Homo economicus’ sovereignty and governmentality: critical crossroads between Ludwig Von Mises and Michael Foucault

Abstract

From the second half of the Twentieth Century, economic politics disseminated a set of subtle devices. One of the main epistemological displacements produced by neoliberal discourse concerns the insertion of human subjectivity as a central element of economic rationality. The inclusion of subjectivity in the logic of economic calculations made it possible to construct the figure of homo oeconomicus as an anthropological referent of the new neoliberal discourse. One of the leading authors on this journey is Ludwig von Mises. Misian theory is profoundly philosophical: from it, it is possible to collect the whole structure of neoliberal theory and its bifocal contrast between the economic action of the market and the political theory of the state, and in it homo oeconomicus occupies a central place. Michel Foucault’s genealogy on the neoliberal governmentality brought a different critical look at the constitutive principles of this discourse. Alongside Mises’s theory (as well as Hayek’s, Röpke’s and Böhm-Bawerk’s), Foucault’s reading is accurate to us, as it allows us to contrast the reason of government, constituted along the thinking patterns, with that optics. Homo oeconomicus as a supposed sovereign subject. The aim of this essay is to provoke a critical cross between Mises and Foucault, focusing mainly on the contradictions that arise within the neoliberal discourse of homo oeconomicus as sovereign subject, with the practices of governalization of the same homo oeconomicus. The essay consists of three moments: (i) firstly, our goal is to understand von Mises’s market theory in order to align some important concepts, in particular the concept of sovereignty of homo oeconomicus; (ii) next, we intend to analyze Foucault’s theory of neoliberal governmentality, pointing towards the way in which Mises’s theory projects itself as an economic reason for government; (iii) in a third point we develop some implications derived from the crossings of theses on the sovereignty of the Mises’s homo oeconomicus, with the analyzes on the governmentality of this homo oeconomicus developed by Foucault’s studies.