ABSTRACT
There is nothing predictable about the direction the reception of a major thinker will take, and the huge success of the work of Michel Foucault is no exception. It would have been utterly impossible to foresee, at the time of their publication, which of his writings would catch the attention of his readers for years to come and which of his projects and concepts would become major references in a variety of disciplines. The fate of the notion of governmentality is particularly instructive. It is undeniable by now that Foucault’s two lecture courses at the Collège de France on the overall project that he himself called “the history of ‘governmentality’” (Foucault 2007: 108) have produced an enormous echo in sociology, political theory, and even in cultural anthropology.2 But the challenge his suggestions pose to the historiography of politics and history of political thought has hardly been the object of any comparable debate. This is surprising, especially given the fact that Foucault’s original project at the end of the 1970s was mainly a historical enterprise. The 1977-1978 lectures, Security, Territory, Population, and the 1978-1979 lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, are both devoted to a genuinely historiographical task, namely the rewriting of the history of the (European, modern) state and of the arts and technologies of government.
