Michel Foucault’s interpretation of neoliberalism has had a remarkable expansion over the last decades and it is essentially linked to the success of the word and category represented by the term "biopolitics". Since the nineties we have witnessed an intense proliferation of writings on "biopolitics", in which this category has been used with the porpoise of explaining the economic and social problems that characterize the society of the twenty-first century: globalization, eugenethics, bioeconomics, bioethics, robotics and transformers technologies, sexuality and secularization of bodies, biomedicine and biotechnologies. Could all those phenomena be perhaps in some way connected with the practice of liberal government or with its idea of power?
From this question I want to to compare Foucault’s theory, in which the issues of government and power are conceived as a “management” of individual conducts before being a legal or formal representation, with the thesis of Italian jurist Bruno Leoni who, several years before the French philosopher, imagined a liberal conception of power as an irreducible element to its legal transfiguration. From both sides, in fact, they reach a “no-erdogic” organization of power, that arises from the relations of individuals before their organization as a “State”. For the first, power is the outcome of local individual relationships that are practiced at the base of society; for the second, it is represented by the exchange of “individual claims” that will form the political frameworks: in any case, the concept of government has been performed by relations of power which are established as exercise prior to any constitutional or sovereign will and which are reversible between individuals themselves.
Since there, power not have a decision-making center nor a fixed origin and there is no way to arrange steady positions in such contexts nor to make predictions about how these positions will be distributed within the structure. The final outcome of the entire process will be unpredictable and will not be determined in advance unless by the nature of the exchange. This is why I propose to re-examine, with Leoni and Foucault, the link between biopolitcs, government and political subjects as a continuous, transversal and indefinite process of exchange.
