2 - Security
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2023
Summary
The challenge now, he [Macron] said, is ‘to build a form of neoprogressivism, structured around the ideal of individual progress for all, in a way that combines agility with security… We have to rethink the framework, and undertake an ideological renovation. It will happen. We need to show the way.’
Pedder 2018, 101The need for security is an essential component of Macron’s ideological thought, so much so that it has surpassed the need for freedom that liberalism is renowned for being founded on. Liberalism had been the ideology of laissez-faire par excellence, but Macron’s neoliberal outlook demands the cultivation of the value of security above and beyond that ultimate freedom to do business. In order to provide security, neoliberalism has fully embraced the power of the state to create markets and economic structures that liberalism once thought to be natural. Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the rise of security as a core value of society. Where liberty was once the cornerstone of liberal ideology, security is the new value promoted by neoliberalism. By analyzing the thought of Michel Foucault, who was writing on security in the late 1970s precisely as the neoliberal state was becoming a reality, we will see that this new value is articulated in the form of new technologies for the management of populations. Describing security as the contemporary deployment of techniques of power, Foucault identifies key features that shed light on the contemporary application of these techniques. Using examples of the architecture of the town, the control of state-sponsored markets, and the management of epidemics – all of which played an essential role during Macron’s time in power, Foucault argues that the rise of security is a key aspect of contemporary politics. Although Foucault does not phrase it as such himself, it is the rise of the liberal, and then the neoliberal, state that is at stake in the deployment of these technologies of security. By focusing on the town, economics, and health policy, we see three distinct areas where this state has established itself as the primary provider of techniques to deal with problems of the industrial and post-industrial eras.
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- The Macron RégimeThe Ideology of the New Right in France, pp. 39 - 59Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2022