ABSTRACT:In his 1979 lectures, Foucault took particular interest in the reconfiguration of quotidian practices under neo-liberal human capital theory, re-describing all persons as entrepreneurs of the self. By the early 1980s, Foucault had begun to articulate a theory of ethical conduct driven not by the logic of investment, but of artistic development and self-care. This article uses Foucault's account of human capital as a basis to explore the meaning and limits of Foucault's final published works and argues for two interrelated genealogical projects focused on the ethics of economic activity.Keywords: Neo-liberalism, homo oeconomicus, human capital, Chicago School, critique. IAs is well known, in the final two published volumes of History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault turns his attention toward the ethics of sexual practices in antiquity, which ultimately centered on the development of the ‚cultivation‛ and ‚care‛ of the self. In a gloss on Epictetus' account of the emergence of the self and the practice of governance, Foucault writes, ‚It is the modality of a rational being and not the qualification of a status that establishes and ought to determine, in their concrete form, relations between the governors and the governed.‛ 1 In his 1979 lectures at the Collège de France, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault gives a strikingly similar gloss on the neo-liberal figure of rationality par excellence: ‚The surface of contact between the individual and the power exercised on him, and so the principle of the regulation of power over the individual, will be only this kind of grid of homo oeconomicus. Homo oeconomicus is the interface of government and the individual.‛ 2In the figure of homo oeconomicus-a subject of governmental rationality serving as a grid of intelligibility between the government and the governed-Foucault traces the pro-1

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<p>The Maryland State Constitution states that its General Assembly may, "regulate or prohibit the right to vote of a person convicted of infamous or other serious crime or under care or guardianship for mental disability." In a single sentence, the link between criminality and mental disability is invoked in order to draw an internal boundary around those who can take part in the project of representative government. Through a close reading of one particular moment in the history of Maryland's disenfranchisement provisions, I show how these restrictions could buttress prevailing racial hierarchies. Delegates to Maryland's nineteenth century constitutional conventions explicitly understood disenfranchisement as a practice that managed the boundaries of full citizenship through the courts' power to determine criminal guilt and mental competence. In defining "exceptions" to the franchise, the delegates were additionally shoring up the increasingly unstable conception of whiteness. The figure of the "free negro" was persistently invoked to do this work, marked through criminality and insanity as civically disabled in order to both reduce the threat that s/he posed to the standing of white workers and to shore up the purity of whiteness itself as innocent, able, and fit to rule. In so far as disenfranchisement is an instrument of racial oppression, it continues to operate racially not just in spite of color-blind liberalism, but also precisely through its ability to disarm claims of racial animus. The norms that drove the adoption of disenfranchisement in the nineteenth century continue to ground these exclusions to the vote, meaning that the ideal figure of the American citizen continues to be compulsorily white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Ending this legacy of social and political hierarchization requires that we remove disenfranchisement provisions, but also move beyond the logic of inclusion, divesting the vote as a location that finalizes, essentializes, and fixes the boundaries of the polity.</p>