ABSTRACT
In a roundabout way, the authors published a translation of one of Foucault's lectures on governmentality in the Autumn of 1979—they translated it from the Italian where it had been published in Aut Aut a year earlier. Governmentality has become synonymous with histories of the present, Foucault's over-arching project. And, since the present is dominated by neoliberalism, governmentality has become the favoured way of understanding how neoliberalism plays out in different domains of economic, social and personal life. The authors used the term neoliberalism initially but later on chose to use the term 'advanced liberalism' to try to indicate the changes that were happening: changes to the form of the state, the emergence of the new distantiated technologies for governing, like the new public management, the devolution of responsibilities as close as possible to the individual, responsibilisation and all that.
