ABSTRACT
I will use the concept of governmentality and the so called “cuestión social” (social question) at the turn of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth to analyze the Chilean case and show, I hope, the potential of a Foucauldian concept such as governmentality in the study of the Latin American elites’ problems with the management of mass populations. Essentially the essay will analyze discourses that linked the needs of the Chilean state and those of the elites identified with it for the creation of a secular-pastoral power, that is, a power that connected the classic individualizing function of Christianity in the West to the totalizing function of political government under the aegis of law which the state is said to embody.
