The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality

The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality

Based on Michel Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on governmental rationalities and his 1977 interview regarding his work on imprisonment, this volume is the long-awaited sequel to Power/Knowledge. In these lectures, Foucault examines the art or activity of government both in its present form and within a historical perspective as well as the different ways governmentality has been made thinkable and practicable. Foucault's thoughts on political discourse and governmentality are supplemented by the essays of internationally renowned scholars. United by the common influence of Foucault's approach, they explore the many modern manifestations of government: the reason of state, police, liberalism, security, social economy, insurance, solidarity, welfare, risk management, and more. The central theme is that the object and the activity of government are not instinctive and natural things, but things that have been invented and learned. The Foucault Effect analyzes the thought behind practices of government and argues that criticism represents a true force for change in attitudes and actions, and that extending the limits of some practices allows the invention of others. This unique and extraordinarily useful collection of articles and primary materials will open the way for a whole new set of discussions of the work of Michel Foucault as well as the status of liberalism, social policy, and insurance. Graham Burchell , a contributor to Radical Philosophy and Ideology and Consciousness , is a freelance researcher and translator. Colin Gordon , a former research assistant to Michel Foucault at the College de France, is the editor and translator of Foucault's Power/Knowledge and translator of The Philosophical Imaginary by Michelle LeDoeuff. Peter Miller serves as convener of the Department of Accounting and Finance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Foucault Effect Studies in Governmentality By Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, Peter Miller The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 1991 Editors and Contributors All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-08045-1 Contents Acknowledgements, Preface, 1. Governmental Rationality: An Introduction Colin Gordon, 2. Politics and the Study of Discourse Michel Foucault, 3. Questions of Method Michel Foucault, 4. Governmentality Michel Foucault, 5. Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital – Police and the State of Prosperity Pasquale Pasquino, 6. Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing 'The System of Natural Liberty' Graham Burchell, 7. Social Economy and the Government of Poverty Giovanna Procacci, 8. The Mobilization of Society Jacques Donzelot, 9. How Should We Do the History of Statistics? Ian Hacking, 10. Insurance and Risk François Ewald, 11. 'Popular Life' and Insurance Technology Daniel Defert, 12. Criminology: The Birth of a Special Knowledge Pasquale Pasquino, 13. Pleasure in Work Jacques Donzelot, 14. From Dangerousness to Risk Robert Castel, Index, CHAPTER 1 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 pa