Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient : the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left.

However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower ? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers ? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism ?

This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

米歇尔-福柯在1984年去世时，正值战后社会转型的希望渐渐消失。在他去世后的几十年里，新自由主义取得了胜利，对社会权利的攻击也变得越来越大胆。如果福柯不是这些年的直接见证者，那么他关于新自由主义的工作还是有先见之明的：自由主义的问题在他最后的作品中占据了重要位置。自他去世后，福柯的概念装置在世界左翼知识分子的相当一部分中获得了核心的、甚至是主导的地位。

然而，正如本卷的文章所表明的，福柯对新自由主义的态度至少是模棱两可的。福柯非但没有领导一场反对自由市场正统观念的思想斗争，反而在许多方面似乎认可了它。人们如何理解他对被理解为生物权力工具的福利国家的激进批判？或者他对所谓的新哲学家的拉皮条式的反马克思主义的支持？福柯有可能被新自由主义所诱惑吗？

这个问题不仅仅是对传记的兴趣：它迫使我们更广泛地面对1968年5月以来左派的变异、随后几年的幻灭以及过去30年法国知识领域的深刻变革。要理解1980年代和新自由主义的胜利，就是要通过一个最重要的人物来探索知识界左派最模糊的角落。