ABSTRACT
In the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu gave lectures on the ‘state’ at the College de France. In the late 1970s, Foucault privileged a narrative of governmentality, in which the central state directed a wide range of interrelated changes in modern life, seeking all to control movement: of people, goods, and ideas. Sixteenth-century European polities had generally been commonwealths, in which elite groups provided the citizens: those whom Aristotle, in the then-ubiquitous definition, said ruled and were ruled in turn. Some early modern states became empires, but they made an iconographical transition before such expansion. Early modern states stepped up efforts at control of population movements, often by excluding groups. Until about 1700, they had to guess about something as basic as the number of their inhabitants. Foucault’s paradigm seeks to explain the state’s persistent and increasing interference in individual life, often in ways hidden from immediate view.
