"Governmentality"

The essay published as “Governmentality” is the second lecture of Foucault’s Collège de France Course Lecture series given in the Winter months of 1978. Foucault titled that lecture series “Security, Territory, and Population” but at the end of the “Governmenality” lecture he already expresses that a better titled would have simply been “Governmentality.” This, then, was the year in which Foucault theorized the modality of governmental power, to be placed alongside of the other modalities of pastoral power, biopower, and disciplinary power.

There are (at least) two related issues the reader faces in grappling with Foucault’s conception of “governmentality.” The first of these concerns the status of Foucault’s concept of power. Is it a historical description of an actual-working modality of power? Is it a philosophical theory of an ideal form of power? Or is it both? Undoubtedly, for Foucault, it would have to be both. But I think there remain serious questions concerning the historical legitimacy of this model. The “Governmentality” lecture is given at times to sweeping historical claims which Foucault barely backs up. This raises questions concerning the historiographical status of Foucault’s genealogy (What is genealogy? How is it practiced? What does it assume? Where does it differ from traditional history?). It also raises questions for Foucault’s readers concerning the ongoing use of his models of power—what historiographical and philosophical adjustments must we make to Foucault’s methodologies and assumptions in order to legitimate the deployment of his various concepts of power?

A second related concern stems from my own interest in trying to deploy Foucault’s concepts of power in the context of my own work in political history, specifically American political history. I am particularly interest in how well Foucault’s work meshes with a very summary account of American liberalism which goes like this: American liberalism can be characterized in terms of a bifurcation of politics into the two opposed realms of public power and private freedom, following on from the quintessential theorization of John Stuart Mill or, more recently, John Rawls and Richard Rorty; the high point of American liberalism thus described was the Progressive Era or, more broadly, the years from the Civil War through the Wilson presidency; American liberalism thus described began to retreat during the Hoover administration, slowly intensified its retreat after the Second World War, and then really began to thoroughly dissipate with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; while public/private liberalism continues to dominate much theoretical and political discourse, liberal political practice today is not very well characterized according to the discursive universe of public versus private power. Regardless of the validity or accuracy of this account (which I would, of course, defend), I am curious specifically how it sits with Foucault’s models and histories of power.

An initial point concerns the genesis of governmentality out of the context of pastoral power, a point which Foucault discusses in the first 1978 Course Lecture, the one immediately prior to “Governmenality”. In his summary for the Course Lectures of that year, Foucault describes the relation thus: “Now, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw a general crisis of the pastorate open up and develop, but in a much more complex fashion: a search for other modes (and not necessarily less strict ones) of spiritual direction and new types of relation between pastor and flock; but also inquiries concerning the right way to ‘govern’ children, a family, a domain, a principality” (EW1, 68). This, then, is the genealogical point of entry of governmental power. The situation is one of “a double movement, then, of state centralization, on the one hand, and of dispersion and religious dissidence, on the other” (EW3, 202). This is a first approximation of the theme of public versus private power, but as Foucault goes on to elaborate “governmentality” the story is much more complex.

Toward the end of the “Governmentality” lecture, Foucault writes: “[I]t is the tactics of government that 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 governmentality” (EW3, 221). Governmentality, then, describes a very general modality of power in which the split between public and private is able to sustain itself. At the same time, it is clear that governmental power, like disciplinary power and biopower, itself transverses the distinction between public and private. This has serious consequences for the liberal practice of dividing public and private spheres. For, if power is exercised often enough on the governmental model, then it will become increasingly clear that power assumes both public and private forms. This will eventually result in the realization that the liberal model of public power versus private freedom is untenable. Power, in other words, is pervasive throughout both public and private domains (this is the crucial Foucauldian point which resonated so well with so many feminists).

Here, then, is one possible way of relating Foucault’s accounts of power to my mini-history of American liberalism offered above. On the sovereign model of power, as outlined in History of Sexuality Volume 1 (pp. 83-85), power essentially contains the split between public and private spheres within itself. So long as power is exercised and theorized on the sovereign model, then, the public versus private split will seem natural. The interesting thing about governmentality, and its correlate forms of power (discipline, biopolitics), is that it is capable of sustaining the public-private split within itself at the same time that the actual powers exercised under governmentality exceed the logic of that split. Eventually, then, power itself starts to run outside of the boundaries of the public/private theory. This is what happened in American liberalism in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s which very often outstripped the conceptual terms of public versus private (feminism being the primary example). Yet theorists and politicians alike continued to describe power on the sovereign model of public versus private (witness the academic fame of John Rawls’s theory of political justice, which is premised on state versus nonstate dualism). With Foucault comes finally a new model of power, written in the wake of and in response to the failed assumptions of the new social movements (cf. “Truth and Power”, 117 and “The Subject and Power”, 329), which finally enables us to recognize the extent to which our exercises of power transgress the familiar dichotomy of public versus private. We are finally able to recognize that the state, though of importance for politics, is not the only thing of importance in politics: “Maybe what is really important for our modernity… is not so much the statization of society, as the ‘governmentalization’ of the state” (EW3, 220). Governmentality is one of the first moments in this genealogy of the disintegration of public versus private power. It is a complex genealogy, but we have its origins here.

This way of relating Foucault’s account to the summary history of American liberalism is of course in parts very sketchy. One problem is this. It goes against one of Foucault’s explicit warnings to his readers: “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” (EW3, 219). Foucault here cautions against the familiar claim that his work demonstrates how sovereign power gradually receded against the in-washing tide of disciplinary (etc.) power, a caution previously sounded, but largely unheard, in his 1976 Course Lectures: “The powers of modern society are exercised through, on the basis of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism” (“Two Lectures”, 106). The idea, then, is not that discipline-government-biopolitics replace sovereignty, but that they develop alongside of it throughout modernity. This seems to run against my interpretation above.

There are two ways of dealing with this problem and it is unclear which is preferable. The first way consists in massaging the inconsistency. My model of liberalism can admit the persistence of sovereign power, but only in discursive terms. That is, the discourse of sovereign power persists, while the exercise of sovereign power dissipates. This, in fact, is precisely what my model holds and why it is so deeply concerned with the incoherence between official sovereign theories of power and actual non-sovereign (e.g., disciplinary) practices of power. It is doubtful, however, that when Foucault speaks of a persistence of sovereign power, he thinks of this persistence on the level of discourse only and not on the level of the exercise of power. Another way of dealing with the inconsistency between Foucault’s account and mine is simply to deny the historical adequacy of Foucault’s inconsistent claim. This is, of course, a risky strategy. But it is, ultimately, I think advisable. Foucault does not offer a wealth of evidence that sovereign power continues to be an important model for the actual exercise of power in modernity and late modernity. He claims this, but his evidence is fairly thin. In fact, the only evidence he offers in “Governmentality” is the persistence of this theme in the theoretical discourse of Rousseau. What Foucault needs to offer, then, is a more precise historical account of the actual continued functionings of sovereign power. Surely the execution of Damiens the regicide recounted in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish would be an extremely foreign experience for most of we moderns these days. Indeed, one way of reading Discipline and Punish is that it accounts for precisely this distance. In any event, this issue is much too thorny to deal with in a short space. But it is worth considering because it raises all the important historiographical questions mentioned above concerning the assumptions, utility, and efficacy of the genealogical mode of history.