Introduction

While recognizing the interest of political economy as a science, that is as a stock of knowledge, Bentham denies the possibility for government to use it as an art to control the market. Government intervention in economic life is seen as having a negative impact. Foucault, on the other hand, explains the reasons why the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century consensus of laissez-faire economics was accompanied by breathtaking legal, political, medical and educational interventions. For him freedom is not a given in a government based on the transaction of the interests of collective and individual utility. It emerges thanks to the limitations, safeguards and checks imposed by government. The quotes above encapsulate the contradictions at the heart of a form of liberalism, theorized by Bentham in his economic writings, and later analysed by Foucault. The subtle interaction between economics and government, in the government rationality emerging during the period in which Bentham was writing, is presented by Foucault as still presiding over our biopolitical world.

If the quotes above highlight a position common to Bentham and Foucault, law continues to divide them.