The Entrepreneurial Self and ‘Youth at-risk’: Exploring the Horizons of Identity in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

This paper argues that a particular form of Selfhood has come to dominate the horizons of identity in the Western democracies at this time—I refer to this form of personhood as the entrepreneurial Self. The paper argues that the figure (population) of ‘Youth at-risk’, in its negativity, illuminates the positivity that is the entrepreneurial Self. That is, the discourses that construct Youth at-risk reveal the truths about whom we should, as adults, become. The paper engages with Foucault's theories of government, of (Neo)Liberalism as a problematisation of the practise of Liberal welfare government, and of the ways in which certain psychological discourses articulate with (Neo)Liberal views of enterprise to produce a view of the Self as the entrepreneurial Self.

Notes

1. The Ordoliberalen are so named through their involvement in the journal Ordo (Gordon 1991).

2. One measure of Hayek's influence in the emergence of post-war (Neo)Liberal problematisations of the practice of government is found in the jacket notes from his The Fatal Conceit (1988). Here Hayek is described, in part, as being the ‘ideological mentor for the Reagan and Thatcher “revolutions”’.

3. See also Hayek (1967).

4. Nancy Fraser (1989), and Fraser and Linda Gordon (1994) have argued that this view of the Subject, as masculine, as rational choice-making homo economicus, underpinned the development of Liberal Welfare practices of government. Such practices most often position women and children in relations of dependence to this Subject.