ABSTRACT
Governmentality is one of Foucault’s most well known and most widely used concepts. The word is a portmanteau creation which fuses ‘government’ and ‘mentality’, or ‘rationality’, so that what is produced is a word ~ - ized. For Foucault, this is exercised at the personal level, of self on self, all the way through dyadic relationships, right up to government at state level and beyond. Foucault sees government as a continuum in the sense of the same issues and practices being at stake, whether these are exercised by an individual in relation to his or her own behaviour, or by an administration at state level.
