Returning to Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization almost two decades after its publication allows us to take stock, from a slight temporal distance, of the reception in our discipline of the work of Michel Foucault.Footnote ¹Magnetic Mountain is the one of the books that came out of a project that Kotkin and a number of other students began under Foucault's direction at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 (p. xviii). Foucault's work in California occurred during a particular turn in his political thinking, a moment when he experimented with liberal alternatives to the left theories of the first decades of his career. Kotkin's book is not simply an application of a general Foucauldianism, but rather of a specific California Foucault.Footnote ²

The central feature of this California Foucault is, in the words of an article co-authored by Kotkin, a turn from ‘power per se’ to the ‘history of modern subjectivity’.Footnote ³ In all his work, Foucault presented power and the subject as inseparable, but in California the two seem to have drifted, momentarily, apart. Magnetic Mountain specifies an archive of this California Foucauldianism (p. 392 n. 90). Kotkin singles out as especially important Foucault's essay ‘The Subject and Power’, discussions after Foucault's lectures on Parrhesia, or truth-telling, at Berkeley in autumn 1983, and the collections of essays edited by Paul Rabinow and Collin Gordon.Footnote ⁴ Conspicuously absent is the more conventionally left-wing, rather than liberal, Foucault of his Discipline and Punish and his History of Sexuality, although excerpts of the two texts appear in the volume edited by Rabinow.

It would be incorrect to characterise Foucault at any point in his career as a liberal, and Kotkin's book develops a liberal Foucauldianism in part by incorporating several other theoretical strains at odds with most conventional understandings of Foucault's project. Kotkin wrote Magnetic Mountain at a time of great political and economic transformation and confusion, with the decline of Fordism and Soviet state socialism and the rise of new forms of politics. Daniel T. Rogers has recently characterised this period as an ‘Age of Fracture’, in a book that includes Foucault as a central figure.Footnote ⁵ I aim to interpret Magnetic Mountain as a document of social and political thought in this age of fracture.

My purpose here, however, is not only historicising, but also critical. I build on Anna Krylova's important article, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, which highlights liberalism implicit in Magnetic Mountain.Footnote ⁶ Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck make a related point about the persistence of a liberal subject inside Kotkin's Foucauldian account.Footnote ⁷ Kotkin himself has also more recently affirmed the centrality of liberalism to his understanding of modernity.Footnote ⁸ Like Krylova, Halfin and Hellbeck, I want to highlight how the avenues opened by Kotkin's path-breaking work might be pursued further. I do so by problematising Kotkin's conceptualisation of the subject, as they do, as well as his liberalism, more broadly.

Liberalism is not simply at odds with Foucauldianism. As the last, or at least the strongest, remaining totalising Enlightenment utopia, liberalism provides only a weak basis from which to study modernity. To put it perhaps too bluntly: the problem with using liberalism to supplement Foucault is that, even if Foucault did sometimes seem open to liberalism, it is antithetical to his, and to most, critical approaches to history. Its concept of the individual, though it might appear as a disaggregation of the social, in fact substitutes an abstract totality for the fragmentary and antagonistic social (the recourse to concepts of culture, civilisation or mentality is symptomatic of this); its doctrine of property masks rather than explains social hierarchy; and its claim of a special relation to markets – which are, in fact, a practical anthropological constant – distorts the meaning of both liberalism and markets.

Foucault taught at Berkeley during a reorientation of parts of the French intellectual and political scene away from the leftism that had characterised the immediate post-war decades toward a liberalism that had begun to imagine itself in opposition to a broad interlinked complex condemned under the signifier ‘totalitarianism’. The nouveaux philosophes Bernard Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann expressed this shift especially forcefully in books published in 1977.Footnote ⁹ Foucault reviewed Glucksmann's book in Le Nouvel Observateur in terms so positive that it led to a break with Gilles Deleuze, as historian Michael Scott Christofferson has revealed.Footnote ¹⁰ The key to the broader reorientation led by nouveaux philosophes was a metonymic connection between Nazism, Stalinism, Marxism, and, at least in some variants, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment and the social welfare state.

Thus, in the autumn of 1983, Foucault organised a working group of students and faculty at Berkeley to collectively author a book on ‘the 1920s and the rationalities of government that make possible the Welfare State, fascisms, and Stalinism’. Foucault chose this topic both because it ‘was more consonant with the interests and expertise of the group’ and also because ‘it would allow him to take up a contemporary topic’.Footnote ¹¹ The topic was contemporary not because the 1920s were relatively recent, but rather because the alleged similarities of ‘the Welfare State, fascisms, and Stalinism’ had recently become a central component of attacks by the nouveaux philosophes upon the French left.

‘The Subject and Power’, Foucault's afterward to Dreyfus and Rabinow's book, gives a sense of how Kotkin and others might have found an opening for liberalism in the work of one of the greatest contemporary critics of liberalism. In that text, Foucault claimed that ‘it is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research’. He specified that his central area of concern, however, was ‘the relationship between rationalisation and excesses of political power’ that one did ‘not need to wait for bureaucracy or concentration camps to recognise’. Studying the subject allowed Foucault to study power, he explained in Berkeley, because ‘the forms of resistance against different forms of power’ could serve as ‘a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations’.Footnote ¹² In fact, Foucault, as Kotkin writes, ‘never gave resistances the empirical attention they deserved’ (p. 22).

‘The Subject and Power’ highlights the individual as a seat of resistance to power, perhaps indicating Foucault's new-found sympathy for the liberalism of the nouveaux philosophes, and at minimum indicating how Kotkin might have found in this text a resource for a liberal analysis. Foucault, in fact, states explicitly that struggles against ‘domination’ and ‘exploitation’ remain important, but also asserts that the most important present struggles are for individuals to specify their own identity. As examples of such contemporary struggles, Foucault cited the ‘opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live’. In these struggles, Foucault suggested, people ‘do not look for the “chief enemy,” but for the immediate enemy. Nor do they expect to find a solution to their problem at a future date (that is, liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle) . . . they are anarchistic struggles’.Footnote ¹³ Here, Foucault seems to separate major political struggles of the day, especially feminism, from collective politics aiming toward ‘liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle’. In calling these struggles ‘anarchistic’, moreover, he mischaracterises not only their many variants but also anarchism, which has always been a collective and class-conscious movement. In contrast to much of his work, here Foucault seems to make the individual the locus of politics by erecting an opposition between the individual responding to ‘the immediate enemy’ and more conventional types of left politics looking for the ‘chief enemy’ and finding the solution in future-oriented politics.

I am not suggesting that Foucault had become a liberal individualist, but only that Foucault was finding forms of struggle consistent with liberal individualism more interesting in the late 1970s and early 1980s than he had, say, in Discipline and Punish (1975) or in the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1976). In a January 1978 lecture at the Collège de France, for example, Foucault rejected his earlier view that the freedom offered by liberalism was merely a freedom for some that was ‘ballasted . . . with a disciplinary technique’ for others, including ‘children, soldiers, and workers’. Rather, he asserted, liberal freedom was ‘nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security’.Footnote ¹⁴ Neither position Foucault described could be construed as an endorsement of liberalism, but the latter formulation at least accepts that liberalism does endorse a kind of individual freedom, even while it also shows that this apparent freedom is in fact a strategy of control.

The California Foucault, in short, is Foucault at a very specific moment of crisis, one marked by a shifting stance on liberalism that made him appear at least more sympathetic to liberalism than he might otherwise have appeared. Still, what I regard as experiments with liberalism had a real impact on precisely that version of his thought that he conveyed in Berkeley.

As a sophisticated and rigorous study of the Soviet Union, Magnetic Mountain necessarily also challenges the liberal potential in California Foucault. As Christofferson has argued, the liberal reorientation of figures like Lévy and Glucksmann, so important for this moment in Foucault's thought, employed a stylised idea of the Soviet Union, and particularly a certain image from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, to give greater moral and historical weight to criticisms aimed more locally at the French left. (These politics of course also had a larger cold war context.) For these ‘anti-totalitarian’ liberals, Stalinism and the Gulag, like Nazism, remained powerful, but perhaps necessarily underexplored, subjects, less important as objects of analysis than to give a revived classical liberalism (that is, neo-liberalism) an otherwise improbable historical emancipatory significance. To write seriously about Stalinism from within this paradigm, as Steven Kotkin has done, is, necessarily, to rend the fabric of California Foucauldianism.

Liberalism, perhaps like many ‘isms’, condenses a set of not-always compatible ontological, epistemological and political commitments. Margaret Thatcher was perhaps the greatest recent exponent of liberal ontology, pronouncing: ‘There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people.’Footnote ¹⁵ (We can measure the distance of Foucault from this ontology by comparing it with the ontology of ‘bodies and pleasures’ he tentatively proposes in History of Sexuality.Footnote ¹⁶) Epistemologically, liberalism proceeds from a universal and abstract individual laden with properties and property, which are linked by market or market-like exchanges. Politically, liberalism demands protection for individuals to acquire and maintain these properties and property. Its ontology and epistemology limits the ability of liberalism to discern class and other forms of social power, and thus makes it a weak critique of any society, including socialist societies like the Soviet Union. Thus, as it was possible for Leon Trotsky and others to offer Marxist accounts hostile to the Soviet Union, it is also possible to offer a relatively sympathetic liberal analysis of a social formation as hostile to liberal politics as was the Soviet Union. This is why liberalism so often resorts to demonology to supplement its ontology and epistemology. Kotkin refuses this demonology and thus reveals with particular clarity the strengths and weaknesses of liberalism as a basis for critical analysis.

The first part of Magnetic Mountain, on ‘The Grand Strategies of the State’, offers an important reading of the construction of the Magnitogorsk factory town as a disciplinary project. Kotkin here is attuned to the failures of administrative projects to a welcome and greater extent than Foucault's similar analyses of institutions and architecture in Discipline and Punish.Footnote ¹⁷ As the Panopticon was, in Jeremy Bentham's description, a ‘mill for grinding rogues honest and idle men industrious’, so Magnitogorsk was to turn ore into steel, peasants into socialist workers and an empty space into a model socialist city.Footnote ¹⁸ All of this was carried out through disciplinary procedures, including urban planning and passport identification, that locked together city, factory and population. In this first part of the book, although Kotkin is clear that the construction of Magnitogorsk as a disciplinary apparatus served an identifiably socialist project, he also reveals how closely this project resembled capitalist industrial urbanism. Indeed, Gary, Indiana, was the inspiration for Magnitogorsk, and non-socialist American and German experts played central roles in planning the city and factory.

In the second part of the book, ‘The Little Tactics of the Habitat’, Kotkin turns from the study of disciplinary institutions and practices to the study of the construction of the Soviet individual, the subject in Foucault's terminology. Although discipline and subject were both correlative, and equally important topics for Foucault, one of the characteristics of California Foucault is, I think, an under-emphasis on the connection between discipline and the subject. While Kotkin elsewhere identified ‘government’ as the connection between power and the subject, in Magnetic Mountain it is liberalism, not Foucault's notion of ‘government’, that connects the two.Footnote ¹⁹

Perhaps the central chapter in the second part of Magnetic Mountain, ‘Speaking Bolshevik’, opens with a counter-intuitive move reminiscent of Foucault's brilliant reversal of narratives of liberation in Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality. Much as Foucault in those works argues against looking at prison reform or sex talk as emancipatory, Kotkin suggests that, rather than asking how Russian workers became revolutionary, historians ask: ‘how did it come about that within a period of less than twenty years, the revolutionary proletariat of Europe's first self-proclaimed workers and peasants state were turned into Europe's most quiescent working class?’ (p. 128). Here Kotkin gives an insightful analysis of the construction of the Soviet subject not as a victim, as a subject truncated by the repressive actions of power, but rather a subject produced by power.

Kotkin begins his analysis by identifying the socialist worker as an object of knowledge and power. Individuals at Magnitogorsk were identified as a particular kind of socialist worker, whose labour was a form of civic participation, rather than, as in capitalist labour, the compulsory production of surplus value. Kotkin then looks at a number of mechanisms by which those identified as such were made into socialist workers, including competition for the title of Stakhanovite, differential wages based on piece rates and norms, NKVD policing, trade-union-based social welfare, and the negative image of an exploited capitalist other. The individual worker was ‘frequently called upon to discuss his or her biography’, which typically emerged as a narrative of becoming a socialist worker from, for example, a peasant (p. 217). This articulation of an identity becomes a creation of a self that is a communist self, a positive product of power rather than a diminished self of repression. Kotkin offers an account of subjectivity as performance, in which workers learn to ‘speak Bolshevik’ to articulate their identities as socialist workers, whose labour is civic duty rather than exploitation. Kotkin also suggests that workers could articulate resistance to the regime in the language of Bolshevism, again following Foucault in his sense that resistance could also employ languages first articulated by power.

After such a rigorous Foucauldian analysis, it is surprising to find Kotkin asking whether the Soviet subject truly believed. If the subject is coproduced with power, then there is no reason why the relationship of the subject with power would be the cognitive one of belief or disbelief. To answer this question of belief, Kotkin turns from Michel Foucault to Lucien Febvre, from power-knowledge to mentalité. He answers, with the latter, that, just as Rabelais could not have been an atheist in the sixteenth century so Soviet citizens could not disbelieve Stalinism, though they might resist some of its abuses (p. 225).Footnote ²⁰ This is part of a suggestion that Marxism is (like?) a religion and Stalinism a ‘Civilization’. ‘Stalinism,’ Kotkin writes, ‘was not just a political system, let alone the rule of an individual. It was a set of values, a social identity, a way of life’ (p. 23). Here Kotkin also taps into a kind of subterranean functionalist stream in Foucault's thought, where individuals are integral components of a social whole rather than, as in Marx, for example, ‘the bearers of particular class-relations and interests’, that is, complex individuals in interdependent relationships with fragments of non-holistic totality that is itself an effect of antagonism.Footnote ²¹

Kotkin does not just merge social antagonisms into a single, local ‘Civilization’ but also merges the ‘Civilization’ of Stalinist Magnitogorsk into a totality that includes the entire history of the Soviet Union, perhaps also Eastern European socialism, perhaps also every welfare state, and perhaps even the Enlightenment. For Kotkin, Stalinism sheds particularly clear light on the much broader phenomenon of ‘the formation of the welfare state’, a process of ‘social regulation . . . as well as self-imposed normalisation and micro-level resistance’, a ‘conservative response to the rise of the working class’ that was also ‘linked to the efforts at pacification in Europe's colonies’ (p. 19). Indeed, Kotkin argues that the USSR was not merely a typical welfare state, but rather ‘might appear as the standard whose uncanny success challenged the rest of the world to respond’ (p. 20). This turn to the welfare state as a ground on which to analyse commonalities among those modern states commonly defined as normal – that is liberal – and those commonly defined as deviant – that is communist, fascist and colonial – has been an important historiographical move, and Kotkin's book exemplifies this gesture.Footnote ²²

Connecting all forms of social welfare to Stalinism (as well, perhaps, to Nazism and colonialism) has also become, since the late 1970s, a widespread political gesture employed by Western European elites, including socialist and labour parties embracing what they sometimes characterize as a ‘third way’, seeking to shape a post-Fordist economic conjuncture.Footnote ²³ This revived a critique of ‘collectivism’ that Friedrich von Hayek had mounted during the expansion of the welfare state after the Second World War, to suggest that Soviet Socialism, National Socialism and social welfare were all way stations on the ‘road to serfdom’.Footnote ²⁴ Margaret Thatcher drew similar analogies in her agenda-setting speech to the 1975 Conservative Party Conference.Footnote ²⁵ The nouveau philosophe André Glucksmann, whose position Foucault had endorsed, also built his theory in part by connecting these, on the face of it, quite disparate phenomena.

This critique of the welfare state as a critique of modernity also incorporated an earlier scepticism about the Enlightenment as technocratic authoritarianism, common to conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott and to left thinkers, above all Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.Footnote ²⁶ Kotkin emphasises the centrality of Condorcet to this conception, citing Keith Baker's important book while suggesting that Condorcet's attempts to use social science to resolve ‘the tension between scientific elitism and democratic liberalism’ had failed, a point slightly different from Baker's emphasis.Footnote ²⁷ It is nonetheless consistent with a broad sense that the problems of first, second and third world – the democratic deficits of liberalism; state socialism; colonialism and neo-colonialism – can be comprehended as the effects of an authoritarianism imputed to the welfare state immediately and to the Enlightenment more broadly. The universal problem of modern humanity, in this reading of the Enlightenment, is universality.

In tension with this account of a universal process of the development of the modern welfare state is the strong opposition Kotkin draws between capitalism and socialism, so that the two are internally homogenous and mutually exclusive. While this was certainly part of the official self-understandings of the Soviet Union and its allies, on the one hand, and the United States and its allies, on the other, it has explanatory costs as well as benefits.

The benefits are clear: if socialism is one thing, and one unique thing, then Kotkin's insightful reading of Magnitogorsk in the period of Stalinism sheds light on socialism in general. Moreover, the assumption that capitalism is similarly one thing, and the binary opposite of socialism, underwrites Kotkin's explanation of the rise and fall of communism as a transition away from, and then toward, capitalism. The Stalinist welfare state was more attractive to its citizens than was capitalism in the 1930s, associated as it was with poverty at best, fascism at worst. As Kotkin writes: ‘Only if the reality and image of capitalism had been considerably different would it have been possible within the USSR to imagine the wholesale rejection of the cause of socialism’ (p. 236). The relative status of capitalism and socialism, however, had changed by the 1980s, so that both Magnitogorsk workers decided for capitalism (p. 237) and the Soviet regime opted for ‘dramatic self-liquidation’ (p. 360).

Yet there are also costs to defining socialism and capitalism as internally uniform binary opposites. One set is empirical: socialism changed radically within the Soviet Union, for example, from war communism to the NEP to Stalinism to post-Stalinism to market socialism.Footnote ²⁸ The wider socialist camp, from Cuba to Yugoslavia to Tanzania to China, presents an even greater diversity. Capitalism has had a similarly dramatic, if less precisely defined, set of transformations, including Fordism, Keynesianism, fascist corporatism, and neo-liberalism.

Beyond these empirical difficulties is a theoretical difficulty brought about by passing over an ultra-left thesis that might, perhaps, have better developed Foucault's critical project, if not the nouvelle philosophie he brought with him to Berkeley, namely, that the Soviet Union was not socialist at all but rather state capitalist. This thesis, associated with the Trotskyist Max Schachtman in the United States, was well represented at the University of California at Berkeley by Hal Draper, who had been a librarian there. While Draper had retired by the time Foucault arrived in California, it would be interesting to know if and how he also interacted with this scene. The Schachtmanist position is one that would be, in many ways, more consistent with the authoritarian welfare state interpretation that forms the core of Kotkin's analysis. It would also have pre-empted the neo-liberal potential in some of California Foucault and might have better complemented what I want to see as the ‘real’ Foucault, who was too democratic for liberalism.

In fact, something akin to Schachtmanism or Trotskyism appears in Kotkin's analysis of the emergence of a new class in the Soviet Union. To explain the persistence of social and political conflicts in the Stalinist welfare state, Kotkin employs the theory of a ‘new class’ by Yugoslav socialist dissident Milovan Djilas.Footnote ²⁹ Djilas had been central to the creation of a Yugoslavian variant of socialism that had sought in worker-managed enterprises an antidote to the state authoritarianism and democratic deficits of Stalinism. Djilas broke with the Tito government over its failure to realise these democratic ideals, and his critique of the new class remains a call for a more democratic socialism rooted in the power of workers in a democratic society. The new class, according to Djilas, arose when Communist administrators began treating social property as their own private property, combining ‘administrative functions . . . with parasitic functions in the same person’, much like – although not identical to – their bourgeois counterparts in the capitalist West.Footnote ³⁰ Djilas's concept of a new class might allow analysts to ground discussions of commonalities between self-described liberal and non-liberal welfare states with a more rigorous theory than liberalism.

Kotkin, however, resists any attempt to explain Stalinism as a state form corresponding to this particular class formation. Indeed, he rejects even the slightest hint of Trotskyism, including in historians like Sheila Fitzpatrick, Moshe Lewin and Richard Stites, who view Stalinism as an end or a decline of the Russian Revolution. He does, however, employ the concept of a new class to explain the terror as the result not only of NKVD machinations but also of ‘a palpable social anger directed at local representatives of “Soviet power” who resembled a new gentry more than selfless servants of the people’ (pp. 342–3). (He also offers an explanation of the terror more consistent with conservative responses to the French Revolutionary Terror, namely, that the assertion of absolute certainty in politics ‘lay[s] the basis for the terror’ (p. 298). As Burke wrote of the original philosophes: ‘In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.’Footnote ³¹)

Kotkin's discussion of the functioning of the economy of Magnitogorsk in Chapter 6 reveals the burdens of his sharp and homogenising distinction between socialism and capitalism. Socialism is, in Kotkin's words, an ‘anti-system’ to capitalism, so that the essential thing of capitalism will be the essential absence of socialism. (One might imagine a more symmetrical account of the opposition than a contrast between a presence and an absence.) Consistent with liberal understandings of capitalism, Kotkin defines capitalism not around the discipline and exploitation of workers (as Foucault himself might have), but rather around the existence of markets and private property. Private property in Kotkin's account, again consistent with liberalism, remains relatively unexplored, and it is markets that come to serve as the defining absence/presence in Kotkin's account of the Soviet economy.

Kotkin acknowledges that markets played a central role in the Stalinist economy but, simultaneously, preserves them as a sphere of democratic resistance against the Stalinist economy. The idea that markets are democratic, and in some way particular to capitalism, is one of the oldest Enlightenment utopias, of course, but one recently revived by neo-liberalism. Indeed, for an analysis of markets Kotkin turns to one of the great neo-liberal thinkers of the 1980s, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. The title of De Soto's 1980 book, The Other Path, suggests that the small-scale markets it celebrates offer an alternate to the socialism of the Shining Path movement, and, by implication a capitalist response to socialism.Footnote ³² De Soto dedicated the book to ‘Latin America's competitive workers and entrepreneurs’, and offered that it would help realise the ‘ideals’ of his ‘left-wing friends’ better than left-wing methods themselves would. As Timothy Mitchell has related, De Soto, with assistance from the conservative United States Atlas Foundation, carried out an experiment in which Peruvian slum-dwellers were granted formal title to their homes. The hypothesis was that formalising the property claims of these precarious workers would allow them to borrow money against their property and become entrepreneurs. This did not turn out to be the case, but, thanks to a network of neo-liberal foundations, the experiment came to serve a range of celebrations of the market against the state. This network of neo-liberal foundations put forth the proposition that markets were good for the poor, while the state functioned simply as a preserve of privilege. These foundations and their wealthy supporters recommended deregulation and privatisation – one wonders how cynically – as democratic means allowing the poor to enrich themselves.Footnote ³³

Kotkin finds, in fact, that markets played a major role in firm-to-firm and in retail distribution in Magnitogorsk and that the state also encouraged worker-owned cooperatives. While some of these markets were illegal, many were also central to the functioning of the planned economy. What Kotkin says about markets in Stalinist Russia could be said of almost any society: ‘market relations had to be tolerated; market relations had to be policed’; and: ‘what was considered honest trade could at one moment suddenly become speculation, or the other way around’ (p. 275).

This is not to suggest that the Stalinist economy was identical to all other economies, but rather that the place to locate the difference is not in the state/market dichotomy of neo-liberal thinkers like De Soto.Footnote ³⁴ Kotkin claims that the Soviet state rejected markets as a representation of ‘the supreme evil in the Bolshevik imagination: capitalist economic relations’. He also writes that the state opposed markets because it ‘arrogated to itself the sole authority to make all decisions’ and wished to deny individuals ‘the freedom to make decisions and to engage in association’. He also acknowledges, however, that Soviet citizens appreciated what they saw as the ‘social justice’ of the planned economy, even if the state partly ‘appropriated’ this language (p. 278). Kotkin comes to the limits of neo-liberal discourse when treating the Soviet Union rigorously rather than as a caricature, and bringing in neo-liberal caricatures of markets and democracy from De Soto burdens the analysis.

Writing in the midst of the ‘age of facture’, Stephen Kotkin assembled a set of theoretical resources whose strengths are considerable and whose weaknesses appear perhaps more clearly after almost two decades of critical analysis of neo-liberalism. For all the unnecessary problems that emerge from trying to combine a Foucauldian and a liberal analysis, it is also important to note that the California variant of Foucauldianism was essential in bringing the approach of Michel Foucault to US academia. The first resources we have to go beyond this California Foucault were provided by the subsequent work of Michel Foucault himself. The publication of his seminars, including his analysis of neo-liberalism, has made even clearer that, while he may have explored aspects of liberalism as an alternative to authoritarian welfare states, he rejected, needless to say, its political metaphysics.Footnote ³⁵ The incorporation of Foucault into the autonomist Marxist tradition by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri has been another important advance.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, their anti-socialist, anti-Soviet communism would provide a far firmer ground than liberalism from which to critically interrogate modernity qua social welfare. Finally, the work of Giorgio Agamben, building on Foucault, Hannah Arendt and many others, on the camp, on bare life and on sovereignty has profound implications for understanding the production of the subject and power apart from both Marxist and liberal paradigms. The Italian Foucault, perhaps more than the French or California Foucault, in my view, offers the most promising way forward in continuing to develop the type of analysis which Magnetic Mountain helped pioneer. And, while I am confident that the Italian Foucault provides certain advantages over the California Foucault, it does not (nor need it) have greater fidelity to some one true Foucault.