ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Ben Anderson’s idea of an apparatus which is designed to inscribe and manage the ‘affective life’ of the population. The sovereign is made to appear and to be made meaningful for the populace. Where morale concerns the unity, efficacy and efficiency of the population in its war effort, public order concerns the temper of the populace. ‘Morale’ is the name that the government gives to that part of the affective life of the populace that is necessary to increase the capacity for war. Like morale, the population is produced by the very fields of study which seek to study it. The emergence of the question of the population for Michel Foucault signals a radical shift in the triangular relation between sovereignty, discipline and government, where governmentality as the ‘conduct of conduct’ takes pre-eminence. The affective life of the populace, at least insofar as it concerns the sovereign order, is always a risk to be managed.
