O Homo Oeconomicus em Michel Foucault: a análise do ser humano como naturalmente econômico na arte liberal de governar

Abstract

The research of this dissertation has as more basic reference the Collège de France courses taught by Michel Foucault from 1976 to 1979 and focuses primarily on the concept of homo oeconomicus as key for a comprehensive and coordinated analysis of the various aspects composing the biopolitics just as the French thinker shows in his researches. This particular notion of the individual of interest, the self-interested individual, is precisely what will enable all the intertwining of mechanisms and devices featuring biopolitics at the same time that constitutes itself as energy or force that moves its operation. We start from the classic idea of sovereignty in opposition to biogovernment, to rid of an analytic of the power that seeks a transcendental or metaphysical foundation of a truth that would guide the legitimate exercise of politics. We analyze therefore the modern reason of state, as well as the understanding of governmentality, in order to clarify the mode of action both internally and externally by a biogovernment that has the economy as internal criticism of its rationality and the population as the main target of their action. It is structured thereafter what Foucault exposes about liberal criticism with regard to the construction of individuality by disciplinary technology, the fabrication of freedom fundamentality and the maintenance of a police power as guarantee of normality. Thus, it will be displayed the concept of homo oeconomicus as the way of life that serves as source for the constant activation of biopolitics by means of their rules, disciplines, security devices, policing etc., because of your self-interest logic of action. We will examine, in addition, the American neoliberalism, grasped more precisely as criticism of government rationality that allowed an entire refinement not only of the economic man – understood as human capital – as well as the very way they are treated by the techniques of government. We establish in this way an understanding of the most varied and fundamental aspects considered by Foucault in this studies about the way as politics is conducted in the modernity, starting precisely from the concept of homo oeconomicus as the great governmental partner.