ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the sequence of lectures that surrounds Michel Foucault discussion of governmentality, a discussion that spawned a whole school of “governmentality studies” in the English-speaking world after the lecture in question was published in English in 1991. In Foucault’s analysis, the key connections are between liberalism, understood as an “art of government”, political economy, the science that generated that art, and raison d’Etat, the analytical frame within which that science developed. Foucault suggests that the idea that the major task of rulers was to govern their subjects was new. Foucault is interested in the way ideas about good government, originally associated with problems of pastoral care migrated from those spheres to the sphere of the ruler. Foucault refers to the process as the governmentalization of the state, rather than the statification of government, because he recognizes that the initial move toward more intensive policing soon reversed itself.