an object of theoretical reflection emerged as inseparable from the practices of actual governing.

The same nominalist approach is also applied to the entity “the economy” in these lectures. Foucault’s history of liberal and neoliberal governmentality is not a form of historicism that would simply trace the emergence of capitalism as a unique and historically determined social and economic formation, as opposed to being a variant of the universal, essential type of exchange economy, for example. The opposition between Foucault and phenomenology is thus not an opposition between naïve empiricism and transcendentalism. Foucault is more fundamentally problematizing the fixity and universality of the idea of “the economy” itself by showing how it emerged from a set of historical practices of governing. In The Order of Things he had already shown how economic analysis remained on the level of an analysis of wealth in the seventeenth century and how, in the eighteenth century with the physiocrats, a new domain of knowledge, political economy, was opened up.Footnote 10 In the lecture series Security, Territory, Population, he is no longer interested in the physiocratic writings in terms of an archeology of knowledge reconstructing the function of their texts “according to the rules of formation of its concepts” (STP, 36). The objective now is to study it “according to its objectives, the strategies that govern it, and the program of political action it proposes” (STP, 36).

For Foucault, physiocrats and their economic doctrine represent “the founding act of economic thought” in the sense that with them not only a whole new conception of the economy emerges, but, crucially, free market starts to operate as the principle of good government (STP, 33). In other words, with the physiocrats, political economy emerges not only as a science, but also, and primarily, as a technique of governing—a political intervention in the field of reality understood as “the economy.” The physiocrats’ study of market mechanisms was both a scientific analysis of what happens and a program of what should happen. Foucault argues that it would therefore be wrong to simply concede that physiocratic economic theory produced a shift in economic policy as its practical consequence. What occurred instead was a fundamental reorganization of the theoretical field of what we today call ‘economics,’ as well as a major shift in the techniques of government. Physiocrats rejected any analysis of economic processes in terms of morality and approached them instead as autonomous, natural phenomena governed by scientific laws and regularities. With their doctrine of “economic government” the art of government too reached a certain threshold of “science.”

The word “economy” designated a form of government in the sixteenth century; in the eighteenth century, through a series of complex processes that are absolutely crucial for our history, it will designate a level of reality and a field of intervention for government (STP, 95).

Hence, through the work of the physiocrats the modern conception of the economy emerged for the first time as an autonomous sphere of society and as an object of both scientific knowledge and good governance in political history. Economic statements were recognized as being “in the truth” in the sense that they could be assigned a truth-value.Footnote 11 This was highly significant for our conception of good government and, more generally, for our understanding of the political. The establishment of an autonomous and self-regulating economic sphere was not a deliberate political act tactically invoked or initiated by anybody, but it had momentous political effects. The identification of policy issues as economic now meant that they were understood as morally and politically neutral and could therefore be removed from political decision-making processes to the exclusive territory of economic experts and financial institutions.

Hence, the theoretical and political importance of Foucault’s approach to neoliberalism as a historically specific form of governmentality lies, in my view, in the attempt to show that neoliberalism is not reducible to an economic doctrine nor is it understandable merely through economic and political facts about empirical reality. As a form of governmentality, it relies philosophically on a distinctive ontological division between society and economy that emerged through a set of historical practices and theoretical discourses during the eighteenth century.

Such a historical ontology of neoliberalism appears as directly opposed to Eucken’s eidetic understanding of economic history in the sense that its aim is to account for the particular and contingent ways that political and social conditions not only shape, but constitute objects of scientific inquiry. The conditions of possibility for the emergence of scientific objects and the truth claims about them do not lie in eidetic cognition, but in historical and social practices. The objects of science that Foucault is interested in are not universal essences, but social constructs subsequently understood as universal. For a phenomenologist, on the contrary, scientific discoveries are always additions of truth about the objects given to ordinary experience. Science rests on the indispensable and fundamental perceptual framework and must proceed from it.

To conclude and return to the question of the importance of Husserl’s method for Eucken’s economic thinking: Even if we cannot hold Husserl personally responsible for the findings of Eucken’s economic theory, the method that he develops must carry some responsibility for what is discovered with it. Particular methods already determine, at least to some extent, the kinds of things that can be discovered with the help of them. In the case of Husserl’s phenomenological study of the history of science, for example, we will either find essential, universal structures or we will find nothing at all. The obvious political problem with such an understanding of the history of science is that contingent practices and forms of thought assume an inevitability and universality that makes it virtually impossible to question them. As Eucken’s work shows, the conviction that idealities must be suprahistorical, apodictic essences in all rigorous scientific inquiry has direct political consequences in a science like economics: certain economic orders, such as contemporary capitalism, can be naturalized and understood as inevitable.