ABSTRACT
In his lecture on ‘governmentality’, Foucault stated that ‘governmentality’, which introduced issues concerning ‘the population’ into the political and administrative vocabulary, was born out of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, as well as the archaic model of Christian pastoral power (Foucault 1991: 104). When newly established nation-states in Europe started to form modern international relations where the balance of power was sustained by the diplomatic and military competence of each nation-state, the population of these nation-states appeared as an essential object of governing, forming as they did the very base of their national strength, with which states compete in the international system. Foucault explained this mechanism by referring to von Justi’s eighteenth-century theorization of ‘police’, by which individuals were kept ‘happy’ – happiness being understood ‘as survival, life, and improved living’ ‘in such a way that their development fosters that of the strength of the state’ (Foucault 1981: 251-2). Hence, the state began to investigate and analyze the ‘population’, a group of people inhabiting the state, in order to revise its conditions of life.
