Governmentality presentation

Meghan Maggiore
Melissa McMahon
Foucault and Modernity
23 January 2007
Governmentality
Foucault poses that we live in an era of governmentality first discovered in the 18th century. In this very dense lecture, Foucault traces the history of the problem of sovereignty and the emergence of the state operating on an “art of government” that shifts the focus of the state from the sovereign and his territory to the population directly and its well being.
Foucault defines governmentality as:
“The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.”
“The tendency that, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led toward the preeminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, and so on) of this type of power—which may be termed “government”—resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of knowledges.”
“The process or, rather, the result of the process through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages transformed into the administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and gradually becomes ‘governmentalized.’”

Foucault sees the problem of government exploding in the 16th century. The problematic of government, in general, was resultant of the decline of feudalism and the rise of the administrative, territorial, and colonial states as well as the question of how one should be spiritually led to achieve eternal salvation fostered by the Reformation and Counter-reformation. Namely, the centralization of the state and dispersion of religious dissidence brought forward a need to define the proper means of governing others and oneself.
Of all the political literature written between the 16th and 18th centuries, Foucault finds it easiest to show the progression of government by comparing this myriad of literature to Machiavelli’s The Prince. The Prince’s commentary on how and under what conditions sovereignty could be maintained was, as Foucault believed, its main contextual significance. These authors, such as Naudé and Machon, “attempted to articulate a kind of rationality that was intrinsic to the art of government, without subordinating it to the problematic of the prince and of his relationship to the principality of which he is lord and master.” They argued against the idea (assuming their interpretations are correct) that the prince is external to his principality in that there exists no fundamental, essential, natural, or juridicial connection between the prince and his principality.
Literature that counters Machiavelli’s idea of principality try to replace it with what they call the “art of government,” which Foucault rejects as being “not at all the same” thing. Foucault references La Perrière’s Miroir Politique to reject other author’s notions that Machiavelli’s prince acts in a transcendent manner. La Perriere defines “to govern” and “governor” as signifying “monarch, emperor, king, prince, lord, magistrate, prelate, judge, and the like” but also speaks of “governing” a household, souls, children, a province, a convent, a religious order, and a family. These definitions are paradoxical in that they show the practices of government, of this singular, transcendent prince, to be multifarious and inclusive of many types of people that have immanence to the state.
With this multiplicity of forms, Foucault then addresses the question of how to define the form of governing the state as a whole. He references La Mothe Le Vayer who states that there are three types of government, each relating to a science or discipline:
the art of self government—morality
the art of properly governing a family—economy
the science of ruling the state—politics
The art of government, Foucault states, is always characterized by the essential continuity of one type with another and the second with a third. This continuity consists of a central idea of “economy” centered around the idea of the family and is defined in two ways:
1. upward—a person who wishes to govern the state must first learn how to govern himself, his goods, and his patrimony, after which he will be successfully in governing the state.
2. downward—when a state is well run, the head of the family will know how to look after his family, his goods, and his patrimony, which means, in turn, that individuals will behave as they should.
Foucault then goes on to say that to govern a state, economy must be applied at the level of the entire state, and a surveillance and control must be exercised over the people as the head of a family controls his own household and goods.
Foucault then returns to La Perriere’s book to discuss the statement “government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end.” He points out that La Perriere, in defining government this way, contradicts the notion of government that Machiavelli presents. For Machiavelli, the territory (or land) and inhabitants were the objects of power, making the target of sovereignty the land and consequently the people who inhabit that land—territory is the fundamental element. La Perriere’s definition implies that one governs things, which Foucault states includes a complex of men in relation to things such as wealth, fertility, customs, and misfortunes such as famine, death, etc. The metaphor Foucault cites from treatises on government is that of the ship.
Foucault also distinguishes sovereignty from government in La Perriere’s definition of government in that government has a finality of its own. Foucault points out that in every case jurists or theologians show the sovereign conferring authority over the people for the common good, meaning that the end of sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty if the common good is to be understood as obedience to the law—the sovereign or God, the absolute sovereign. This cycle comes very close to Machiavelli’s statement that the primary aim of the prince was to retain his principality. Here’s a very important passage:
“this term, “dispose,” is important because, with sovereignty, the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim—that is, obedience to the laws—was the law itself…with government it is a question not of imposing law on men but of disposing things: that is, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics…”
The turning point in history Foucault shows is the use of multi-form tactics rather than laws as instruments of government. This theme becomes frequent in the 17th century and is made explicit in the texts of the Physiocrats. Law no longer is used to achieve the aims of government.
Foucault’s final remark on La Perriere’s text shows the transformation of the meaning of the word “wisdom” in regards to a ruler. No longer meaning knowledge of divine and human laws as in the biblical sense, rather it comes to mean the “knowledge of things, of the objectives that can and should be attained, and the disposition of things required to reach them….”
The art of government was not merely theory in the 16th and 17th centuries according to Foucault. This art saw practice in the rise of statistics, or the science of the state, the administrative practice of the territorial monarchies, and the practice of mercantilism. This art was organized around the theme of the reason of state, which acted as an obstacle to the formation of the art of government. Reasons for this include the historical reasons of war, rebellion, and financial crisis that plagued all of the Western monarchies at the end of the 17th century. Further, Foucault states that as long as the political and sovereign institutions remained the same and the exercise of power was seen as an exercise of the sovereign, the art of government could not fully develop on its own. Mercantilism in the 18th century had the potential to apply this art of government at the level of political practices and knowledge of the state for governmental tactics, but it took as its aim the acquisition of wealth and the creation of an army for the sovereign, once again blocking the autonomous formation of the art of government.
How was the art of government to overcome these obstacles presented by the sovereign? Foucault says that the problem of population and the use of statistics in a new manner were the answer. Statistics showed that society had its own regularities and that population involves a range of intrinsic, aggregate effects that cannot be explained merely at the level of the family. Therefore, the removal of the family as the economic model and the reinterpretation of the family as an instrument of government was one of the first steps of separating government from sovereignty. Secondly, the purpose of government now becomes the welfare of the population. “The population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, but it is also the object in the hands of the government, aware…of what it wants, but ignorant of what is being done to it” (217). Foucault signifies this as the birth of a new art, a range of new tactics and techniques. Finally, Foucault poses population as the point around which the “patience” of the sovereign is organized. In order to govern effectively, government must take into every account in all of its observation and knowledge the population.
This new art of government did not eradicate the problem of sovereignty or discipline. Rousseau defines in The Social Contract that it is possible to justify both sovereignty and an art of government in the characteristics that define this new art. Further, “discipline was never more important or more valorized than at the moment when it became important to manage a population. Government, discipline, and sovereignty are not separate, Foucault says, rather they are a triangle with population as its target and the apparatuses of security as its mechanism.
Final two passages on 220 and 221