Britain and much of the Western world is economically stagnant, and many long-standing liberties are threatened by public and private surveillance systems that narrow people’s freedom. In my new book, I locate this state of affairs in the dominant narratives that govern our age. No one did more to examine the power of these narratives, or what he called ‘discourses’, than the French social theorist Michel Foucault. 

Foucault argued that the conduct of politics and state in the modern West is now dominated by ‘bio-political’ discourses. These are narratives that frame public debate around ‘pattern anomalies’ considered to threaten ‘the welfare of the population’ and they generate multiple targets and goals identified with ‘improving’ that welfare. They are evident in the constant production of statistics and reports which claim to identify this or that ‘imbalance’ or ‘inequality’ and which empower politicians and various experts to propose ‘corrective measures’.

The response to the Covid-19 pandemic was an extreme form of this ‘bio-power’, with statistical models empowering public health professionals to implement lockdowns, but more mundane forms of ‘government by statistics’ have come to characterise most of what contemporary states do. Think of macro-economic narratives where every statistical perturbation in the rate of economic growth, investment or consumption leads to demands for this or that ‘stimulus’ measure. Think of the constant demands from public health experts to introduce one or other tax, regulation or nudge on what we eat and drink in response to some statistically constructed ‘obesity crisis’. Consider the proliferation of ‘social justice’ initiatives fuelled by statistics taken to demonstrate supposed evidence of inequality or discrimination. Or consider why multiple private organisations now feel compelled to produce ‘sustainability action plans’ demonstrating how they are reducing their ‘ecological footprint’ for fear of losing their licence to operate. 

What unites these narratives is the belief that human societies are statistically ‘knowable objects’ that can be manipulated into desirable patterns by technocratic ‘managers’. The Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek showed that these scientific claims are fallacious. Human beings are not atoms in a laboratory. No matter the controls, they will continually act in ways that upset the predictions of modellers and managers. What Foucault shows us, however, is that even though they may fail to deliver economic growth, better health, social justice or sustainability, these narratives have ‘power effects’ with a profound influence on the extent to which people can live freely or exercise their capacities for self-governance. 

One such effect, all too visible today, is the production of a regulatory expert class that claims to know how to ‘manage society’. This class has incentives to close the range of acceptable opinion because if ‘too many’ contradictory opinions are heard by the public this may undermine their willingness to submit to expert rule. From Covid, to obesity, to social justice and sustainability, once a dominant opinion becomes established dissenters are speedily marginalised and ostracised by their fellow experts as at best ‘unscientific’ and at worst as corrupt or morally ‘bad actors’. Just as the medieval church preserved its social position by demonising religious challengers, today’s would-be social engineers are quick to cancel those with heterodox opinions and crush dissent. 

Second, bio-political discourses proliferate demands to ‘police’ the conduct of others and they enable people to secure status by publicly demonstrating their commitments to statistical targets and goals, and by acting as members of this ‘police force’. Central governments cannot carry out the necessary surveillance themselves, so they recruit multiple actors in private and civil organisations ‘installing’ pieces of ‘managerial code’ through contracts, performance indicators and audits, with rewards for ‘progress’ towards approved ‘social objectives’. These surveillance networks include pressure groups and activists – often government funded – seeking to discipline the non-compliant through the power of negative publicity. The result is a society caught in a web of as Foucault puts it ‘precise controls and comprehensive regulations’ that narrow the scope for people to act, to think and even to speak differently. 

This is the Britain of today – a society low on dynamism, hidebound by a maze of rules and targets, where regulatory compliance is a major growth industry and where people live in fear of speaking their mind. There was, however, no conspiracy that put us on this silent ‘road to serfdom’. It emerged gradually and imperceptibly from multiple actors, using narratives that no one consciously ‘invented’, but that now form the assumptions of much of our political and economic life. 

A Foucauldian perspective suggests that if we want to loosen the grip of this bio-political state and avoid replacing one set of technocrats with another, this will require the embrace of resistant or counter cultural discourses. In today’s bio-political state, these counter cultural discourses would emphasise the limits of social control and recognise how liberty and entrepreneurship continually upset patterns. They would embrace markets not as machines that require periodic ‘fixing’, but as creative dramas of profit and loss both material and psychological. Instead of craving an unattainable capacity to predict the future, they would celebrate economic and cultural life as a voyage of exploration into the unknown. Crucially, they would champion the fact that a free and dynamic society cannot be statistically governed. 

Embracing such a narrative would not imply opposing all rules and regulations, and neither would it see the collection of ‘data’ as inherently threatening to freedom. There can be no freedom without rules and institutions to broker disputes between people over property, contracts and transgressions of others’ rights. Neither is this vision of a free and dynamic society incompatible with some basic forms of social insurance to protect people from the worst vicissitudes of life.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between regulation in this limited sense and regulation informed by the belief that society is a manageable object that can be controlled by social engineers at their will. This is a distinction that has been lost in Britain and the modern West. To escape the Foucauldian nightmare of a bio-political state that directly or indirectly controls more and more of our lives, we must embrace the unpredictability of social and economic life and resist the temptation to demand controls on others that ultimately will only serve to imprison us all. (https://capx.co/longstanding-liberties-are-threatened?)