Neoliberalisme et psychologie behavioriste
In: Raisons politiques: études de pensée politique, Heft 1, S. 15-30
ISSN: 1291-1941
This article explores the relationship between neoliberalism & behaviorist psychology. Working our way back to the wellsprings of liberal thought in Jeremy Bentham & John Stuart Mill, we find it was the Utilitarians who laid the foundations for the liberal economy & a new psychology that presents the individual as the product of interaction with his environment. By progressively incorporating the contributions of Darwinian evolutionism, this behaviorist school eventually became the reigning paradigm of American psychology. J. Watson and, above all, B. F. Skinner gave this school, by turns, an educational & reeducational orientation. By demonstrating through experiments the superiority of positive reinforcement to punitive systems, they developed a technology of behavioral control. What this conception of psychology has in common with contemporary neoliberalism is an ideology of social control based on the necessary rationality of human behavior & on consumption as the main positive reinforcement system. Adapted from the source document.