ABSTRACT
It has been highlighted above that it is a key feature of governmentality to target the population. To put it differently, the focus on the population, its features, and especially its freedom, makes governmentality a distinctively modern form of power. Accordingly, modern governmentality relies on biopolitics in order to impact and regulate various features of the population. As in the case of surveillance and technologies of the self, biopolitics possesses both empowering and subjugating capacities. For this purpose, modern governmentality makes use of statistical knowledge which serves a biopolitical technology of power. This reliance on statistical data and its biopolitical utilization is a crucial feature of modern governmentality in world society. In this sense, it is important to stress that, following sociological neo-institutionalism, modern statistics as a globally circulating model is fundamentally based on the principles of rationalization, standardization, scientization, and universalism. It follows that these world-cultural principles have contributed the global circulation of modern statistics.
