ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the contribution of an analytics of government to state theory. This approach takes up methodological and theoretical considerations that Michel Foucault developed in his genealogy of the modern state. The governance discourse promotes a technocratic model of steering and managing. An analytics of government enables people to overcome some theoretical blind spots of the governance discourse that dominates contemporary accounts of state transformations and policies. Political and sociological knowledge, operating with dualisms like individual and state, knowledge and power, and so on, plays a constitutive role in the emergence and reproduction of concrete forms of statehood. Foucault's analytics of government combines the microphysics of power, which remained centered on questions of discipline and normalization, with the level of macro-power. This approach investigates how power relations have historically been concentrated in the form of the state without ever being reducible to it.
