Foucault introduces the term ‘governmentality’ in Security, Territory, Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics at the Collège de France. In these lectures, he examines how that to which he refers as governmentality historically developed by investigating and tracing the forms of governing belonging to Christianity, liberalism, and neo-liberalism.
In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault says that what he first understands by governmentality is “the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technological instrument”.
Governmentality is not simply government. It is not what governments carry out. Later in Security, Territory, Population, Foucault says that “the emergence of the state as a fundamental political issue can in fact be situated within a more general history of governmentality… The state is an episode in governmentality”.
Governmentality is the emergence, union, operation, and circulation of a set of practices in society through the state’s institutions. It is the coming together and into each other of the practices operating in and shaping society.
That at which such practices are directed is the population so that it can be understood further and mobilized. Understanding is put into the service of mobilizing. Understanding renders mobilizing more controlled and more effective. Foucault says that the apparatus of security is what is responsible for understanding and mobilizing the population. The apparatus of security is what makes understanding possible and mobilization actual.
The second element of governmentality, for Foucault, is “the tendency, line of force, that for a long time, and throughout the West, has constantly led towards the preeminence over all other types of power — sovereignty, discipline, and so on — of the type of power that we can call “government” and which has led to the development of a series of specific governmental apparatuses on the one hand, [and, on the other] to the development of a series of knowledges”.
Foucault here talks about the preeminence of governmentality over sovereignty and discipline. The preeminence of governmentality over sovereignty is expected and indicated everywhere in Foucault’s work, since Foucault constantly puts into question, and disagrees with, the traditional understanding of power as central and moving downward and thinks of power as scattered and emerging from below.
This preeminence of governmentality over discipline is made more understandable later in the lecture, when Foucault offers his understanding of discipline as the historical exercising of governmentality, as a manner of exercising governmentality that is historically shaped, that is to say, that is conditioned by and related to specific historical conditions.
The last element of governmentality concerns understanding “the process, or rather, the result of the process by which the state of justice of the Middle Ages became the administrative state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was gradually governmentalized”.
Here Foucault says that governmentality arises from a historical process. But historical processes, for Foucault, are never single, unified, or continuous. They are contingent, multiple in their origins, and made up of scattered power intersections. That is to say, that from which governmentality arises, or that through which it unfolds, is multiple.
The Stages of Governmental Reason
For Foucault, governmental reason consists of four stages: the Christian pastorate, the beginning, or the earliest forms, of governmentality, liberal governmentality, and finally neoliberalism. Foucault says that “the modern state is born, I think, when governmentality became a calculated and reflected practice. The Christian pastorate seems to me to be the background of this process”.
In the Christian pastorate, the shepherd-flock relation held sway. The shepherd looked after the flock, cared for its members, and sought their salvation. Looking after, caring, and seeking were for the benefit of the shepherded. At the heart of this relation lies responsibility in the sense that the shepherd is responsible for the flock and each member of the flock is responsible for obeying the shepherd.
In this shepherd-flock relation, there is thus a responsibility-obedience relation. In this responsibility-obedience relation, what is at issue is not the state, but the souls of the shepherd and flock. Between this initial form of governmentality and modern governmentality, there is a continuous relation, according to Foucault.
Foucault says that “Christian pastorship has introduced a game that neither the Greeks nor the Hebrews imagined. A strange game whose elements are life, death, truth, obedience, individuals, self-identity – a game which seems to have nothing to do with the game of the city surviving through the sacrifice of its citizens. Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two games – the city-citizen game and the shepherd-lock game – in what we call the modern states”.
Foucault links together these different forms of governmentality in the sense of continuity. The aim of the church was to guide the nature of people, which was given to them by God. Governing then revolved around making certain that nature complied with Christian demands and necessities. In the Renaissance, the political took the place of the form of governing pertaining to the shepherd-flock relation, which means that the state took the place of the church.
In this form of governmentality, the questions revolve around how the political could justify itself and how it could sustain itself as a form of governing. That is to say, how governing is to occur and how the state, which carries out the governing, sustains itself as governing and remains in governing. Governing is thus not only a governing of people but a self-preservation of the state through governing.
Governmentality becomes more determined in its objectives and begins to take definite shape in the following centuries, according to Foucault, when the military-diplomatic apparatus and the apparatus of the police turn themselves further toward the governed, aiming to govern the governed further so that the unity, growth, and health of the polity could be stabilized further and made more secure.
The aim of the military was to preserve the state from the outside. The police were turned toward the inside of the state, toward the population, in order to maintain the health, organization, and size of the population, and in order to make certain that the availability of goods to the population was constantly assured. At the heart of this turning toward the population was the coming together of people with each other as an objective. Foucault says that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “generally speaking, what the police has to govern, its fundamental object, is all of the forms of, let’s say, men’s coexistence with each other”.
Liberalism
It was in the eighteenth century that this model of policing changed and the functions of the police became different due to the emergence of the earliest stages of capitalism, in which the market was allowed more freedom and power concerning the nation’s forces.
This shift in functions, practices, models, and theories has become known as liberalism. Liberalism in this sense is fundamentally related to the practices of the police. It is a change in the space given to policing in the state. It is the distancing of the police from the economic sphere of the state toward the exteriority of that sphere in the sense that now the police must protect the market instead of affecting its mechanisms or intervening in its practices.
Foucault says that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the emphasis was on the naturalness of the market mechanisms and on preventing any intervention in this assumed naturalness, which led to granting specific forms of freedom, that is to say, to the arising of new forms and different types of freedom. Foucault calls the governmentality belonging to this set of practices liberalism.
This means that liberal freedom is not any freedom but a governed form of freedom. Foucault says that liberal governmentality is not total freedom or any freedom, but a specific freedom whose scope is predetermined by the decision to protect, support, and sustain the market mechanisms and the conception that they are natural.
Coercing, Limiting, and Controlling in Liberal Governmentality
According to Foucault, “liberalism, the liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed in the eighteenth century, entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship [with] freedom … Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etcetera”.
Liberal governmentality, in its governing of how people should be together within a capitalist market, controls and coerces people. It shapes and reshapes them according to specific limits.
This forcing and coercing is directed at guarding the capitalist society from any dangers. Guarding and coercing are related to liberal governmentality. Coercing and controlling people render the dangers less in their effects. The existence of dangers renders coercing, limiting, and controlling justified.
That is to say, in liberal governmentality, danger justifies coercing and coercing needs danger. Both are dependent on each other. Both need and justify each other. Liberal governmentality controls, coerces, and limits to make possible a specific freedom. It renders unfree so that a specific freedom appears in society.
Foucault says that “all of those mechanisms which since the years from 1925 to 1930 have tried to offer economic and political formulae to secure states against communism, socialism, National Socialism, and fascism, all these mechanisms and guarantees of freedom which have been implemented in order to produce this additional freedom, have taken the form of economic interventions, that is to say, shackling economic practice, or anyway, of coercive interventions in the domain of economic practice.”
The free market does not mean less government, but a certain type of governing. It does not mean that the market is allowed to freely and naturally unfold according to its forces, but that only a certain type of market should be sustained by means of limitations, controls, and coercions. That is to say, it is these limiting and controlling practices that allow the free market to be sustained.
This means that the free market is not allowed any freedom and all freedoms, but a specific freedom through coercions and controls. The naturalness of the market belonging to early forms of liberalism thus disappears later, according to Foucault.
Foucault says that “government … has to intervene on society as such, in its fabric and depth. Basically, it has to intervene on society so that competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every moment and every point in society and by intervening in this way its objective will become possible, that is to say, a general regulation of society by the market”.
According to Foucault, governing in neoliberal governmentality, as limiting and forcing, does not become less, but becomes different in the sense that the traditional government and the state recede and, in doing so, introduce a different form of governing. This means that the state and the government do not disappear or become less important or effective. They remain operative, but what is more fundamental now is the way of governing itself. That is to say, the institutions recede, leaving their place empty for different styles and ways of governing.
For more articles on Foucault’s philosophy, visit this webpage.