AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Last Man Takes LSD1. The Birth of a ControversyFoucault and the liberal arts of governmentFoucault in his presentNeoliberalismThe intellectual2. Searching for a Left GovernmentalityFoucault against the post-war LeftNeoliberalism beyond Right and LeftTowards a 'new political culture'3. Beyond the Sovereign Subject: Against InterpretationAgainst the sovereignty of the authorTh e rise and fall of the modern subject4. Ordeals: Personal and PoliticalVeridiction and forms of truthExperimentation and knowledge through the ordealA 'political spirituality' against the sovereign5. The Revolution BeheadedTh e self as a battlefieldResistance as 'desubjectification'Proliferation against powerNeoliberalism: a framework for pluralismAn 'intelligent use' of neoliberalism6. Foucault's NormativitySexuality and moralityTh e revolutionInequality and neoliberal governmentalityThe California Foucault7. Rogue Neoliberalism and Liturgical PowerThe 1970s: coming downTowards a left governmentalityConfessional civil warEpilogueAfterwordIndex

The contribution of this important essay is to place Foucault's thought on neoliberalism in its political context of the time. This is the whole point of this essay, all the more fascinating since it offers an overview of the work on Foucault, in particular on its relation to neoliberalism.

In December 2014, then doctoral student Daniel Zamora published an interview in Jacobin entitled “Can We Criticize Foucault?” that rapidly went viral. It was shared more than 30,000 times, read more than 200,000 times and translated in more than ten languages.,A book edited by Zamora with intellectual historian, Michael Behrent - Foucault and Neoliberalism (Polity Press, 2015) - was published a year later and shed a new light on Foucault’s last decade with its more contextual and intellectual history approach. The small Facebook page (@critiquerfoucault) that was created at the time to promote the book has now more than 11,000 followers and shown very large interest around the topic. The scholarly journal, History and Theory, devoted an entire special issue to the book in 2015.,Rather than receding, the controversy around the topic has been growing and has provoked many more leading scholars to enter the discussion.,This will be then the first comprehensive history of Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism in the broader context of the last decade of his life.,The authors of this new book complement one another in that they represent different cultural (Francophone and Anglophone) and generational perspectives on Foucault and his impact. They are both among the preeminent scholars in this fields. They have been part of the controversy since the beginning and have been brought into collaboration by its urgency. They will address the issues raised by this controversy within our present and for a broader public. They seek to expand the reach of this constitutive intellectual event and show how Foucault’s last decade still echoes within contemporary debates about social justice and social democracy, neoliberalism and sovereignty, and the rising, populistthreat to liberal democracy.,Examples of the international coverage of the controversy: Daniel Drezner, “Why Michel Foucault is the libertarian’s best friend”, The Washington Post, December 2014. Thomas Thiel, “Aufschrei der Unberuhrbaren”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 2017. Carlo Crosato, “Quel filo rosso che traversa le relazioni di potere”, Il Manifesto, November 2019. R.M., review, « Le dernier homme », Libération, 30 August 2019. Daniel Zamora, “Can We Criticize Foucault?”, Jacobin, December 2014. Mitchell Dean, “Rebel, Rebel. Revisiting the radical legacy of Michel Foucault via David Bowie”, Stanford University Press Blog, February, 2016. Daniel Zamora, Mitchell Dean, “Did Foucault Reinvent His History of Sexuality Through the Prism of Neoliberalism?”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 18th April 2018 Daniel Zamora “How Foucault Got Neoliberalism so Wrong”, Jacobin, September 2019. Mitchell Dean, Daniel Zamora, “Interview: Ein Neoliberaler?”, Der Freitag, August 2019. Mitchell Dean, Daniel Zamora, “Un essai relance la querelle sur Foucault et le néolibéralisme“, Les Inrockuptibles, 22 octobre 2019.,Endorsements from Corey Robin, Nancy Fraser, Melinda Cooper, Philip Mirowski and Sam Moyn