Category: Foucault
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By Gordon Hull In a 1998 paper, Thomas W. Merrill argues that the presence of the right to exclude others is the necessary and sufficient condition for the presence of a property right. In this, he views himself as arguing against a “nominalist” interpretation of the right. This nominalist interpretation, associated with legal realism and…
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By Gordon Hull As I suggested last time, the current neoliberal expansion of IP hinges on the acceptance of monopolies, and the relation between deadweight loss (as advanced by Arrow) and incentives theory (as advanced by Demsetz) is accordingly essential to understanding it. Here I want to expand on that point, and then say something…
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By Gordon Hull In rereading Philip Mirowski’s critique of Foucault on neoliberalism (as it’s presented in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, his book on the 2008 financial crisis), I noticed a limit in Foucault’s analysis that I hadn’t really thought about before. Although Foucault correctly sees that a key (if not they…
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By Gordon Hull Ajit Pai is the Marie Antoinette of the Trump Administration. How else can you explain his decision to do a little skit last week, in which he pretends that his chairmanship of the FCC is a part of a plot by his former employer, Verizon, to ensure full regulatory capture of the…
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By Gordon Hull It has seemed to me for a long time that one helpful theoretical lens through which to look at neoliberalism is to understand it as a phase (or perhaps a dispositive) of biopower. This is because neoliberalism does not generally rely on juridical rules (or tried to colonize the judiciary), it pushes…
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By Gordon Hull Over at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant has a nice post on how Marx’s distinction between C-M-C and M-C-M’ helps to explain an otherwise puzzling ideological construction. Marx’s distinction, arrived at in chapter 4 of Capital, is about how commodities circulate. In the C-M-C formula, we consider someone who starts with a commodity,…
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By Gordon Hull As our tin-pot “President” continues his inexorable slide into narcissistic authoritarianism, it is worth noting recent events that establish beyond any residual doubt that radical white terrorism is now official policy. When historians look at the Trump presidency, assuming we all survive long enough for there to be historians, I suspect last…
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By Gordon Hull I have a new paper up on SSRN, "The Subject and Power of Bioethics," which was invited to a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Ethics, Medicine and Public Health. The abstract is: The present paper argues that late work of Michel Foucault is helpful in understanding contemporary bioethics. Specifically, Foucault’s writings…
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by Gordon Hull On Wednesday night, the Trump administration implemented as much of its long promised Muslim Ban as it thought the Supreme Court would allow. Travelers from a list of six countries who did not have a “bona fide” connection or “close familial relationship” to someone in the U.S. would be banned. The administration…
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