Broadly speaking, everything which opposes liberalism and proposes state "management·of the economy thus constitutes an invariant whose history can be seen throughout the development of European societies since the"end of the nineteenth century and, more precisely, from the start of the twentieth century, that is to say, when the liberal art of government became, so to speak, intimidated by its own consequences and tried to limit the consequences that it ought to have drawn itselffrom its own development. How did iury tolimitthem? Well; by a technique of intervention which consisted·in applying to society and the economy a type of rationality considered valid within the natural sciences. In short, what we can broadly call technology. Technicization 6f state management, .of control of the economy, and also in the analysis of economic phenomena, is what the ordoliberals call "eternal Saint-Simonism,,, and they identify Saint-Simon48 with the birth of that vertigo which takes hold of the liberal art of government and leads it to seek a principle of limitation, a principle of organization in the application to society of a schema of rationality specific to nature, a principle which ultimately leads to Nazism. So, from Saint-Simon to Nazism there is a cycle of rationality entailing interventions which entail the growth of the state, which entails setting up an administration that itselffunctions according to technical types of rationality, and this constitutes precisely the genesis of Nazism over two centuries, or at any rate a century and a half, ofthe history of capitalism.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 671