What does this involve? Well, when we look a bitmoredosely, we may of course hear it as a kind of more or less Rousseauesque return to nature, something that Riistow called, moreover, with a very ambiguous word, a "V.italpolitik," a politics of life. But what is this Vitalpolitik that Riistow talks about, and of which this is an expression? Actually, as you can see, it is not a matter of constructing a social fabric in which the individual would be in direct contact with nature, but of constructing a social fabric in which precisely the basic units would have the form of the ente1:pris~,forwhat is private property if-not an enterprise? What is a house if not an enterprise? What is the management of these small neighborhood communities [ ... *] ifnot other forms of enterprise? In other words, what is involved is the generalization of forms of "enterprise" by· diffusing and multiplying them as· much as possible, enter~ prises which must not be focused on the form of big national or international enterprises or the type ofbig enterprises of a state. I think this multiplication of the "enterprise" form within the social body is what is at stake in neo-liberal policy. It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 823