4 DEC FS Q.50

Read the passage carefully and answer questions that follow:
There is no doubt that the market as a reality and political economy as a theory played an important role in the liberal critique. But liberalism is neither the consequence nor the development of these: rather, the market played, in the liberal critique, the role of a “test”. A locus of privileged experience where one can identity the effects of excessive governmentality and even weigh their significance: the analysis of the mechanisms of “dearth” or more generally, of the grain trade in the middle of the eighteenth century was meant to show the point at which governing was always governing too much. Therefore, an analysis to make visible, in the form of evidence, the formation of the value and circulation of wealth —– or, on the contrary, an analysis presupposing the intrinsic invisibility of the connection between individual profit-seeking and the growth of collective wealth economics, in any case shows a basic incompatibility between the optimal development of the economic process and maximization of government procedures. It is by this, more than the play of ideas. The French or English economists broke away from mercantilism and commercialism: they freed reflection on economic practice from the hegemony of the “reason of state” and from the saturation of governmental intervention. By using it as a measure of “governing too much”, they placed it at the limit of governmental action. Liberalism does not derive from juridical thought any more than it does from economic analysis. It is not the idea of political society, but the result of a search for a liberal technology of government.