Фуко и либералната идея за гражданско общество
Foucault and the liberal idea of civil society

Summary/Abstract: By force of a certain liberal refl ex in both, the political theory and its everyday avatars, we are used to oppose civil society to the state. And by this, we see traditionally the strong civil society as a basis for a healthy democracy. This article aims to problematize such a presupposition by turning its attention to the recently published lectures which Foucault delivered at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1979 – Security, territory, population, and mainly Birth of biopolitics, where he analyses liberalism not as an ideology but as a specifi c political rationality linked to a number of governmental practices focused on the population understood as a multitude of entrepreneurial subjects. Although Foucault himself is not primarily interested in the liberal idea of civil society, an attempt is made to show that his refl ections on “liberal governmentality” offer important insights which allow us to think of civil society not as a sort of natural resistance to the supposedly artifi cial state repression but as a governmental object in a specifi c political technology of individuals, which renders the ultimate subject of liberalism – homo oeconomicus – governable.

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