Governmental rationality: an introduction

Colin Gordon

Between 1970 and 1984, Michel Foucault delivered thirteen annual courses of lectures at the Collège de France in Paris. Foucault's duties at the college, as professor in a specially created Chair in the History of Systems of Thought, were not to teach a syllabus but to report on the results of his own researches. Several of these lecture series, Foucault's own official summaries of which have been republished as a volume by the Collège de France,1 are preliminary explorations of themes taken up in various of Foucault's later books. But others contain rich seams of material which he never chose or had time to work up in a final written form. Perhaps the two most remarkable annual courses of which this is true were those of 1978 and 1979, entitled respectively 'Security, territory and population', and 'The birth of biopolitics'. One of the 1978 lectures was published (although not in French) in Foucault's lifetime, and is reprinted in this volume (Chapter 4). A provision in Foucault's will has been interpreted by his literary executors as precluding posthumous publication of the complete lecture series; but the exceptional interest of the 1978 and 1979 courses has been recognized by the recent publication on cassette tape of the initial lectures of the two series, and a complete tape edition of the two series is currently under consideration. Complete recordings of these lectures are available to researchers in the Foucault archive at the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir in Paris.

In these lectures Foucault defined and explored a fresh domain of research into what he called 'governmental rationality', or, in his own neologism, 'governmentality'. This work was not carried out single-handedly. A group of fellow researchers, several of whom are among the contributors to this volume, took part in seminars held at the Collège de France which paralleled and complemented the programme of the lectures. In the subsequent lecture courses in Paris, Foucault shifted his attention away from these governmental themes in the direction of the topics of his final volumes of the History of Sexuality. But he continued to teach and organize research seminars on questions of government on his frequent visits to the United States, particularly at Berkeley. A number of lectures, essays and interviews published in the USA during these later years provide valuable documentation of this area of Foucault's work.

In the present essay I shall attempt a brief outline of the meaning of the theme of 'governmentality' in Foucault's work and the studies which he and others carried out under this heading, constructing a composite picture of the kinds of political and philosophical analysis which this style of working produces in the hands of a number of different and independent researchers. In some ways this is a problematic and even a foolhardy undertaking. A condensed, syncretic account may risk glossing over important differences of perspective between different individual contributions. One is describing a zone of research, not a fully formed product (although happily, it is now possible to refer to major subsequent publications by many of this volume's authors). The inaccessibility and the informal oral structure of the lecture materials makes summarization at once an indispensable and an uncomfortable task. I can only hope that the richness of the material itself will encourage the reader to tolerate these presentational obstacles and their attendant irritations.

As well as summarizing, I shall attempt to connect and to contextualize. We are only gradually becoming aware of, and are still far from having fully documented access to, the astounding range of Foucault's intellectual enterprises, especially in the later years from 1976 to 1984. The governmental theme has a focal place in Foucault's later philosophy; an effort needs to be made to locate this as accurately as possible. To understand the theme's wider resonance, something needs to be said about the interactions between a research agenda and a contemporary political world. To help to situate its distinctive value – and on grounds of good sense – it will be advisable to resist doctrinaire overstatement of this work's unique and unprecedented character, and instead to try to establish lines of communication with twentieth-century enquiries into allied areas of political philosophy and the history of political ideas. Such points of fruitful connection are, as Graham Burchell illustrates (Chapter 6), encouragingly numerous. Finally, and taking due account of widespread extant discussion of Foucault's later published work, something ought to be said about the ethical and political considerations (if any) implicit in this way of working and thinking.

What did Foucault have in mind by the topic 'governmental rationality'? Foucault understood the term 'government' in both a wide and a narrow sense. He proposed a definition of the term 'government' in general as meaning 'the conduct of conduct': that is to say, a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons. 'The government of one's self and of others' was Foucault's title for his last two years' lectures, and for a projected, unpublished book. Government as an activity could concern the relation between self and self, private interpersonal relations involving some form of control or guidance, relations within social institutions and communities and, finally, relations concerned with the exercise of political sovereignty. Foucault was crucially interested in the interconnections between these different forms and meanings of government; but in his lectures specifically on governmental rationality he concerned himself principally with government in the political domain.

Foucault used the term 'rationality of government' almost interchangeably with 'art of government'. He was interested in government as an activity or practice, and in arts of government as ways of knowing what that activity consisted in, and how it might be carried on. A rationality of government will thus mean a way or system of thinking about the nature of the practice of government (who can govern; what governing is; what or who is governed), capable of making some form of that activity thinkable and practicable both to its...