Liberalism: Rationality of government and vision of history

The paper addresses two issues arising from Foucault's work. One concerns his treatment of liberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, which is probably more familiar through the work of the (mostly) British 'governmentality' school, and the other concerns a comment on relations between the West and the rest in The Order of Things that seems to express an insensitive Eurocentrism. I argue that we cannot make sense of liberalism without grasping the place of this Eurocentrism in eighteenth/nineteenth century western thought.