Pierre Dardot: "We Are Witnessing a Civil War Against Collective Rights"

Pierre Dardot is a professor at Université Paris-Nanterre and co-author (with Christian Laval) of the seminal work The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (2009), in which they revitalized Foucault’s biopolitical framework to analyze neoliberalism’s evolution until its current crisis. Their work redefined neoliberalism beyond mere economic policy, exposing it as a dominant rationality that permeates all spheres of human existence—universalizing competition and recasting individuals as “entrepreneurs of themselves.”

This foundational text was followed by pivotal works like Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century (2014), which theorized alternative rationalities rooted in communal practices, and The Choice of Civil War: Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy, a genealogical critique of neoliberalism’s militarized logic, among others. Dardot’s scholarship extends to Latin America, where his research, particularly in Chile, has established him as a significant analyst of the region’s political and social transformations.

Collective Rights Beyond the State?

Dolores Marcos: Your work reveals neoliberalism as a rationality reshaping social relations and subjectivities—far beyond mere economic policy. This rationality corrodes democracy and rights, the very foundations of equality. Argentina's current government exemplifies this, merging extreme neoliberalism with ultraconservatism through state violence, repression of protests, and systemic attacks on social movements.

Yet history shows resistance: during the dictatorship, groups like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo expanded struggles for labor, gender, and territorial rights. You argue the State cannot be a tool for liberation, urging us to redefine rights beyond liberal citizenship—rejecting both market fundamentalism and state domination.

But faced with today's violent dispossessions, can we ignore the State? Must we not tactically engage it to defend rights, while building counter-conducts that transcend liberal democracy—without romanticizing the welfare state? How do we balance this urgent defense with the longer project of constructing alternatives?

Pierre Dardot: To properly address this question, we must frame it through the genealogy of law, specifically the notion of law-based citizenship. The concept of a tactical pact between social movements, emancipatory forces, and the state proves problematic—it is neither common terminology nor clearly transformative in practice. If it implies a retreat to a mere defence of gained rights, this approach will not stop Milei’s or any radical right-wing agenda.

This line of thinking rests on a flawed assumption: that rallying around legal rights and consensus-building can secure broader support against authoritarian threats. But rights-based defensiveness does little to address the deeper conflicts driving reactionary politics. By treating citizenship as a static legal shield rather than a site of struggle, it concedes the ideological terrain to the far right. In fact, such postures may backfire, inviting further radicalization from figures like Trump and Milei, as each legalistic challenge fuels their anti-system radicalization.

We must recognize the historical construction of rights—first civil, then political rights, followed by social rights, and post-1970s expansions around gender, feminism, and minority protection. This progression introduced a crucial collective dimension to the concept of rights, transforming them from individual guarantees into tools for group emancipation. From labor movements fighting for workplace democracy to indigenous communities defending territorial autonomy, from feminist collectives demanding reproductive justice to LGBTQ+ activists battling for recognition, all demonstrate how rights have become vehicles for collective empowerment.

Chile's recent constitutional process (2020-2023) made this tension visible as demands for collective rights became the central battleground. The constitutional convention—the first in the world with gender parity and significant indigenous representation—proposed groundbreaking collective rights: plurinational recognition of indigenous nations (including territorial autonomy and political participation), gender parity across all state institutions, environmental rights granting legal personhood to ecosystems, and labor rights framed as collective rather than individual protections. Yet this ambition triggered the conservative backlash. The opposition's successful "Rechazo" campaign weaponized fears about collective rights. The Chilean case crystallizes our pivotal choice: regression to liberal individualism (as embodied in the current conservative constitutional rewrite) or advancement through collective struggles that reimagine rights as instruments of popular power.

"When movements give up the struggle for collective rights, they ensure that their opponents dictate the terms."

The defense of collective rights represents more than legal claims—it demands substantive social justice. Struggles for collective rights challenge the neoliberal fiction that equality can be achieved through individual rights alone and expose how supposedly "neutral" legal systems protect entrenched privileges. Milei's reactionary response to such demands follows an unoriginal script: he frames collective rights as violations of individual liberty, property rights, and spontaneous order—a typical argument from the global far-right playbook.

Social justice is indispensable precisely because it centers collective rights—the recognition that emancipation cannot be achieved through individual legal claims alone. Argentina’s post-dictatorship struggles—for labor, land, women’s, and Indigenous rights—embody this collective dimension, proving that transformative change has always required mobilizing as collective subjects.

When we describe the state as a "battlefield," we’re referring specifically to the social movements that have contested it as a space of struggle since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983. But a critical distinction must be made: a battlefield is not the same as a weapon. The state can—and must—serve as terrain for conflict, but our approach should be pragmatic rather than abstract. Questions like "What is the state?" are too vague; what matters is analyzing the specific form it takes today and how to challenge it effectively.

Only with this strategy can we assume that securing collective rights guaranteed by the state allows for structural change. But transformation demands dual pressure: both within institutions and through sustained mobilization from below. Social movements must lead this charge while engaging state structures pragmatically—neither retreating into anarchist purism (which cedes institutional power to enemies) nor lapsing into statist instrumentalism (which mistakes government positions for real power). The conclusion is clear: when movements give up the struggle for collective rights in favor of a merely defensive struggle for liberal individual rights, they do not avoid conflict; they simply ensure that their opponents dictate the terms.

The Political Rationality of Violence

Gustavo Robles: We are witnessing a new phase of right-wing neoliberal radicalization—an authoritarian turn within the global political realignment that began after the 2008 crisis and crystallized in the past decade with so-called right-wing populisms. Unlike technocratic neoliberalism or sovereigntist right-wing populisms, this new phase is characterized by uninhibited violence—what you term in your book the "civil war option." This manifests both in overt conflicts (Palestine's genocide, Middle East bombings, African wars, Europe's militarized borders) and in symbolic cruelties (Trump's nihilism, Milei's chainsaw politics, Bukele's punitive spectacles).

Violence now operates as both means and message—no longer requiring legal justification or diplomatic pretense. When neoliberal rationality once shaped subjects through entrepreneurial individualism, how does it now produce subjects who demand their own oppression through spectacularized cruelty? What analytical framework can move beyond mere outrage to explain violence's political-economic function in this phase? How does it reshape coexistence and enable new, authoritarian subjectivities?

Pierre Dardot: This question holds particular significance for me and Christian Laval, especially following our 2009 book The New Way of the World. Everything began with the intellectual earthquake caused by the 2004 publication in France of Foucault’s lectures The Birth of Biopolitics. Reading this work proved shocking because the dominant French discourse—particularly on the left—portrayed neoliberalism as a jungle-like social Darwinism; Foucault’s lectures fundamentally challenged this caricature.

This encounter with Foucault drew us to his concept of governmentality, which remains extraordinarily fruitful for analyzing contemporary power structures. Governmentality designates the art of indirectly steering individuals—making them act as desired without explicit commands or direct impositions. Around 1979, when Foucault delivered these lectures, European governments were beginning to embrace this neoliberal rationality. What is fascinating are the distinctions he discerned even then, insights vital for understanding and interrogating current developments.

However, between 2015 and 2017, we observed a crucial shift: neoliberalism shed its managerial guise and adopted increasingly authoritarian forms, expressing violence more directly than what had motivated The New Way of the World. This forced us to recalibrate our analysis in The Choice of Civil War (2021). Between these two books, neoliberalism’s history revealed new dimensions: we discovered that since the 1930s, key neoliberal figures had justified violence against democratic movements seen as threats to governance—a tradition we had overlooked.

"Governmentality proves inadequate as an analytical category. That is why my recent work emphasizes counter-revolution: this right-wing violence is not conservatism but a systematic offensive to erase decades of social gains."

Personally, after multiple trips to Chile, I found it astonishing that Foucault’s 1979 course contained no reference to the 1973 Chilean dictatorship. Nor had we addressed Pinochet in The New Way of the World, written decades after the coup. This posed a problem because Pinochet’s regime demanded a different analytical framework—we could not examine it through Foucauldian governmentality. That concept only becomes applicable post-1989, when Pinochet’s dictatorship ended and a governmentality resembling what we had analyzed emerged.

Working with Laval’s research group, we revisited neoliberalism’s history and grasped the centrality of violence’s rationality to our present moment. Deepening this historical review led us to rediscover foundational texts like von Mises’ 1927 Liberalism, which justified violence against the masses. Amid Red Vienna’s worker battalions, Mises—a neoliberal founding father—even endorsed 1930s Italian fascism as civilization’s provisional protector against worker "barbarism." This established the enduring binary logic between private property (civilization) and social demands (barbarism), a logic resurging today as violence’s justification.

This legacy helps decipher Milei’s disturbing recent claim that exploitation theory should be inverted, claiming workers actually exploit capitalists. Such rhetoric is not new but revives old justifications for violence. Governmentality proves inadequate as an analytical category. That is why my recent work emphasizes counter-revolution: this right-wing violence is not conservatism but a systematic offensive to erase decades of social gains. We are witnessing a "choice of civil war" against gained collective rights. This goes far beyond conservative politics—it is more radical and dangerous, demanding we recognize neoliberalism’s historical depths of violence. This trajectory is what The Choice of Civil War sought to illuminate.

Commoning Against Leviathan

María José Cisneros: In your 2014 book Common (co-authored with Laval), you argue that resisting neoliberalism requires more than defensive measures—it demands organizing around "the common" through constituent practices that transform institutions toward radical self-governance. Far from abstract, this principle has guided global anticapitalist struggles.

In Argentina since 2001, the common has flourished through popular economy movements, later expanded by feminist and dissident collectives who link anti-patriarchal, anticolonial, and anticapitalist struggles while building alternative social relations. Unsurprisingly, Milei's market-obsessed government now attacks these movements, dismissing them as "poverty profiteers" or seekers of "privileges."

This raises urgent questions: Can common-based practices transcend institutional reform to envision entirely new futures? Which current examples most effectively counter authoritarianism? What are their limits? How might they interact with—or transform—institutional politics (parties, unions, the state)? Could these traditional structures become sites for commoning, despite their contradictions?

Pierre Dardot: One of the main limitations of commons-based initiatives is their frequent isolation, with little coordination between them. In Argentina during 2001, there was strong coordination, but the current situation differs, as it does in Europe. Yet attempts at creating connections persistently emerge at the margins of these experiences. Commons-oriented practices are not limited to cooperatives or small local institutions; they unfold within social movements and remain rooted in specific social contexts.

A recent French example demonstrates this: facing the threatened closure of a factory vital to a local community, the CGT (France’s main labor union) formed an unprecedented alliance with four environmental organizations. This marks the first convergence between workers' unions and ecological movements, where the fight against layoffs gained an environmental dimension. This encouraging development represents a concrete possibility to overcome fragmentation—precisely what opponents seek to prevent by blocking coordination and alliances. That is why the union’s incorporation of ecological concerns proves particularly significant.

"We should not expect political parties to become "battlefields" against figures like Milei ... Political parties operate through a logic that monopolizes politics as purely a state matter."

Regarding political parties and the state (leaving aside unions here), their connection runs deep because parties were constituted with states’ objectives and political logics, creating a structural limit. We should not expect political parties to become "battlefields" against figures like Milei, as might have occurred in contexts like Argentina’s 1983 scenario. The battlefield metaphor should not extend to political parties because they operate through a logic that monopolizes politics as purely a state matter. This holds true whether operating outside the state to conquer it or working within to protect it.

Transforming parties into battlefields requires exceptional courage. Podemos in Spain illustrates this: emerging in 2015 as a different, "process-oriented" party promising internal democratization, by 2017 it had devolved into nationalist populism. Initially, it created spaces for grassroots participation and diverse collectives’ influence, but eventually, leadership conflicts and political professionalization prevailed, assimilating it into traditional logic. Its alliance with Sánchez’s PSOE confirmed this dynamic of submission to the state rather than transformative change.

A similar situation unfolds with France’s new Popular Front following the June 9, 2024, elections that dissolved the National Assembly. While initially demonstrating a willingness to unite all progressive and left-wing parties—each with its own logic (ecologists, socialists, and four or five other groups)—maintaining unity remains unlikely amid the tensions of a presidential campaign featuring multiple candidates and competing agendas.

Governing Through Care

Alejandro Ruidrejo: You mentioned Foucault's absence of references to the Chilean neoliberal experience. I would like to connect this omission with the fact that, on the few occasions Foucault examined political or governmental experiences in Latin America, we find his brief analysis of the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay. These Christian communist republics, as they have been called, posed a significant challenge to neoliberal thought—from von Mises to Louis Baudin, among many others. Their missionary ratio gubernationis truly challenged neoliberal rationality.

In the trajectories of Jesuitism and pastoral power in Latin America, the figure of Pope Francis emerges, who has also maintained a critical stance toward neoliberalism. In our country, he has served as a reference point around which social organizations and critical perspectives on how we are governed have developed. I believe there has been a historical blockage in the genealogies of pastoral power that extends into our present, impacting not only its ways of shaping governance but also the exercise of critique. How do you see the potential of pastoral power for envisioning an alternative rationality to neoliberalism?

Pierre Dardot: In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault dedicates several chapters to pastoral power, tracing its genealogy from the 4th–5th centuries AD, when it became institutionalized alongside the Church. Unlike early Christian communities, this model—first embodied in the bishop-as-shepherd—entails individualized care of the flock, with each sheep receiving particular attention. Crucially, Foucault highlights how this power combines two logics: individualizing (adapting to each case) and integrating (maintaining collective cohesion). He repeatedly emphasizes this duality and its ultimate aim: the salvation of souls.

"The state-citizen relationship constitutes a pastoral power utterly transformed, combining serialized individualization with integration."

This concept undergoes profound distortion in modern political appropriation. During Chile’s dictatorship, Opus Dei weaponized pastoral imagery to justify repression, completely perverting its original meaning. While Jesuits in Latin America—despite their ambivalent role—occasionally embodied a more protective pastoralism (as in the 17th-century Paraguayan missions), today’s reality differs radically. The modern state’s appropriation of pastoral power bears no resemblance to these Jesuit practices.

The devastated Church no longer holds its former role. Today, the state assumes pastoral power through institutions like medicine, psychiatry, and education—mechanisms of social control and material management, wholly divorced from spiritual salvation. The state-citizen relationship now constitutes a pastoral power utterly transformed, combining serialized individualization with integration.

Autism exemplifies this modern state pastoralism, operating paradoxically in both Argentina and France—a dynamic Foucault foresaw in his final works. This example proves illuminating: neoliberal discourse celebrates certain autistic individuals (like those with Asperger’s) for their "superior" intellectual competitiveness, while silencing others struggling with speech and reasoning. Argentina’s more differentiated pedagogy contrasts with France’s model of formal equality, where autistic students face identical demands as neurotypical peers. This neoliberal appropriation of anti-discrimination rhetoric enacts subtle violence: imposed uniformity breeds exclusion.

The result? Countless autistic individuals expelled from mainstream education, confined to facilities for "violent autistics" staffed with restraint-trained personnel. Beneath inclusion’s veneer lies treatment bordering on animal husbandry—a discriminatory system Foucault would recognize. Pastoral power appears benevolent, but his analysis reveals its inverse: the state’s pastoral regime exerts new violence through control mechanisms disguised as care.

Dolores Marcos is Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the National University of Tucumán

Gustavo Robles is an IRGAC Fellow and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Passau, Germany

María José Cisneros is Professor of Latin American Thought at the National University of Tucumán

Alejandro Ruidrejo is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the National University of Salta, Argentina

Our thanks to Elena Hernández (Department of French, University of Tucumán) for her careful French-to-Spanish translation