ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses on the theoretical specificity of Foucault's "analytics of power" consisting the fact that it escapes any neat classification. He repeatedly stresses that he wants to liberate political thought from the orientation toward questions of sovereign power and its legitimacy. Government was a term discussed not only in political tracts but also in philosophical, religious, medical, and pedagogic texts. In the 1978 lectures Foucault traces the genealogy of governmentality from Classical Greek and Roman days via the early Christian pastoral guidance through to the notion of state reason and police science. The threefold theoretical displacement of Foucault deals with an analytics of government that offers a view of power that focuses either on consensus or on violence; it helps to differentiate between power and domination; it clarifies the relations between politics and ethics. Foucault regards liberalism as a specific art of governing that must be distinguished from the political universe of discipline and from the world of sovereignty.
