Michel Foucault, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Gouvernementalité is not, first of all, a word for "the government" in the ordinary political sense — the cabinet, the administration, the machinery of the state. That conflation is precisely what I wanted to refuse. Let me say what it is. At the most general level, power is not a thing one possesses; it is a relation — a relation between individuals such that one can direct or determine the behaviour of another, voluntarily, in terms of objectives that may also be the other's own.1
To govern someone, in this wide sense, is simply to determine their conduct through a strategy, by resorting to a number of tactics.2 One can govern a society, a group, a family, a single person. What I wanted to study, across the asylum, the clinic, the prison, was exactly this: how the mentally ill were governed, how patients were governed, how the delinquent was governed — the full range of surveillance, kindness, philanthropy, economic calculation, and care that the word "govern" (held in quotation marks, with all its richness) covers.3
That is gouvernementalité in the wide sense. But the concept also has a historically precise, singular meaning, formulated in the lecture of 1 February 1978. In that narrower sense, it names the specific regime of power that emerged in the eighteenth century — a regime that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument.4
It designates the process by which this type of power came to take pre-eminence over sovereignty and discipline.5 In this sense, gouvernementalité is to the state what techniques of discipline are to the penal system, what techniques of segregation are to psychiatry, what biopolitics is to medical institutions.6 The historical lineage matters here.
Before there was a governmentalized state, there was the raison d'État — the idea, developed by Italian and German authors at the turn of the seventeenth century, that governing is a rational art whose rules are drawn not from divine law or Machiavellian cunning but from the nature of the state itself.7 Giovanni Botero defined it as a perfect knowledge of the means through which states form, strengthen themselves, endure, and grow; Chemnitz reduced it to the state's preservation, expansion, and felicity, achieved by the easiest and promptest means.8
This rationality — neither simply Christian nor simply Machiavellian — is one of the main features of modern political rationality, and it is what I trace through the raison d'État and then through the police, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.9 What this genealogy reveals is something I find more important than the usual obsession with "the state" as such: maybe the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction, whose importance is far more limited than many of us think.10
What matters for our modernity is not the statization of society but the gouvernementalisation of the state — the fact that the state survives and defines its own limits precisely through the tactics of government, which continually redraw the line between what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private.11
One can even sketch, very roughly, three great forms of power in the West: the state of justice, born in feudal territoriality, corresponding to a society of law and litigation; the administrative state of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, corresponding to a society of regulations and disciplines; and finally the state of government, no longer defined by territory but by a mass — the population, with its volume, its density, its economic instrumentation, managed through apparatuses of security.12
The concept thus operates at two registers simultaneously: a general analytics of power-as-conduct, and a specific historical diagnosis of the modern state. Holding both together is what makes it useful.
Power is relations; power is not a thing, it is a relationship between two individuals, a relationship which is such that one can direct the behaviour of another or determine the behaviour of another.The Politics of Truth, pp. 135–136
When I say 'govern someone,' it is simply in the sense that one can determine one's behaviour in terms of a strategy by resorting to a number of tactics.The Politics of Truth, pp. 135–136
How the mentally ill were governed; how the problem of governing the sick... how the patients were governed, what one did with them, what status they were given, where they were placed, in what type of treatment, what kind of surveillance, also acts of kindness, philanthropy, economic field, care to be given to the ill: it is all that, I think, that one must try to see.The Politics of Truth, pp. 135–136
the concept of 'governmentality' progressively shifts from a precise, historically determinate sense, to a more general and abstract meaning. In fact, in this lecture it serves as the name for the regime of power deployed in the eighteenth century, which 'has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument.'Security Territory Population, Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978, pp. 323–324
as well as the process that has led to 'the pre-eminence over all other types of power - sovereignty, discipline, and so on - of the type of power that we can call "government."'Security Territory Population, Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978, pp. 323–324
governmentality is to the state (...) what techniques of segregation [are] to psychiatry, (...) techniques of discipline (...) to the penal system, and biopolitics to medical institutions.Security Territory Population, Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978, pp. 323–324
This type of rationality, which is one of the main features of modern political rationality, developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the general idea of the 'reason of state' and also through a very specific set of techniques of government that were called at this moment, and with a very special meaning, the police.THE POLITICAL TECHNOLOGY OF INDIVIDUALS, pp. 449–450
Giovanni Botero, at the end of the sixteenth century, gives this definition of the reason of state: 'A perfect knowledge of the means through which states form, strengthen themselves, endure and grow.'... Chemnitz... gives this definition: 'A certain political consideration required for all public matters, councils, and projects, whose only aim is the state's preservation, expansion, and felicity.'THE POLITICAL TECHNOLOGY OF INDIVIDUALS, pp. 449–450
The art of governing people is rational on the condition that it observes the nature of what is governed, that is, the state itself. Now, to formulate such an obvious fact, such a platitude, was in fact to break simultaneously with two opposite traditions, the Christian tradition and Machiavelli's theory.THE POLITICAL TECHNOLOGY OF INDIVIDUALS, pp. 449–450
Maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think.GOVERNMENTALITY, pp. 264–265
the governmentalization of the state is, at the same time, what has permitted the state to survive... it 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.GOVERNMENTALITY, pp. 264–265
First came the state of justice, born in a territoriality of feudal type... Second, the administrative state, born in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries... Finally, the state of government, which is no longer essentially defined by its territoriality... but by a mass: the mass of the population, with its volume, its density.GOVERNMENTALITY, pp. 264–265