I would suggest that a national element in Foucault's
late turn to Austrian style liberalism is the nature of the
French state and society. It has long been dirigiste and
etatiste in comparison to most other societies and still
is, with one of the strongest ongoing systems of indicative
planning around. Hayek even identified Saint-Simon as the
ultimate father of rational constructivist planning and
social engineering, of which Hayek disapproved. Indeed,
there is a direct line from Saint-Simon to the modern
plannificateurs of the French economy, a trend deeply
connected to the rationalist Cartesian tradition, as well
as the policy tradition handed down from Colbert under
Louis XIV.
Thus, there has been a countertendency of French
liberals to tend to go whole hog in reaction to all of
this. Laissez-faire is a French term (as is bureau), and
in Jean-Baptiste Say one has a real poster boy of pure
classical liberalism with a libertarian bent.
Barkley Rosser
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
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