Governmentality

Governmentality is a concept in the work of the French philosopher and cultural critic Michel Foucault. It explains the historical origins, evolution, and mechanisms that facilitate the institutional control of a population. Foucault also used the term in a more general sense to describe how governing structures are governed themselves. He discussed the concept during the final stages of his career, primarily articulating his ideas about government and governmentality in a series of recorded lectures delivered while he was a faculty member of the Collège de France in Paris.

Foucault’s ideas about government and governmentality complement a body of earlier work that he produced regarding the general nature and structure of power. Scholars note that his ideas about governmentality add a deeper, broader, and more complex dimension to Foucault’s established notions of power. Governmentality became a highly influential philosophical concept in political science and has exerted a profound influence on modern neoliberal political theory. Some commentators trace the roots of contemporary Western neoliberalism to a 1979 governmentality lecture delivered by Foucault, in which he discusses the complex nature of the market-based economic relationship between individuals and the governing structures in which they operate.

Background

Foucault was a prominent figure of twentieth-century thought and scholarship. He is widely considered one of the century’s most important and influential intellectuals and ranks among the best-known thought leaders of the related philosophical schools of structuralism and poststructuralism.

Structuralism first emerged during the 1950s, in part as a response to the existentialist beliefs forwarded by the influential French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). Sartre’s worldview assigned high levels of freedom and self-determination to the human condition, which structuralism rejects. Instead, the structuralist perspective endorses high levels of cultural and psychological determinism, positing that human behavior is heavily influenced by and subject to social controls enforced by structured systems created by human beings. According to the structuralist viewpoint, these systems essentially arrange regulatory mechanisms and rules into ordered systems perceived by the mind on a psychological rather than a sensory level.

Poststructuralism simultaneously rejected certain aspects of structuralism while building upon other aspects, creating a loosely defined philosophical system delimited mainly by its endorsement of the idea that meaning is neither fixed nor stable. Human beings may strive to find meaning or create systems that generate meaning, but the poststructuralist view posits that such meaning has no inherent character and instead constantly changes depending on the viewpoint of the person perceiving it. It therefore questions the very nature of meaning itself and dismisses the idea that meaning and order are coherent and constant.

During his lifetime, Foucault published an extensive bibliography of books, essays, and works of philosophy, cultural criticism, and literary criticism. In these texts, and during his extended career as a lecturer and professor, Foucault developed an influential view of the nature and application of power as a dynamic feature of human society. For Foucault, power is not an element restricted to and wielded selectively and exclusively by institutions granted the authority to exercise it by a complicit populace. Rather, Foucault views power as a pervasive, omnipresent feature of society that undergoes a constant process of mediation and negotiation to create a superstructure that functions as a source of perceived truth. Foucault’s lectures on government and governmentality built on this established view of the nature, structure, and function of power.

Foucault articulated his ideas on governmentality during a series of lectures delivered beginning in the late 1970s and continuing until the final stages of his life, which ended with his 1984 death. Most of the lectures were delivered at the Collège de France, where Foucault worked as a professor. However, Foucault left instructions stating that his unfinished writings were not to be published after his death. As such, his discussions of governmentality were never directly presented by Foucault in written form and have instead been harvested from the lectures in which he explained them. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Foucault’s key governmentality discussions were included in two distinct lecture series. These include Security, Territory, Population (delivered in 1977–1978) and The Birth of Biopolitics (delivered in 1978–1979).

Overview

In the Territory, Security, Population lecture series, Foucault endeavors to illuminate what he calls the “problem of government,” which includes multiple key sub-questions: How should a person govern themselves? How should a person allow themselves to be governed, and by what or whom? How can a governor or government function in the best and most effective possible way? In answering these questions, Foucault focuses on how government occurs and underlying sociocultural structures facilitate the way people think about governance.

One important answer derives from a concept Foucault called “biopower.” Commentators describe Foucault’s notion of biopower as one of his famous thought “fragments,” in which he outlines an idea in detail but does not develop it into a comprehensive and cohesive philosophical theory. For Foucault, biopower describes a series of power-based relationships in which a governance structure impacts elements of reproductive biology to regulate and achieve stable control over an entire population. In explaining it, Foucault notes links between the concept of population and the sourcing and exercising of political power over that population. For Foucault, population extends beyond simply reporting the number of people that live in a specific locale to include variable factors such as birth rates, death rates, marriage rates, and the average number of children per family. These aspects of society combine to create an overarching unit that Foucault calls “the social,” describing it as the arena in which political power exerts influence. Foucault uses the Latin term omnes et singulatum (of all and of each) to describe how political power works on the social as a whole and on each individual who comprises it.

In describing the relationship between the social and the state, Foucault notes that the social is largely motivated by a pervasive need for stability and security. The question of where that stability and security comes from and how it is applied and used comprises the “problem of government” that Foucault’s idea of governmentality endeavors to answer. In Territory, Security, Population, Foucault examines how governments have historically worked to provide that stability and security to the people under its control, analyzing both the secular and religious power structures operating within recent centuries of European society. In doing so, he describes three defining features of governmentality: First, he notes that power consolidates at the institutional level and control over individuals is its objective; second, he demonstrates that this form of power is the underlying basis of modern notions of government; third, Foucault defines governmentality as a process that results in a state, through its obligation to provide security while maintaining the consent of the governed, develops practices and institutions that deliver or appear to deliver both security and apparent freedom to its citizens. For Foucault, this process is defined by tactics and strategies, applied by macro-level power structures on micro-level interactions, to achieve and maintain control.

The Birth of Biopolitics applies the concept of biopower and governmentality described in Territory, Security, Population to neoliberal forms of governance that were emerging during the late 1970s, when international geopolitics were entering the initial phases of globalism. Neoliberal viewpoints assign a dual function to individuals within society—they not only comprise the end site at which political power acts but also function as the base economic unit of a consumption-oriented society in which market forces function as the primary source of socioeconomic benefits. To achieve and optimize the socioeconomic benefits that provide the security desired by the social, neoliberal governance structures generally seek to minimize taxation and government regulation, resist mass-scale attempts to organize labor, and cast inequality as the inherent and necessary outcome of meritocratic social organization. Foucault characterizes neoliberalism as an entirely new power and governance structure with no clear historical precedent, asserting a novel “technology of power” built largely on microeconomic forces. For Foucault, this power structure is defined by its focus on producing both general social conditions and individual citizens who accept consumption, competitiveness, and self-interest as desirable characteristics upon which neoliberal governance structures are built.

Scholars and commentators note the enormous influence of The Birth of Biopolitics on the global economic and political order. The lecture series has garnered attention from intellectuals, scholars, and political scientists; some commentators have described its concepts as the root of the neoliberal order subsequently adopted by the United States and leading European economies. This neoliberal order is strongly associated with major political figures of the era including US president Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) and UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013). Others have argued that neoliberal power structures continue to play a defining role in contemporary geopolitics, influencing the so-called “forever wars” championed by the US military-industrial complex and events like the subprime mortgage collapse that led to the 2008–2009 worldwide financial crisis often called the Great Recession.

Bibliography

Busse, Jan. The Globality of Governmentality: Governing an Entangled World. Abingdon-on-Thames, Routledge, 2021.

Jessen, Mathias Hein, and Nicolai von Eggers. “Governmentality and Statification: Toward a Foucauldian Theory of the State.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 37, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 53–72.

Kelly, Mark. “Michel Foucault (1926–1984).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu/foucault/. Accessed 18 Jan. 2022.

“Michel Foucault.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 22 May 2018, plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/. Accessed 18 Jan. 2022.

Sahu, Skylab. Gender, Violence, and Governmentality. Abingdon-on-Thames, Routledge, 2020.

Sitaraman, Ganesh. “The Collapse of Neoliberalism.” New Republic, 23 Dec. 2019, newrepublic.com/article/155970/collapse-neoliberalism. Accessed 18 Jan. 2022.

Sokhi-Bulley, Bal. “Governmentality: Notes on the Thought of Michel Foucault.” Critical Legal Thinking, 2 Dec. 2014, criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/02/governmentality-notes-thought-michel-foucault/. Accessed 18 Jan. 2022.

Teo, Terri-Anne, and Elisa Wynne-Hughes. Postcolonial Governmentalities: Rationalities, Violences, and Contestations. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.