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Following Foucault, we can thus trace three stages in the development of bourgeois institutions and bourgeois political thought. In the mid-17th century, Thomas Hobbes posited the authoritarian State as the one and only entity capable of founding civil society, by ending the otherwise incessant war of all against all. This provides a rationale for what Foucault calls the society of sovereignty. In the latter part of the 18th century, Adam Smith argued that manufacture, commerce, and trade, fueled by the propensity to exchange, offered a smoother way to suspend the war of all against all, and thereby to allow civil society to flourish. This is the position of classical liberalism. The role of the State is to promote the peaceful conditions for industry and trade, and for the increasing specialization of labor. And the division of labor, in turn, provides the material basis for what Foucault calls the disciplinary society.
But 20th- and 21st-century neoliberalism inverts this whole tradition. For neoliberalism, the legitimate role of the State is precisely to destroy civil society, and instead to incite a war of all against all, in the form of unfettered economic competition. Where Hobbes sees the war of all against all as a primordial condition that we need to escape from, neoliberalism sees the war of all against all as a desirable state that does not arise spontaneously, but needs to be actively engendered. And where Smith finds a harmony between the pursuit of self-interest and the natural human tendency towards sympathy, neoliberalism seeks to extirpate the latter, in order to compel human beings to act in accordance with the former. This is why, as Margaret Thatcher so notoriously put it, “there is no such thing as society” in the neoliberal vision; “there are individual men and women, and there are families.” It would be absurd to criticize neoliberalism for failing to recognize the social; for in fact, the extermination of the social – or of any form of relation of broader scope than that of the family – is precisely the goal of neoliberal policy.
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Autonomous Oblast