5
Governmentality
Michel Foucault
In a previous lecture on "apparatuses of security', I tried to explain the emergence of a set of problems specific to the issue of population, and on closer inspection it turned out that we would also need to take into account the problematic of government. In short, one needed to analyze the series: security, population, government. T would now like to try to begin making an inventory of this question of government.
Throughout the Middle Ages and classical antiquity, we find a multitude of treatises presented as 'advice to the prince', concerning his proper conduct, the exercise of power, the means of securing the acceptance and tespect of his subjects, the love of God and obedience to him, the application of divine law to the cities of men, etc. But a more striking fact is that, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, there develops and flourishes a notable series of political treatises that are no longer exactly ladvice to the prince', and not yet treatises of political science, but are instead presented as ■works on the 'art of government'. Govern-
ment as a general problem seems to me to explode in the sixteenth century, posed by discussions of quite diverse questions. One has, for example, the question of the government of oneself, that ritualization of the problem of personal conduct which is characteristic of the sixteenth century Stoic revival. There is the problem too of the government of souls and lives, the entire theme of Catholic and Protestant pastoral doctrine. There is government of children and the great problematic of pedagogy which emerges and develops during the sixteenth century. And, perhaps only as the last of these questions to be taken up, there is the government of the state by the prince. How 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 -all these problems, in their multiplicity and intensity, seem to me to be characteristic of the sixteenth century, which ties, to put it schematically, at the crossroads of two processes: the one which, shattering the
From G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp. 87-104. Hemel Hempstead and Chicago: Harvester Wheatsheaf and University of Chicago Press, 1991. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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structures of feudalism, leads to the establishment of the great territorial, administrative and colonial states; and that totally different movement which, with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, raises the issue of how one must he spiritually ruled and led on this earth in order to achieve eternal salvation.
There is a double movement, then, of state centralization on the one hand and of dispersion and religious dissidence on the other: it is, I believe, at the intersection of these two tendencies that the problem comes to pose itself with this peculiar intensity, of how to be ruled, how strictly, by whom, to what end, by what methods, etc. There is a problematic of government in general.
Out of all this immense and monotonous literature on government which extends to the end of the eighteenth century, with the transformations which 1 will try to identify in a moment, I would like to underline some points that are worthy of notice because they relate to the actual definition of what is meant by the government of the state, of what we would today call the political form of government. The simplest way of doing this is to compare all of this literature with a single text which from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century never ceased to function as the object of explicit or implicit opposition and rejection, and relative to which the whole literature on government established its standpoint: Machiavelli's The Prince. It would be interesting to trace the relationship of this text to all those works that succeeded, criticized and rebutted it.
We must first of all remember that Machiavelli's The Prince was not immediately made an object of execration, but on the contrary was honoured by its immediate contemporaries and immediate successors, and also later at the end of the eighteenth century (or perhaps rather at the very beginning of the nineteenth century), at the very moment when all of this literature on the art of government was about to come to an end. The Prince re-emerges at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany, where it is translated, prefaced and commented upon
by writers such as Rehberg, Leo, Ranke and Kellerman, and aiso in Italy. It makes its appearance in a context which is worth analyzing, one which is partly Napoleonic, but also partly created by the Revolution and the problems of revolution in the United States, of how and under what conditions a ruler's sovereignty over the state can be maintained; but this is also the context in which there emerges, with Clausewitz, the problem (whose political importance was evident at the Congress of Vienna in 1815) of the relationship between politics and strategy, and the problem of relations of force and the calculation of these relations as a principle of intelligibility and rationalization in international relations; and lastly, in addition, it connects with the problem of Italian and German territorial unity, since Machiavelh had been one of those who tried to define the conditions under which Italian territorial unity could be restored.
This is the context in which Machiavelh re-emerges. But it is clear that, between the initial honour accorded him in the sixteenth century and his rediscovery at the start of the nineteenth, there was a whole 'affair' around his work, one which was complex and took various forms: some explicit praise of Machiavelh (Naude, Machon), numerous frontal attacks {from Catholic sources: Ambrozio Pohti, Dis-putationes de IJbris a Christiana detestand/s; and from Protestant sources: Innocent Gentil let, Discours sur les may ens de bien gouverner contre Nicolas Macbiavel, 1576), and also a number of implicit critiques (G. de La Perriere, Miroir politique, 1567; Th. Elyott, Th, Governor, 1580; P. Paruta, Delia Perfezton, dellaVita politico,, 1579).
This whole debate should not be viewed solely in terms of its relation to Machiavelli's text and what were felt to be its scandalous or radically unacceptable aspects. It needs to be seen in terms of something which it was trying to define in its specificity, namely an art of government. Some authors rejected the idea of a new art of government centred on the state and reason of state, which they stigmatized with the name of Machiavellianism;
:& ••        0thers  rejected   Machiavelh   by showing that there existed an art of government j ^hich was both rational and legitimate, and
i- ' •       of which Machiavelli's The Prince was only
* an imperfect approximation or caricature; f in allv, there were others who, in order to
>*■- prove the legitimacy of a particular art of
aovernment, were willing to justify some at least of Machiavelli's writings (this was what
; Naude did to the Discourses on Livy;
* Machon went so far as to attempt to show " that nothing was more Machiavellian than i- the way in which, according to the Bible,
God himself and his prophets had guided the Jewish people). a- All these authors shared a common con-
cern to distance themselves from a certain
* conception of the art of government which, s once shorn of its theological foundations and ^ religious justifications, took the sole interest :\ of the prince as its object and principle of
unonality. Let us leave aside the question of
whether the interpretation of Machiavelh in •fi these debates was accurate or not. The esscn-
tial thing is that they attempted to articulate a 3. kind of rationality which was intrinsic to the
att of government, without subordinating it \- to the problematic of the prince and of his
if relationship to the principality of which he is
;j lord and master.
The art of government is therefore defined t in a manner differentiating it from a certain
■■; capacity of the prince, which some think they
t can find expounded in Machiavelli's writings,
.t which others are unable to find; while others
■>~j again will criticize this art of government as a
new form of Machiavellianism. This politics of The Prince, fictitious or ; otherwise, from which people sought to dis-
( tance themselves, was characterized by one
principle: for Machiavelli, it was alleged, the ■ prince stood in a relation of singularity and
< externality, and thus of transcendence, to his
principality. The prince acquires his princi-: pality by inheritance or conquest, but in any
case he does not form part of it, he remains •fr external to it. 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 difference, the link in any event remains a purely synthetic one and there is no fundamental, essential, natural and juridical connection between the prince and his principality. As a corollary of this, given that this link is external, it will be fragile and continually under threat - from outside by the prince's enemies who seek to conquer or recapture his principality, and from within by subjects who have no a priori reason to accept his rule. Finally, this principle and its corollary lead to a conclusion, deduced as an imperative: that the objective of the exercise of power is to reinforce, strengthen and protect the principality, but with this last understood to mean not the objective ensemble of its subjects and the territory, but rather the prince's relation with what he owns, with the territory he has inherited or acquired, and with his subjects. This fragile link is what the art of governing or of being prince espoused by Machiavelli has as its object. 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.
Schematically, one can say that Machiavelli's The Prince, as profiled in all these implicitly or explicitly anti-Machiavellian treatises, is essentially a treatise about the prince's ability to keep his principality. And it is this savoir-faire that the anti-Machiavellian literature wants to replace by something else and new, namely the art of government. Having the ability to retain one's principality is not at all the same thing as possessing the art of governing. But what does this latter ability comprise? To get a view of this problem, which Is still at a raw and early stage, let us consider one of the earliest texts of this great anti-Machiavellian literature: Guil-laume de I.a Perriere's Miroir Politique.
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This text, disappointingly thin in comparison with Machiavelli, prefigures a number of important ideas. First of all, what does La Perriere mean by 'to govern' and 'governor': what definition does he give of these terms? On page 24 of his text he writes: 'governor can signify monarch, emperor, king, prince, lord, magistrate, prelate, judge and the like'. Like La Perriere, others who write on the art of government constantly recall that one speaks also of 'governing' a household, souls, children, a province, a convent, a religious order, a family.
These points of simple vocabulary actually have important political implications: Machiavelli's prince, at least as these authors interpret him, is by definition unique in his principality and occupies a position of externality and transcendence. "We have seen, howT-ever, that practices of government are, on the one hand, multifarious and concern many kinds of people: the head of a family, the superior of a convent, the teacher or tutor of a child or pupil; so that there are several forms of government among which the prince's relation to his state is only one particular mode; while, on the other hand, all these other kinds of government are internal to the state or society. It is within the state that the father will rule the family, the superior the convent, etc. Thus we find at once a plurality of forms of government and their immanence to the state; the multiplicity and immanence of these activities distinguishes them radically from the transcendent singularity of Machiavelli's prince.
To be sure, among all these forms of government which interweave within the state and society, there remains one special and precise form: there is the question of defining the particular form of governing which can be applied to the state as a whole. Thus, seeking to produce a typology of forms of the art of government, La Mothe Le Vayer, in a text from the following century (consisting of educational writings intended for the French Dauphin), says that there are 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 finally the science of ruling the state, which concerns politics. In comparison with morahtv and economy, politics evidently has its own specific nature, which La Mothe Le Vayer states clearly. What matters, notwithstanding this typology, is that the art of government is always characterized by the essential continuity of one type with the other, and of a second type with a third.
This means that, whereas the doctrine or the prince and the juridical theory of sovereignty are constantly attempting to draw the line between the power of the prince and any other form of power, because its task is to explain and justify this essential discontinuity between them, in the art of government the task is to establish a continuity, in both an upwards and a downwards direction.
Upwards continuity means that a person who wishes to govern the state well must first learn how to govern himself, his goods and his patrimony, after which he will be successful in governing the state. This ascending line characterizes the pedagogies of the prince, which are an important issue at this time, as the example of La Mothe Le Vayer shows: he wrote for the Dauphin first a treatise of morality, then a book of economics and lastly a political treatise. It is the pedagogical formation of the prince, then, that will assure this upwards continuity. On the other hand, we also have a downwards continuity in the sense that, when a state is well run, the head of the family will know how to look after his family, his goods and his patrimony, which means that individuals will, in turn, behave as they should. This downwards line, which transmits to individual behavior and the running of the family the same principles as the good government of the state, is just at this time beginning to be called police. The prince's pedagogical formation ensures the upwards continuity of the forms of government, and police the downwards one. The central term of this continuity is the government of the family, termed economy.
The art of government, as becomes apparent in this literature, is essentially concerned with answering the question of how to introduce economy - that is to say, the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and ^ Lalth within the family (which a good father is expected to do in relation to his wife, children and servants) and of making the family fortunes prosper - how to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family into the management of the state.
This, I believe, is the essential issue in the establishment of the art of government: introduction of economy into political practice. A.nd if this is the case in the sixteenth century, it remains so in the eighteenth. In Rousseau's Encyclopedia article on 'Political economy' the problem is still posed in the same terms. What he says here, roughly, is that the word 'economy' can only properly be used to sig-nity the wise government of the family for the common welfare of all, and this is its actual original use; the problem, writes Rousseau, is how to introduce ir, 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 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.
An expression which was important in the eighteenth century captures this very well: Quesnay speaks of good government as 'economic government'. This latter notion becomes tautological, given that the art of government is j ust the art of exercising power in the form and according to the model of the economy. But the reason why Quesnay speaks of 'economic government' is that the word 'economy', for reasons that I will explain later, is in the process of acquiring a modern meaning, and it is at this moment becoming apparent that the very essence of government - that is, the art of exercising power in the form of economy -
is to have as its main objective that which we are today accustomed to call 'the economy'.
The word 'economy', which in the sixteenth century signified a form of government, comes in the eighteenth century to designate a level of reality, a field of intervention, through a series of complex processes that I regard as absolutely fundamental to our history.
The second point which I should like to discuss in Guillaume de La Perriere's book consists of the following statement: 'government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end'.
I would like to link this sentence with another series of observations. Government is the right disposition of things. I would like to pause over this word 'things', because if we consider what characterizes the ensemble of objects of the prince's power in Machiavelli, we will see that for Machiavelli the object and, in a sense, the target of power are two things, on the one hand the territory, and on the other its inhabitants. In this respect, Machiavelli simply adapted to his particular aims a juridical principle which from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century defined sovereignty in public law: sovereignty is not exercised on things, but above all on a territory and consequently on the subjects who inhabit it. In this sense we can say that the territory is the fundamental element both in Machiavellian principality and in juridical sovereignty as defined by the theoreticians and philosophers of right. Obviously enough, these territories can be fertile or not, the population dense or sparse, the inhabitants rich or poor, active or lazy, but all these elements are mere variables by comparison with territory itself, which is the very foundation of principality and sovereignty. On the contrary, in La Perriere's text, you will notice that the definition of government in no way refers to territory. One governs things. But what does this mean? I do not think this is a matter of opposing things to men, but rather of showing that what government has to do with is not territory but rather a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things
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with which in this sense government is to be concerned are in tact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in their relation to that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relation to that other kind of things, accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc. The fact that government concerns things understood in this way, this imbrication of men and things, is I believe readily confirmed by the metaphor which is inevitably invoked in these treatises on government, namely that of the ship. What does it mean to govern a ship? It means clearly to take charge of the sailors, but also of the boat and its cargo; to take care of a ship means also to reckon with winds, rocks and storms; and it consists in that activity of establishing a relation between the sailors who are to be taken care of and the ship which is to be taken care of, and the cargo which is to be brought safely to port, and all those eventualities like winds, rocks, storms and so on; this is what characterizes the government of a ship. The same goes for the running of a household. Governing a household, 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 die things that can be done, such as possible alliances with other families; it is this general form of management that is characteristic of government; by comparison, the question of landed property for the family, and the question of the acquisition of sovereignty over a territory for a prince, are only relatively secondary matters. What counts essentially is this complex of men and things; property and territory are merely one of its variables.
This theme of the government of things as we find it in La Perriere can also be met with in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Frederick the Great has some notable pages on it in his Anti-Machiavel. He says, for instance, let us compare Holland with Russia: Russia may have the largest territory of any European state, but it is mostly made up of swamps, forests and deserts, and is inhabited by miserable groups of people totally destitute of activity and industry; if one takes Holland, on the other hand, with its tiny territory, again mostly marshland, we hnd that it nevertheless possesses such a population, such wealth, such commercial activity and such a fleet as to make it an important European state, something that Russia is only just beginning to become.
To govern, then, means to govern things. Let us consider once more the sentence I quoted earlier, where La Perriere says: 'government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end'. Government, that is to say, has a finahtj ol its own, and in this respect again I believe it can be clearly distinguished from sovereignty. I do not of course mean that sovereignty is presented in philosophical and juridical tcvts as a pure and simple right; no jurist or, a fottton, theologian ever said that the legitimate sovereign is purely and simply entitled to exercise his power regardless of its ends. The sovereign must always, if he is to be a good sovereign, have as his aim, 'the common welfare and the salvation of all'. Take for instance a late seventeenth-century author, Purendort says: 'Sovereign authority is conferred upon them [the rulers] only in order to allow them to use it to attain or conserve what is of public utility'. The ruler may not have consideration for anything advantageous for himself, unless it also be so for the state. What does this common good or general salvation consist of, which the jurists talk about as being tht end of sovereignty? If we look closely at the real content that jurists and theologians give to it, we can see that 'the common good' refers to a state of affairs where all the subjects without exception obey the laws, accomplish the tasks expected of them, prac tise the trade to which they are assigned, and respect the established order so far as this
older conforms to the laws imposed by God ^ on nature and men: in other words, 'the com-
rnon good' means essentially obedience to the
* law, either that of their earthly sovereign or Ji that of God, the absolute sovereign. In every
^jse, what characterizes the end of sover-"l eignty, this common and general good, is in
\ ^um nothing other than submission to sover-
s, eignty. This means that the end of sovereignty
" • is circular: the end of sovereignty is the exer-
*» cise of sovereignty. The good is obedience to
the law, hence the good for sovereignty is that people should obey it. This is an essential t cucularity which, whatever its theoretical
i structure, moral justification or practical ef-
l* tects, comes very close to what Machiavelli
j said when he stated that the primary aim of
: the prince was to retain his principality. We
always come back to this self-referring circularity of sovereignty or principality.
Now, with the new definition given by La Perriere, with his attempt at a definition of 1 government, I believe we can see emerging a
' new kind of finality. Government is defined
as a right manner of disposing things so as to lead not to the form of the common good, as = : the jurists' texts would have said, but to an
end which is 'convenient' for each of the things that are to be governed. This implies a plurality of specific aims: for instance, gov-trnment will have to ensure that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence, that the population is enabled to multiply, etc. There is a whole series of '. specific finalities, then, which become the ob-
jective of government as such. In order to achieve these various finalities, things must
* be disposed - and this term, dispose, is important because with sovereignty the instru-
: ment that allowed it to achieve its aim - that
is to say, obedience to the laws - was the law ' itself; law and sovereignty were absolutely
inseparable. On the contrary, with government it is a question not of imposing law on : men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of
; employing tactics rather than laws, and even
i of using laws themselves as tactics - to ar-
range things in such a way that, through a
certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved.
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 being laws, now come to be a range of multiform tactics. Within the perspective of government, law is not what is important: this is a frequent theme throughout the seventeenth century, and it is made explicit in the eighteenth-century texts of the Physiocrats which explain that it is not through law that the aims of government are to be reached.
Finally, a fourth remark, still concerning this text from La Perriere: he says that a good ruler must have patience, wisdom and diligence. What does he mean by patience? To explain it, he gives the example of the king of bees, the bumble-bee, who, he says, rules the bee-hive without needing a sting; through this example God has sought to show us in a mystical manner that the good governor does not have to have a sting - that is to say, a weapon of killing, a sword - in order to exercise his power; he must have patience rather than wrath, and it is not the right to kill, to employ force, that forms the essence of the figure of the governor. And what positive content accompanies this absence of sting? Wisdom and diligence. Wisdom, understood no longer in the traditional sense as knowledge of divine and human laws, of justice and equality, but rather as the knowledge of things, of the objectives that can and should be attained, and the disposition of things required to reach tbem; it is this knowledge that is to constitute the wisdom of the sovereign. As for his diligence, this is the principle that a governor should only govern in such a way that he thinks and acts as though he were in the service of those who are governed. And here, once again, La Perriere cites the example of the head of the family who rises first in the morning and goes to bed last,
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who concerns himself with everything in the household because he considers himself as being in its service. We can see at once how far this characterization of government differs from the idea of the prince as found in or attributed ro Machiavelli. To he sure, this notion of governing, for all its novelty, is still very crude here.
This schematic presentation of the notion and theory of the art of government did not remain a purely abstract question in the sixteenth century, and it was not of concern only to political theoreticians. 1 think we can identify its connections with political reality. The theory of the art of government was linked, from the sixteenth century, to the whole development of the administrative apparatus of the territorial monarchies, the emergence of governmental apparatuses; it was also connected to a set of analyses and forms of knowledge which began to develop in the late sixteenth century and grew in importance during the seventeenth, and which were essentially to do with knowledge of the state, in all its different elements, dimensions and factors of power, questions which were termed precisely 'statistics', meaning the science of the state; finally, as a third vector of connections, 1 do not think one can fail to relate this search for an art of government to mercantilism and the Cameralists' science of police.
To put it very schematically, in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, the art of government finds its first form of crystallization, organized around the theme of reason of state, understood not in the negative and pejorative sense we give to it today (as that which infringes on the principles of law, equity and humanity in the sole interests of the state), hut in a full and positive sense: the state is governed according to rational principles which are intrinsic to it and which cannot be derived solely from natural or divine laws or the principles of wisdom and prudence; the state, like nature, has its own proper form of rationality, albeit of a different sort. Conversely, the art of government, instead of seeking to found itself in transcendental rules, a cosmological model
or a philosophico-moral ideal, must find the principles of its rationality in that which constitutes the specific reality of the state. In my subsequent lectures I will be examining the elements of this first form of state rationality But we can say here that, right until the early eighteenth century, this form of 'reason of state' acted as a sort of obstacle to the development of the art of government.
This is for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are the strictly historical ones, the series of great crises of the seventeenth century: first the Thirty Years War with its ruin and devastation; then in the mid-century the peasant and urban rebellions; and finally the financial crisis, the crisis of revenues which affected all Western monarchies at the end of the century. 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 which afflicted the seventeenth century from beginning to end. Massive and elementary historical causes thus blocked the propagation of the art of government. I think also that the doctrine formulated during the sixteenth century was impeded in the seventeenth by a series of other factors which I might term, to use expressions which I do not much care for, mental and institutional structures. The preeminence of the problem of the exercise of sovereignty, both as a theoretical question and as a principle of political organization, was the fundamental factor here so long as sovereignty remained the central question. So long as the institutions of sovereignty were the basic political institutions and the exercise of power was conceived as an exercise of sovereignty, the art of government could not be developed in a specific and autonomous manner. I think we have a good example of this in mercantilism. Mercantilism might be described as the first sanctioned efforts to apply this art of government at the level of political practices and knowledge of the state; in this sense one can in fact sav that mercantilism represents a first threshold of rationality in this art of government which La Perriere's text had defined in terms more
"■■ moral than real. Mercantilism is the first ra-
tionalization of the exercise of power as a practice of government; for the first time I with mercantilism we see the development
■\ 0f a savvir of state that can be used as a tactic
\ • 0f government. All this may be true, but mer-
cantilism was blocked and arrested, I believe, precisely by the fact that it took as its essen-tial objective the might of the sovereign; it sought a way not so much to increase the | wealth of the country as to allow the ruler
■■.j: to accumulate wealth, build up his treasury
^ and create the army with which he could
"■' carry out his policies. And the instruments
mercantilism used were laws, decrees, regula-'-■ tions: that is to say, the traditional weapons
of sovereignty. The objective was sovereign's ■-'i might, the instruments those of sovereignty;
mercantilism sought to reinsert the possihil-i ities opened up by a consciously conceived art
of government within a mental and institutional structure, that of sovereignty, which by its very nature stifled them. ' Thus, throughout the seventeenth century
i up to the liquidation of the themes of mer-
cantilism at the beginning of the eighteenth, the art of government remained in a certain ' sense immobilized. Et was trapped within the
i inordinately vast, abstract, rigid framework
. i of the problem and institution of sovereignty.
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 ver-
sion of the theorv of sovereignty - and this is I where those seventeenth-century jurists come
; into the picture who formalize or ritualize the
; theory of the contract. Contract theory en-
| ables 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. But although contract theory, with its reflection on the relationship between ruler and ;• subjects., played a very important role in the-
* ories of public law, in practice, as is evidenced
a by the case of Hobbes (even though what
' Hobbes was aiming to discover was the ruling
..i principles  of an  art  of government), it
remained at the stage of the formulation of general principles of public law.
On the one hand, there was this framework of sovereignty which was too large, too abstract and too rigid; and on the other, the theorv of government suffered from its reliance on a model which was too thin, too weak and too insubstantial, that of the family: an economy of enrichment still based on a model of the family was unlikely to be able to respond adequately to the importance of territorial possessions and royal finance.
How then was the art of government able to outflank these obstacles? Here again a number of genera] processes played their part: the demographic expansion of the eighteenth century, connected with an increasing abundance of money, which in turn was linked to the expansion of agricultural production through a series of circular processes with which the historians are familiar. If this is the general picture, then we can say more precisely that the art of government found fresh outlets through the emergence of the problem of population; or let us say rather that there occurred a subtle process, which we must seek to reconstruct in its particulars, through which the science of government, the recen-tring of the theme of economy on a different plane from that of the family, and the problem of population are all interconnected.
It was through the development of the science of government that the notion of economy came to be recent red on to that different plane of reality which we characterize today as the 'economic', and it was also through this science thar it became possible to identify problems specific to the population; but conversely we can say as well that it was thanks to the perception of the specific problems of the population, and thanks to the isolation of that area of reality that we call the economy, that the problem of government finally came to be thought, reflected and calculated outside of the juridical framework of sovereignty. And that 'statistics'' which, in mercantilist tradition, only ever worked within and for the benefit of a monarchical administration that functioned according to
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the form of sovereignty, now becomes the major technical factor, or one of the major technical factors, of this new technology.
In what way did the problem of population make possible the derestriction of the art of government? The perspective of population, the reality accorded to specific phenomena of population, render possible the final elimination of the model of the family and the recen-tring of the notion of economy. Whereas statistics had previously worked within the administrative frame and thus in terms of the functioning of sovereignty, it now gradually reveals that population has its own regularities, its own rate of deaths and diseases, its cycles of scarcity, etc.; statistics shows also that the domain of population involves a range of intrinsic, aggregate effects, phenomena that are irreducible to those of the familv, such as epidemics, endemic levels of mortality, ascending spirals of labour and wealth; lastly it shows that, through its shifts, customs, activities, etc., population has specific economic effects: statistics, by making it possible lo quantify these specific phenomena of population, also shows that this specificity is irreducible to the dimension of the family. The latter now disappears as the model of government, except for a certain number of residual themes of a religious or moral nature. What, on the other hand, now emerges into prominence is the family considered as an element internal to population, and as a fundamental instrument in its government.
In other words, prior to the emergence of population, it was impossible to conceive the art of government except on the model of the family, in terms of economy conceived as the management of a family; from the moment when, on the contrary, population appears absolutely irreducible to the family, the latter becomes of secondary importance compared to population, as an element internal to population: no longer, that is to say, a model, hut a segment. Nevertheless it remains a privileged segment, because whenever information is required concerning the population (sexual behaviour, demography, consumption, etc.}, it has to be obtained through the family. But the
family becomes an instrument rather than a model: the privileged instrument for the government of the population and not the chimerical model of good government. This shift from the level of the model to that of an instrument is, I believe, absolutely fundamental, and it is from the middle of the eighteenth century that the family appears in this dimension of instrumentality relative to the population, with the institution of campaigns to reduce mortality, and to promote marriages, vaccinations, etc. Thus, what makes it possible for the theme of population to unblock the field of the art of government is this elimination ot the family as model.
In the second place, population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of government. In contrast to sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.; and the means that the government uses to attain these ends are themselves all in some sense immanent to the population; it is the population itself on which government will act either directly through large-scale campaigns, or indirectly through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of hirth rates, the directing of the flow of population into certain regions or activities, etc. The population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, but it is also the object in the hands of the government, aware, vis-a-vts the government, of what it wants, but ignorant of what is being done to it. Interest at the level of the consciousness of each individual who goes to make up the population, and interest considered as the interest of the population regardless of what the particular interests and aspirations may be of the individuals who compose it, this is the new target and the fundamental instrument of the government of population: the birth of a new art, or at any rate of a range of absolutely new tactics and techniques.
Lastly, population is the point around which is organized what in sixteenth-century texts came to be called the patience of the sovereign, in the sense that the population is the object that government must take into ■account in all its observations and savorr, in order to be able to govern effectively in a rational and conscious 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. I said in my last lecture that the constitution of political economy depended upon the emergence from among all the various elements of wealth of a new subject: population. 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 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.
This is not to say that sovereignty ceases to play a role from the moment when the art of government begins to become a political science; 1 would say that, on the contrary, the problem of sovereignty was never posed with greater force than at this time, because it no longer involved, as it did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an attempt to derive an art of government from a theory of sovereignty, bur instead, given that such an art now existed and was spreading, involved an attempt to see what juridical and institutional form, what foundation in the Jaw, could be given to the sovereignty that characterizes a state. It suffices to read in chronological succession two different texts by Rousseau. In his Encyclopaedia article on 'Political economy', we can see the way in which Rousseau sets up
the problem of the art of government by pointing out (and the text is very characteristic from this point of view) that the word 'oeconomy' essentially signifies the management of family property by the father, but that this model can no longer be accepted, even if it had been valid in the past; today we know, says Rousseau, that political economy is not the economy of the family, and even without making explicit reference to the Physiocrats, to statistics or to the general problem ot the population, he sees quite clearly this turning point consisting in the fact that the economy of 'political economy' has a totally new sense which cannot be reduced to the old model of the family. He undertakes in this article the task of giving a new definition of the art of government. Later he writes The Social Contract, where he poses the problem of how It is possible, using concepts like nature, contract and general will, to provide a general principle of government which allows room both for a juridical principle of sovereignty and for the elements through which an art of government can be defined and characterized. Consequently, sovereignty is far from being eliminated by the emergence of a new art of government, even by one which has passed the threshold of political science; on the contrary, the problem of sovereignty is made more acute than ever.
As for discipline, this is not eliminated either; clearly its modes of organization, all the institutions within which it had developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -schools, manufactories, armies, etc. - all this can only be understood on the basis of the development of the great administrative monarchies, but nevertheless, discipline was never more important or more valorized than at the moment when it became important to manage a population; the managing of a population not only concerns the collective mass of phenomena, the level of its aggregate effects, it also implies the management of population in Its depths and its details. The notion of a government of population renders all the more acute the problem of the foundation of sovereignty (consider Rousseau) and all the
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more acute equally the necessity for the development of discipline (consider all the history of the disciplines, which I have attempted to analyze elsewhere).
Accordingly, wc 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-govern-ment, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security. In any case, I wanted to demonstrate the deep historical link between the movement that overturns the constants of sovereignty in consequence of the problem of choices of government, the movement that brings about the emergence of population as a datum, as a field of intervention and as an objective of governmental techniques, and the process which isolates the economy as a specific sector of reality, and political economy as the science and the technique of intervention of the government in that field of reality. Three movements: government, population, political economy, which constitute from the eighteenth century onwards a solid series, one which even today has assuredly not been dissolved.
In conclusion I would like to say that on second thoughts the more exact title I would like to have given to the course of lectures which I have begun this year is not the one I originally chose, 'Security, territory and population': what I would like to undertake is something which I would term a history of 'governmentality'. By this word I mean three things:
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 to-
wards the pre-eminence over all other forms 1 (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 devel- ; opment 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 ad-ministrative state during the fifteenth and \ sixteenth centuries, gradually becomes 'gov- ; ernmentalized'. . ?
j
"We all know the fascination which the love, or horror, of the state exercises today; we ; know how much attention is paid to the genesis of the state, its history, its advance, its \ power and abuses, etc. The excessive value attributed to the problem of the state is expressed, basically, in two ways: the one form, immediate, affective and tragic, is the lyricism of the monstre froid wc see confronting us; but there is a second way of overvaluing the problem of the state, one which is paradoxical because apparently reductionist: it is the form of analysis that consists in reducing the state to a certain number of functions, such as the development of productive forces and the reproduction of relations of produc- [ tion, and yet this reductionist vision of the « relative importance of the state's role never- ' theless invariably renders it absolutely essen- I tial as a target needing to be attacked and a. i privileged position needing to be occupied. i But 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, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythi- < cized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think. Maybe        . > what is really important for our modernity - i that is, for our present - is not so much the etatisation of society, as the 'governmental?- ■;■ zation' of the state. t We live in the era of a 'governmentality' j first discovered in the eighteenth century.
This governmentalization of the state is a singularly paradoxical phenomenon, since if in fact the problems of governmentality and the techniques of government have become the only political issue, the only real space for political struggle and contestation, this is because the governmentalization of the state is at the same time what has permitted the srate to survive, and it is possible to suppose that if the state is what it is today, this is so precisely thanks to this governmentality, which is at once interna! and external to the state, since it is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on; thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of go ve rnmcntality.
And maybe we could even, albeit in a very global, rough and inexact fashion, reconstruct in this manner the great forms and economics of power in the West. First of all, the state of justice, born in the feudal type of territorial regime which corresponds to a society of laws - either customs or written laws - involving a whole reciprocal play of obligation and litigation; second, the administrative state, born in the territoriality of national boundaries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and corresponding to a society of regu-
lation and discipline; and finally a governmental state, essentially defined no longer in terms of its territoriality, of its surface area, but in terms of the mass of its population with its volume and density, and indeed also with the territory over which it is distributed, although this figures here only as one among its component elements. This state of government which bears essentially on population and both refers itself to and makes use of the instrumentation of economic savoir could be seen as corresponding to a type of society controlled by apparatuses of security.
In the following lectures I will try to show how governmentality was born out of, on the one hand, the archaic model of Christian pastoral, and, on the other, a diplomatic-military technique, perfected on a European scale with the Treaty of Wesphalia; and that it could assume the dimensions it has only thanks to a series of specific instruments, whose formation is exactly contemporaneous with that of the art of government and which are known, in the old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sense of the term, as police. The pastoral, the new diplomatic-military techniques and, lastly, police: these are the three elements that I believe made possible the production of this fundamental phenomenon m Western history, the governmentalization of the state.