Michel Foucault, Governmentality (a lecture at the College de France given on 1 Febuary 1978)

Michel Foucault, “Governmentality (a lecture at the College de France given on 1 Febuary 1978),” in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France, 1977-78 (London, Palgrave-MacMillan, 2007), 126—145

Foucault starts his lecture with an observation, that in the early modern time, a formerly popular genre “mirrors of princes” is replaced by a new literary form, “presented as arts of government.” (126—7). He provides a wider context to this phenomenon: during the sixteenth century, the questions of government—government of children, of souls, of oneself, etc.—appears on the agenda. The reason is twofold: “on the one hand, there is the movement of state centralization, and, on the other, one of religious dispersion and dissidence,” and at the intersection of these movements, “the problem arises <…> of how to be governed, by whom, to what extent, to what ends, and by what methods.” (127)

Foucault says that his aim is to identify some peculiar moments in the evolution of ideas of government by comparing multiple texts about government with the model text: Machiavelli’s The Prince. Foucault mentions that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Machiavelli’s ideas were popular among politicians, The Prince was, for two centuries, quite a criticized peace of political writing. He then says that this anti-Machiavellianism, despite its attacks of Machiavelli’s ideas, was in reality “a positive genre, with its specific object, concepts, and strategy.” (130) Machiavelli is used in this body of literature as an imagined adversary, who is still required to build a conversation.

In order to reconstruct this conversation, Foucault first reconstructs that reading of The Prince that was dominant since the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, for it was this reading and this constructed author Machiavelli against whom the argumentation of the anti-Machiavellian literature was built. Machiavelli’s Prince is an external agent, there is no fundamental, essential, natural, and juridical connection between the Prince and his principality,” (130) therefore the relationship between the Prince and his subjects is very fragile, being under a permanent threat of attacks from both external and internal enemies. Consequently, “the object of the art of governing, the art of being Prince that Machiavelli puts forward, must be this fragile link between the Prince and his principality.” (131)

Consequently, during this historical period The Prince was read as “a treatise on the Prince’s ability to hold on to his principality.” (131) The rich anti-Machiavellian literature aspired to replace this skill with a new, seemingly more important one: “an art of government.” (131)  Foucault starts to analyze these new view on the art of government with a 1555 book Le Miroir politique, contenant diverses manières de gouverner by Guillaume de La Perrière. This author, first, claimed that the practice of government was not external to the state: through such practices as family, convent, school, etc., the practice of government was immanently present in the state. Later authors differentiated between government in these three spheres (“the government of oneself, which falls under morality; the art of properly governing a family, which is part of economy; and finally, the “science of governing well” the state, which belongs to politics—132), but there was “a continuity of the different forms of government,” or, to put it in another way, a tight relationship. (132) It means that “whoever wants to be able to govern the state must first know how to govern himself, and then, at another level, his family, his goods, his lands, after which he will succeed in governing the state” (132) and vice versa: “when a state is governed well, fathers will know how to govern their families, their wealth, their goods, and their property well, and individuals will also conduct themselves properly.” (133) The latter is important, because it brings about the idea that private life can no more exist independently of the state: it starts being “policing.” (133)

And no matter whether you move up or down along this continuity of the different forms of government, the central element is the government of family, which is associated with economy:

The art of government essentially appears in this literature as having to answer the question of how to introduce economy – that is to say, the proper way of managing individuals, goods, and wealth, like the management of a family by a father who knows how to direct his wife, his children, and his servants, who knows how to make his family’s fortune prosper, and how to arrange suitable alliances for it – how to introduce this meticulous attention, this type of relationship between father and the family, into the management of the  state? (133)

Foucault analyzes the concept “economy” in Rousseau’s writing and argues that, according to Rousseau, “to govern a state will thus mean the application of economy, the establishment of an economy, at the level of the state as a whole, that is to say, [exercising] supervision and control over its inhabitants, wealth, and the conduct of all and each, as attentive as that of a father’s over his household and goods.” (133)

Foucault argues that the introduction of “economy” into the concept of “government” is that significant change which differentiates anti-Machiavellian literature from Machiavelli himself. For the latter, there were two objects of government: territory and people. For the former, government is already “not related to the territory, but to a sort of complex of men and things.” (134) This new government should take care of “things,” where “the things <…> are men in their relationships, bonds, and complex involvements with things like wealth, resources, means of subsistence, and, of course, the territory with its borders, qualities, climate, dryness, fertility, and so on. "Things" are men in their relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking. Finally, they are men in their relationships with things like accidents, misfortunes, famine, epidemics, and death.” (134)

That this new art of government is the government of people as things is demonstrated by two metaphors, which become popular in this new body of political literature, the metaphor of the ship and the metaphor of the household.

Foucault then analyzes what mission of this new art of government is envisioned by these new theoreticians. He says that in their writing, the government works for “the common good and the salvation of all.” (136) He the asks: “Now what does this common good, or this salvation of all, which is regularly invoked by jurists and laid down as the very end of sovereignty, comprise?” (136) The answer to this question is:

They say that the common good exists when all subjects obey the law without fail, perform their appointed tasks well, practice the trades to which they are assigned, and respect the established order, insofar as this order conforms to the laws imposed by God on nature and men. That is to say, the public good is essentially obedience to the law, either to the earthly sovereign’s law, or to the law of the absolute sovereign, God. In any case, what characterizes the end of sovereignty, this common or general good, is ultimately nothing other than submission to this law. This means that the end of sovereignty is circular; it refers back to the exercise of sovereignty. The good is obedience to the law, so that the good proposed by sovereignty is that people obey it. (136)

In this respect, this grand aim of the new art of government is not really far from Machiavelli’s vision of that: sovereignty for the sake of sovereignty, power for the sake of power. Yet the difference appears, and an important one. In Machiavelli’s writing, law was the major instrument to exercise one’s power over the population, now, since the early modern time, “it is not a matter of imposing a law on men, but of the disposition of things, that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, or, of as far as possible employing laws as tactics; arranging things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means.” (137) Consequently, in the eighteenth century, according to Foucault, there’s a growing body of history, which “explain that the ends of government cannot be effectively achieved by means of the law.” (137)

Although new visions of a new art of government emerged in the sixteenth century, they could not be realized until the eighteenth century because of, first, more natural reasons—wars, rebellions, a financial crisis of the late seventeenth century—and, secondly, because of “institutional and mental structures,” (139) which were simply not appropriate for their implementation. Foucault studies this paradox—theoretical development of the art of government without practical means to implement it—by analyzing European mercantilism. Its idea was based on the new art of government, but aims and instruments through which it was pursued were of old nature, pushing forward sovereign’s, rather than government’s aims. Moreover, at some point before the eighteenth century, the new art of government was caught in a conceptual/metaphoric trap between being expressed as a sovereignty, family and the household—the first metaphor being too large, two latter—two small. How, then, it could free the way to itself? Foucault answers:

How was the art of government released from this blocked situation? The process of its release, like the blockage itself, should be situated within a number of general processes: the demographic expansion of the eighteenth century, which was linked to the abundance of money, which was itself linked in turn to the expansion of agricultural production through circular processes with which historians are familiar and so will not be discussed here… It is thanks to the perception of the specific problems of the population, and thanks to the isolation of the level of reality that we call the economy, that it was possible to think, reflect, and calculate the problem of government outside the juridical framework of sovereignty (140)

New statistics was particularly important in getting rid of the metaphor of family and household, as it allowed conceptualization of larger population groups. “Statistics enables the specific phenomena of population to be quantified and thereby reveals that this specificity is irreducible [to the] small framework of the family.” (141) This allows a total reconceptualization of the family as such:

The family will change from being a model to being an instrument; it will become a privileged instrument for the government of the population rather than a chimerical model for good government. The shift from the level of model to that of instrument in relation to the population is absolutely fundamental. And in actual fact, from the middle of the eighteenth century, the family really does appear in this instrumental relation to the population, in the campaigns on mortality, campaigns concerning marriage, vaccinations, and inoculations, and so on. (141)

The second important aspect of this shift is that “population will appear above all as the final end of government.” (141) Since then, the purpose of the government was “not just to govern, but to improve the condition of the population, to increase its wealth, its longevity, and its health.” (141) In doing so, it involves open propaganda campaign, as well as more discreet instruments of manipulation (education, e.g.). Finally, this is the moment when social sciences are born, as the government wants to know rationally what is going on with its population.

“The idea of a government as government of population makes the problem of the foundation of sovereignty even more acute… and it makes the need to develop the disciplines even more acute…” (143) Also, as social and political development progresses, things do not become easier or more logical, but, rather, more complicated: “We should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say, of government. In fact we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism.” (143)

In the end, Foucault introduces the term of governmentality:

By this word “governmentality” I mean three things. First, by “governmentality” I understand the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument. Second, by “governmentality” I understand the tendency, the line of force, that for a long time, and throughout the West, has constantly led towards the pre-eminence over all other types of power – sovereignty, discipline, and so on – of the type of power that we can call “government” and which has led to the development of a series of specific governmental apparatuses (appareils) on the one hand, [and, on the other]† to the development of a series of knowledges (savoirs). Finally, by “governmentality” I think we should understand the process, or rather, the result of the process by which the state of justice of the Middle Ages became the administrative state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was gradually “governmentalized.” (144)

On the basis of this concept, Foucault introduces his views on the evolution of the state: “the state of justice” (which governs a “society of customary and written law”), “the administrative state” (which governs a “society of regulations and disciplines”) and, finally, “a state of government that is no longer essentially defined by its territoriality, by the surface occupied, but by a mass: the mass of the population, with its volume, its density, and, for sure, the territory it covers, but which is, in a way, only one of its components.” Its society is “a society controlled by apparatuses of security.” (145)