ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Michel Foucault's suggestions concerning the rationality of contemporary strategies of governance, developing the outline of the concepts of power and knowledge in the context of Foucault's specific historical analyses. It considers three particular aspects of Foucault's work: namely his account of biopolitics, governmentality and of the interrelationship between law and science in securing modern forms of rule. Following an initial discussion of biopolitics as a description of the general grammar or rationality of modern power, the chapter examines Foucault's work on 'governmentality' as a specific expression of the relations between power and knowledge in the exercise of rule developing from the eighteenth century onwards. The chapter elaborates the public inquiry as a mechanism through which the practice of governance is reflected upon, and through which relations between law and science are re-articulated where these have become problematic, thus re-establishing the possibility of governance.
