On January 31, 1979, Michel Foucault made an offhand remark during a lecture at the College of France: “I do not think that there is an autonomous socialist governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism.…One can, moreover, reproach it…but it has lived, it has actually functioned, and we have examples of it within and connected up to liberal governmentalities.” In this rare reference to socialism in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault framed it as “the internal logic of an administrative apparatus” in which the “governmentality of a police state” forms “a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration.”1 One can read this remark as dismissive, slotting socialism as a pseudo-ideology subsidiary to an all-encompassing global history of capitalism. And in the three decades since the end of the Cold War, such readings of socialism have only multiplied—not least due...

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