Foucault, Public Finance, and Neoliberal Governmentality: A Critical Sociological Analysis

Abstract

Over the past three decades, fiscal sociology has increasingly gained traction among scholars in the fields of public finance, sociology, and politics as the market economies plunged intorecession periodically. With the 2008 global crisis, things have turned worse not only for economies but also for the broader social systems under the severe problems of the rising inequalities as a worrisome trend between and within countries. Fiscal sociology scholarship is seen as a promising research program by those who seek to understand complex and interrelated causes, effects and consecutive developments of the crisis. This paper aims to make a contribution to the critical fiscal sociological approach. To that aim, French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault and contemporary governmentality literature after Foucault will be reviewed. The paper constructs a framework for a broader sociological understanding of the current situation and crisis of public finance in theory and practice. Accordingly, public finance in the neoliberal context is described as a constructive governmental technology that carves out state policies and a type of public organization at the macro level and conducts the behaviors of individuals at the micro level of everyday life in a way to spread the market logic to the fiscal and, in turn, non-economic social domains.