Foucault's Defense of Liberalism

To understand the modern state means to understand different forms of governmentality, that is to say the ways of government found in a certain governmental system. Michel Foucault recognized in (neo)liberalism, a governmental system, which attracted his particular attention, an attempt to raise the limitation of the state power to the fundamental principle of government. Liberalism basically stands for the opinion that there is always too much government and because of that the government should always be suspected of the tendency to extend its own power. The biopolitics as an attempt to regulate the biological life was the topic, which inspired Foucault to do his extensive research on the history of govenrmentality in his later years. He was convinced that the future in the political sense will depend on the question how the biological life and the state power will be related. But Foucault lost an interest for the liberal solution soon forgetting that the liberal way of government consists not just of the population politics, but also of the self-limitation of the government itself. The manipulations of the biological life are just the opposite of the liberal reason based on the principle of self-limitation.