Governmentality - Basic Definition of Governmentality

Basic Definition of Governmentality

In his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault often defines governmentality as the "art of government" in a wide sense, i.e. with an idea of "government" that is not limited to state politics alone, that includes a wide range of control techniques, and that applies to a wide variety of objects, from one's control of the self to the "biopolitical" control of populations. In the work of Foucault, this notion is indeed linked to other concepts such as biopolitics and power-knowledge. The genealogical exploration of the modern state as "problem of government" does not only deepen Foucault’s analyses on sovereignty and biopolitics; it offers an analytics of government which refines both Foucault’s theory of power and his understanding of freedom.

The concept of "governmentality" develops a new understanding of power. Foucault encourages us to think of power not only in terms of hierarchical, top-down power of the state. He widens our understanding of power to also include the forms of social control in disciplinary institutions (schools, hospitals, psychiatric institutions, etc.), as well as the forms of knowledge. Power can manifest itself positively by producing knowledge and certain discourses that get internalised by individuals and guide the behaviour of populations. This leads to more efficient forms of social control, as knowledge enables individuals to govern themselves.

"Governmentality" applies to a variety of historical periods and to different specific power regimes. However, it is often used (by other scholars and by Foucault himself) in reference to "neoliberal governmentality", i.e. to a type of governmentality that characterizes advanced liberal democracies. In this case, the notion of governmentality refers to societies where power is de-centered and its members play an active role in their own self-government, e.g. as posited in neoliberalism. Because of its active role, individuals need to be regulated from 'inside'. A particular form of governmentality is characterized by a certain form of knowledge ("savoir" in French). In the case of neoliberal governmentality (a kind of governmentality based on the predominance of market mechanisms and of the restriction of the action of the state) the knowledge produced allows the construction of auto-regulated or auto-correcting selves.

In his lecture titled Governmentality, Foucault gives us a definition of governmentality:

"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 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'."

As Foucault’s explicit definition is rather broad, perhaps further examination of this definition would be useful.

We shall begin with a closer inspection of the first part of Foucault’s definition of governmentality:

This strand of the three-part definition states that governmentality is, in other words, all of the components that make up a government that has as its end the maintenance of a well ordered and happy society (population). The government’s means to this end is its "apparatuses of security," that is to say, the techniques it uses to provide this society a feeling of economic, political, and cultural well-being. The government achieves these ends by enacting "political economy," and in this case, the meaning of economy is the older definition of the term, that is to say, "economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behavior 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". Thus, we see that this first part of the definition states that governmentality is a government with specific ends, means to these ends, and particular practices that should lead to these ends.

The second part of Foucault’s definition (the "resulting, on the one hand, in formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs") presents governmentality as the long, slow development of Western governments which eventually took over from forms of governance like sovereignty and discipline into what it is today: bureaucracies and the typical methods by which they operate.

The next and last strand of Foucault’s definition of governmentality is "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'." This strand can be restated as the evolution from the Medieval state, that maintained its territory and an ordered society within this territory through a blunt practice of simply imposing its laws upon its subjects, to the early renaissance state, which became more concerned with the "disposing of things", and so began to employ strategies and tactics to maintain a content and thus stable society, or in other words to "render a society governable".

Thus, if one takes these three strands together, governmentality may be defined as the process through which a form of government with specific ends (a happy and stable society), means to these ends ("apparatuses of security"), and with a particular type of knowledge ("political economy"), to achieve these ends, evolved from a medieval state of justice to a modern administrative state with complex bureaucracies.