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Governmentality by Michel Foucault —

A Summary

Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault E몭ect: Studies

in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and
Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104.
[Google Drive Link]

From 1970 until his death, Michel Foucault occupied the chair,
created in November 1969, called “The History of Systems of
Thought” at the Collège de France. In this institution, all
professors (each of them occupies a chair and there are 51 of
them at the moment, i.e. in 2018), are obliged to present their
original research through courses which are completely open to
all. Foucault taught there from January 1971 until his death in
June 1984. “Governmentality” was a lecture presented on 1
February 1978 as part of the course on “Security, Territory,
Population”.

A (very slightly) edited version was republished in Power, ed. Paul

Rabinow, vol. 3, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault: 1954-
1984 (New York: The New Press, 1997), 201–22.

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because it was and accept
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the French Cookiethe
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was translated from an Italian translation — with very useful
footnotes can be found in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at
the College de France, 1977-78, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham
Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 87–114.
[Google Drive Link]

This is a complex lecture and assumes a fairly well-read student.

If “governmentality” is completely new to you, check out this

YouTube video (from an International Relations perspective, 11
minutes), this Encyclopedia Britannica entry and this learned
introduction from the blog Critical Legal Thinking, in order,
before proceeding.

Note that the phrase “art of government” is used in two di몭erent

senses — that (interpreted to be) espoused by Machiavelli, and
that espoused by the writers responding to Machiavelli.

Even more fundamentally, the term “government” itself has a

very broad general meaning. As he clari몭es in the lecture of 8
February:

Before it acquires its speci몭cally political meaning in the

sixteenth century, we can see that “to govern,” covers a very
wide semantic domain in which it refers to movement in
space, material subsistence, diet, the care given to an
individual and the health one can assure him, and also to
the exercise of command, of a constant, zealous, active, and
always benevolent prescriptive activity. It refers to the
control one may exercise over oneself and others, over
someone’s body, soul, and behavior. And 몭nally it refers to
an intercourse, to a circular process or process of exchange
between one individual and another. Anyway, one thing
clearly emerges through all these meanings, which is that
one never governs a state, a territory, or a political
structure. Those whom one governs are people, individuals,
or groups.

Also, an important distinction that runs throughout the course,

including this lecture, is the one drawn between sovereignty,
including this lecture, is the one drawn between sovereignty,
discipline, and security, or more precisely between legal
mechanisms, disciplinary mechanisms, and apparatuses of
security. The best introduction to these will be the 몭rst three
lectures which precede this lecture which is being summarised. I
need not dwell on the signi몭cance especially of the notions of
discipline which he had explored in Discipline and Punish and
apparatus (dispositif) which is the object of the 1978 course.

Political writing concerning the ‘art’ of government — of the self

(by the self), of souls (by the priest), of children (by the
father/teacher) and, especially, of the state (by the prince) —
develops and 몭ourishes starting from the 16th century till the
end of the 18th. Questions concerning “[h]ow to govern oneself,
how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people
will accept being governed, how to become the best possible
governor” — the “problematic of government” — become salient
in this period thanks to the double movement of (a) state
centralisation due to the fall of feudalism and (b) religious
dispersion due to the Reformation and the Counter-
Reformation.

What emerges in these writings as the actual de몭nition of what is

meant by the government of the state may be fruitfully
examined against the backdrop of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The
Prince which is the starting point and well as the point of
departure for the new literature on the art of government.

For this new literature, Machiavelli’s Prince was characterized by

one principle: he exists in a relationship of “externality and
singularity” to his principality.[1] That’s to say, the Prince has no
“fundamental, essential, natural and juridical connection” with
his principality, as opposed to say, the father who has precisely
such a connection with his child. “The link that binds him to his
principality may have been established through violence,
through family heritage or by treaty, with the complicity or the
alliance of other princes; this makes no di몭erence, the link in
any event remains a purely synthetic one.” This being so, the
link is fragile and constantly under threat. If the prince wants to
maintain his principality, he has to strengthen this link and it is
this link — “the prince’s relation with what he owns” — that is
the object of Machiavelli’s art of government. To put the point
the object of Machiavelli’s art of government. To put the point
more blatantly, the object of government is not the principality,
or the even the people who comprise that principality, but rather
the tenuous and fragile link which connects the Prince to his
principality.

As a consequence of this the mode of analysis of Machiavelli's

text will be twofold: to identify dangers (where they come from,
what they consist in, their severity: which are the greater, which
the slighter), and, secondly, to develop the art of manipulating
relations of force that will allow the prince to ensure the
protection of his principality, understood as the link that binds
him to his territory and his subjects.

It is this very notion of the art of government extant in

Machiavelli that is being questioned by the new political writing.
The authors writing in response to Machiavelli argue that
possessing this particular art of government, that of holding on
to one’s principality which they 몭nd espoused by Machiavelli,
does not amount to possessing the art of government.
Machiavelli’s art of government cannot be the actual
(true/proper) art of government: the art of government is
something else. What does it comprise?

Consider Guillaue de La Perrière’s Le Miroir politique, contenant

diverses manières de gouverner (1555).

Firstly, it is recognised that the art of government in not to be

associated with the prince alone. La Perrière writes that the term
“governor can signify monarch, emperor, king, prince, lord,
magistrate, prelate, judge and the like”. This may seem purely
terminological but has important political implications because
it suggests that there are multifarious forms of government (see
몭rst paragraph) among which the Prince governing his state is
only one. In addition, these forms of government are internal to
the state. That’s to say that the government of the family by the
father, for instance, happens within the boundaries of the state.
The art of government in this view is then characterised by
“plurality and immanence” while for Machivelli’s Prince, the art
of government is characterised by “singularity and externality”.

Of course, in this plurality, the special case of the government of

the state — a form of government which is to be applied to the
the state — a form of government which is to be applied to the
state as a whole — remains to be articulated.

François de La Mothe Le Vayer distinguishes between “three

fundamental types of government, each of which relates to a
particular science or discipline: the art of self-government,
connected with morality; the art of properly governing a family,
which belongs to economy; and 몭nally the science of ruling the
state, which concerns politics.”

The important point is that these three forms form an ascending

continuity in that “person who wishes to govern the state well
must 몭rst learn how to govern himself, his goods and his
patrimony, a몭er which he will be successful in governing the
state.” This ascending continuity is ensured by the education of
the prince. Le Vayer wrote for the French Dauphin, Louis
XIV, 몭rst a treatise of morality, then a book of economics and
lastly a political treatise.

They form a descending continuity as well in that “when a state

is well run, the head of the family will know how to look a몭er his
family, his goods and his patrimony, which means that
individuals will, in turn, behave as they should.” This continuity
in which the good government of the state a몭ects individual
conduct or family management is secured by what came to be
known as the “police”.

The central term here between these forms of government, the

connector, is the government of the family, termed economy.
Essentially, concern with the art of government of the state as a
whole becomes that of introducing the management of the
family — the meticulous attention that the father devotes to his
wife, children, servants, and the family’s fortunes — into into the
management of the state. Put di몭erently, the concern becomes
that of turning private economy — the proper way of managing
individuals, goods, and wealth — into political economy.

[T]he problem, writes [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau [in Discours sur

l’économie politique], is how to introduce [the wise government of
the family], mutatis mutandis, and with all the discontinuities
that we will observe below, into the general running of the state.
To govern a state will therefore mean to apply economy, to set up
an economy at the level of the entire state, which means
an economy at the level of the entire state, which means
exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour
of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive
as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods.

Secondly, La Perrière de몭nes government as “the right

disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end.
(emphasis added)” What are these “things”? “Things” are men in
their relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of
acting and thinking. For Machiavelli, the objects or targets of his
power are his territory and its inhabitants. For La Perrière, it is
something else. The “things” to be governed are neither the
subjects nor the territory in which they live. Rather they are men
in their relationships, bonds, and complex involvements with
things like wealth, resources, means of subsistence, and, of
course, the territory with its borders, qualities, climate, dryness,
fertility, and so on.[3]

Governing a ... family, does not essentially mean safeguarding the

family property; what concerns it is the individuals that compose
the family, their wealth and prosperity. It means to reckon with
all the possible events that may intervene, such as births and
deaths, and with all the things that can be done, such as possible
alliances with other families; it is this general form of
management that is characteristic of government.

Thirdly, government is directed to ‘a convenient end’. For

theorists of sovereignty, the object or end of sovereignty is the
common good which is essentially obedience to the law, whether
divinely ordained or legislated by mortals. This end of
sovereignty is realised by the exercise of sovereignty. Note the
singular and circular logic. The good (which is the end) is
obedience to the law, so that the good proposed by sovereignty is
that people obey the sovereign. In La Perrière, this end is not
“the form of the common good”. Rather, it is something which is
“‘convenient’ for each of the things that are to be governed.” The
end then is not a singular and circular one but a plurality of
speci몭c ends. Moreover, these ends are to be attained not by
imposing laws (like the sovereign does) but instead by disposing
— managing or arranging — things in ways such that the speci몭c
ends may be achieved.[3]

I believe we are at an important turning point here: whereas the

I believe we are at an important turning point here: whereas the
end of sovereignty is internal to itself and possesses its own
intrinsic instruments in the shape of its laws, the finality of
government resides in the things it manages and in the pursuit of
the perfection and intensification of the processes which it
directs; and the instruments of government, instead of beings
laws, now come to be a range of multiform tactics.

Lastly, and this is a simple and elementary point, what is central

to government is that the governor be patient, meaning that the
true governor should not need a weapon for killing, a sword, in
order to exercise his government. This being the case, the
governor must be wise, understood as having knowledge of the
things he manages and diligent, understood as his acting in such
a way as if he were in the service of those he is governing.

This abstract notion of the art of government did not remain

speculative but had correlations in reality. It got linked to (a) the
development of various administrative and governmental
apparatuses, (b) forms of knowledge having to do with the state,
i.e., the science of government or “statistics”, and
(c) mercantilism and cameralism in the late 16th and early 17th
century.

[Comment: The 2007 translation which was prepared based on

audio recordings of the lecture reports that all previous versions
and translations, including the one used for this summary, have
some sentences missing (a몭er cameralism, see previous
paragraph) and an extra paragraph (the paragraph that spans
pages 96-97 in the translation used [from The Foucault E몭ect]).
The summary follows the new translation in this regard. End
Comment]

However, this notion of the art of government could not realise

its full scope before the 18th century. For one, there were
“massive and elementary historical causes”. These were such
events as the Thirty Years War , peasant and urban rebellions,
and the crises of 몭nance. The art of government could only
spread and develop in subtlety in an age of expansion, free from
the great military, political and economic tensions.

For another, the continued pre-eminence of the problem of

For another, the continued pre-eminence of the problem of
sovereignty, for reasons already hinted at, le몭 little space for the
art of government to develop su몭ciently autonomously.
Consider mercantilism. It represents the 몭rst application of the
art of government. It is the “몭rst rationalisation of the exercise of
power as a practice of government”. However, as its object was
the sovereign’s might, and its instruments — laws, decrees,
regulations — those of sovereignty, it remained immobilized by
the institution of sovereignty. The art of government, then, was
hampered by the rigid, large, and abstract framework of
sovereignty. It is in order to make workable the art of
government without dispensing the overall framework of
sovereignty that the theories of contract appear in the 17th
century.

This art of government tried, so to speak, to reconcile itself

with the theory of sovereignty by attempting to derive the ruling
principles of an art of government from a renewed version of the
theory of sovereignty — and this is where those seventeenth-
century jurists come into the picture who formalize or ritualize
the theory of the contract. Contract theory enables the founding
contract, the mutual pledge of ruler and subjects, to function as
a sort of theoretical matrix for deriving the general principles
of an art of government.

And 몭nally, the art of government su몭ered because of its

continued reliance on the weak and thin model of the family.
How could this model of the family — too thin, too weak and too
insubstantial — hope to succeed at the level of the state?

How then was the art of government able to out몭ank these

obstacles?

The rigid framework of sovereignty was broken by the

emergence of the problem of population and the subsequent rise
of the science of government (or statistics). Statistics refocused
the political economy on the population (which is analogous to
the family in private economy). It also helped in identifying
problems speci몭c to the population which in turn enabled
re몭ection on the art of government outside the juridical
framework of sovereignty.

“In what way did the problem of population make possible the
“In what way did the problem of population make possible the
derestriction of the art of government?”

First, it helped overcome the limiting model of the family as a

model for government by providing a new model, that of
population. Statistics enabled the quanti몭cation of the speci몭c
phenomena of population — deaths, diseases, scarcity,
epidemics, aggregate wealth, etc. — and showed that these
speci몭cities are irreducible to the dimension of the family, which
then had to disappear as the model of government. The family
no longer remains a model but instead becomes a privileged
instrument since the information that will constitute the
statistics of the population has to be collected on the basis of the
family.

The new science called political economy arises out of the

perception of new networks of continuous and multiple relations
between population, territory and wealth; and this is accompanied
by the formation of a type of intervention characteristic of
government, namely intervention in the field of economy and
population. In other words, the transition which takes place in
the 18th century from an art of government to a political science,
from a regime dominated by structures of sovereignty to one ruled
by techniques of government, turns on the theme of population and
hence also on the birth of political economy.

Second, population — its welfare, improvement, health and

wealth — became the end of government, that is to say, the
target of its tactics and techniques. The end of government is no
longer the act of government itself as it was with sovereignty but
the government of the needs and aspirations of the population.

Third, the population and the processes (or ‘speci몭cities’) related

to it becomes the object of knowledge for the government. It is
the population that government will have to take into account in
order to govern e몭ectively in a rationally re몭ected manner. “The
constitution of a savoir of government is absolutely inseparable
from that of a knowledge of all the processes related to
population in Its larger sense: that is to say, what we now call the
economy.” And it is here, in the transition from structures of
sovereignty to techniques of government centered on the
population, that the art of government becomes the science of
government.
government.

[T]he transition which takes place in the eighteenth century from

an art of government to a political science, from a regime
dominated by structures of sovereignty to one ruled by techniques
of government, turns on the theme of population and hence also on
the birth of political economy.

Having said these, neither sovereignty nor discipline became less

important as the art of government developed into the science
of government. In fact, the question of sovereignty was posed
with more sharpness at this stage when it, given the existence
and deployment of an art of government, had to be given a
juridical form and foundation.

[Comment: Foucault retracts the word “science” in the following

lecture of 8 February.

In short, we need to analyze the relations of power on

which the sixteenth century arts of government set their
sights, which are also the target of seventeenth century
mercantilist theory and practice, and which, 몭nally, are the
aim — and maybe reach a certain threshold of, I think last
week I said science, but this is a thoroughly bad and
disastrous word; let’s say a certain level of political
competence — in, broadly speaking, the physiocratic
doctrine of “economic government”.

End Comment]

Consider Rousseau’s Political Economy (1755) and The Social

Contract (1762) in chronological succession. In the former, he
remarks that the model of the family is no longer adequate for
the general problem of population. Private economy is quite
distinct from political economy. Then, in the latter, the concern
is how a general principle of government can be found that will
allow for both the juridical principle of sovereignty and the
elements of the art of government. The problem of sovereignty
does not disappear.

Much the same can be said for discipline. It was never more
important or more valued than when the attempt was made to
manage the population. “[T]he managing of a population not
manage the population. “[T]he managing of a population not
only concerns the collective mass of phenomena, the level of its
aggregate e몭ects, it also implies the management of population
in its depths and its details.”

Accordingly, we need to see things not in terms of the replacement

of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the
subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of
government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty–discipline–
government, which has as its primary target the population.

Instead of calling this course “Security, Territory, Population”, it

would have been better to call it “A History of Governmentality”.
By governmentality is meant at least the following three
things. First, it is the realisation/exercise of a complex form of
power targeted towards management of the population by the
ensemble of “institutions, procedures, analyses and re몭ections,
the calculations and tactics”, using political economy as the form
of knowledge, through “apparatuses of security”. Second, it is the
process by which this particular form of power with its
associated apparatuses of security and the complexes of
knowledge have become pre-eminent. Third, it is the process by
which the state has assumed this form of power, i.e., the process
by which the state has become governmentalised.

1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and

reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise
of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as
its target population, as its principal form of knowledge
political economy, and as its essential technical means
apparatuses of security.
2. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West,
has steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms
(sovereignty, discipline, etc.) of this type of power which may be
termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of
a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the
other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs.
3. The process, or rather the result of the process, through which
the state of justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the
administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
gradually becomes ‘governmentalized’.
To assert that the state has become governmentalised is to reject
the both the simplistic understanding of state as a cold monster
hell-bent on subjugating us as well as the reductionist
understanding of the state as the performer of such and such
functions.

Somewhere still there are peoples and herds, but not where we
live, my brothers: here there are states.
State? What is that? Well then, lend me your ears now, for I shall
say my words about the death of peoples.
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. It even
lies coldly, and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state,
am the people.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, (Cambridge

Texts in the History of Philosophy).

This is important because “the state, no more probably today

than at any other time in its history, does not have this unity, this
individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor, to speak frankly,
this importance; maybe, a몭er all, the state is no more than a
composite reality and a mythicized abstraction, whose
importance is a lot more limited than many of us think. Maybe
what is really important for our modernity — that is, for our
present — is not so much the étatisation of society as the
‘governmentalization’ of the state.”

Notes
[1] Whether or not this interpretation is correct is not important.
What is important is the it was interpreted in this way.

“Let us leave aside the question of whether the interpretation of

Machiavelli in these debates was accurate or not.” (p. 89)

[2] Consider this metaphor. To govern a ship means to take care

of the ship and sailors. But it also means to take care of its cargo,
to reckon with storms, to establish relations between the sailors
and the cargo and the ship all of which are to be taken care of.
Government relates to this complex of men and things.

[3] Foucault contrasts sovereignty with government as part of this

point. The end of sovereignty, understood as the common good,
is achieved essentially by obedience to the law, which is given by
the sovereign. The purpose of sovereignty then is served by the
exercise of sovereignty. The end of government, on the other
hand, is a plurality of speci몭c ends which are convenient for
each of the things governed and which will be achieved through
a mutiplicity of tactics, of which law is but only one. The
purpose of government is served by the application of tactics to
the things it manages.

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