The Government of unemployment

Critical considerations on some historical trends and their traces in the Austrian School's notion of entrepreneurship

Abstract

In the context of successive capitalist crises, the forms of labor force governance are being reconfigured. For decades, the extension of the entrepreneurial form, as a form of self-managed, non-salaried work, has been anchored in the postulates of the Austrian School. Our view of the present is based on an analysis of trends that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These heterogeneous tendencies aimed at decentering, in historical terms, human labor from capitalist social relations of exploitation. At that time, especially in the 19th century, a field of confrontation opened up around the concepts of labor, private property and class struggle; a dispute in which “poverty” and the “social question” were used strategically to test ways of governing structural unemployment that tended to decouple the wage-form and the capital/labor conflict. The construction of the notion of "entrepreneur of his own work" that runs through our hypothesis that raises the possibility of tracing a relationship between specific postulates of branches of physiocracy, the Civil Market Economy and the "socialism of the jurists" (especially in Anton Menger), and their impact on the "moralization" of the relationship between capital and labor, as well as their traces in the current notion of "entrepreneur" of the Austrian School, under a Lockean matrix of the concept of "property". The relevance of the analysis lies in a critical view of the historical forms in which forms of governance of unemployment have been tested, as well as their traces in the present day. Methodologically, we focus on the Foucauldian archeological perspective to investigate the historical conditions of the emergence of various postulates about human labor with an emphasis on “self-management” and the moral dimension in the relationship between capital and labor. We work on different series of documents and thus think about the subject-entrepreneur at present, that is to say, we focus on the gaps of a space of dispersion around a historically situated problematic.