Governmentality

The Turn to “Government”

The focus of government is an important development on Foucault's earlier work on the exercise of power. In a series of studies up to Discipline and Punish, Foucault looks at how various regimes of practice are designed to produce appropriately behaved and compliant subjects. In Discipline and Punish, he argues that the organization of the prison is calculated to tailor the self-image and conduct of the inmates toward the needs of orderliness and reform, and in The Birth of the Clinic, he suggests that the procedures and subjectivities of medical examination produce the sensibility of the compliant patient. What unites these studies is the prominence of institutional convention and organization in the exercise of power. An implication of this is that, to a large extent, the effectiveness of these regimes remains contingent upon their site specificity. In other words, whether the context is the prison wing, the clinician's office, or the schoolroom, discursive regimes produce the power relations necessary for discipline and orderliness in a particular setting.

However, such regimes of control do not transfer readily to the democratic state, in which strategies of power are obligated to a systemic requirement for personal autonomy and subtler networks of judgment and control. The response is a shift in the ends of governmental power, from the pursuit and maintenance of sovereign rule to a duty of care over the population. The systematic discharge of this care is made possible by the development of a “science of population,” producing necessary statistical analysis of such phenomena as contagious disease, living conditions, and economic productivity. The oppressive state becomes the nurturing state, intent on developing measures to enable a healthy population to thrive as workers and consumers. At least in terms of its rhetoric, government moves from the retention and implementation of sovereign control toward the exercise of benign surveillance, responsibility, and care.

Successful government requires that projects of development be internalized within the population, and Foucault uses the example of the family to illustrate how this occurs. Prior to the emergence of population as a productive economic category, Foucault argues, the family was the self-regulating unit for the control of morality and hygiene. Drawing on forms of knowledge made possible through the application of statistics and expressible in universal statements of policy, government is able to extend its rule of care over the family. In matters ranging from the regulation of sexual behavior to the submission of children to schooling and vaccination, the family occupies dual roles as subject of state judgment and concern, [Page 686]and as implementer of policies aimed at population improvement. In this way, the family moves from an internally determining source of control to an instrument of the will to govern. In summary, government is the craft of developing an idealized population through approved practices of free expression and conduct within a framework of welfare and responsibility, conceived at policy level and implemented from within the population itself. This can be illustrated through how advertising post–World War II targeted the competent purchaser, particularly the mother whose laundry could only be deemed suitably clean and white through the purchase of a specific soap powder (Myers 1994).

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