Review of Foucault and Neoliberalism, edited by Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent (Polity)

Foucault & Neoliberalism modestly argues that Foucault's project, particularly after May 1968, bore striking similarities with neoliberalism. Although scholars have debated this issue since at least the French publication of The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault & Neoliberalism shows that, since the English publication of the same lecture series in the inauspicious year of 2008, the American university has increasingly deracinated Foucault from his French context and thereby misread his attitude toward neoliberalism. Thus Foucault & Neoliberalism, an English translation of Zamora’s previous anthology in French, Critiquer Foucault, seeks to revive the debate—and has done so in the pages of Jacobin magazine thus far—by situating Foucault back into his proper historical milieu.