Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population

Notes Security, Territory, Population

Cathy Notes

Try to read this as a new take on primitive accumulation (Marx). In this lecture series he’s trying to provide a history of the evolution of the liberal state and liberal economy. Different than a history looking at ideas of government (Hume). Instead looks not at the implementation of ideas but the organic evolution that can be traced along human behaviors. This and B of B is an effort to get at biopolitics, whose components are population as subject (masses), new forms of knowledge (political economy: Quesney French physiocrat who invents economic table that had all the related components of an economy; Smith, Ricardo). Political economy: production, circulation, and distribution of values, a body of knowledge about the economy authorizing an entirely other body of knowledge about what the state can and can’t do. Biopolitics: regulating man as species rather than man as individual.

Foucault connect biopolitics to the evolution of capitalism, says it supplements disciplinarity. Cathy is thinking here that biopolitics and discipline are two poles of the same phenomenon.

P. 44: Resistance is to be the people not the population.

Population is subject that acts (population as species) and one that is monitored and manipulated (population as public p.75)

Direct line between pastoral and disciplinary power, whose inefficiencies lead to biopower.

Three components of Foucault

1. Creation of subject
2. Knowledge formation
3. Power relations (how power is exercised)

I tried to read this in light of how Foucault begins the lecture series: “This year I would like to begin studying what I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power” (1). He goes on to say that the lectures will investigate “where and how, between whom, between what points, according to what processes, and with what effects, power is applied,” noting, however, that he will present “not a theory of what power is, but simply of power in terms of the set of mechanisms and procedures that have the role or function and theme, even when they are unsuccessful, of securing power

Terms

• Milieu (20-21)
• Raison d’Etat
• Police
• Mercantilism
• 
  

Chapter 1

• In the beginning Foucault makes it clear that he’s interested in analyzing the tactics, techniques, and technologies of power that began to consider man as a species. He’s not articulating a theory of power, but rather an analysis of the mechanisms of power, the politics of truth. The dimensions of the power operate in a field of forces not generated or available to the speaking subject.
• He works his way through the similarities and differences of sovereign and disciplinary power, noting that they don’t progress and cause the elimination of whatever preceded it. Rather they build and recreate one another. However, he is most interested in the shifts that work within a domain of security (10-11).
• The question, then, is “whether there really is a general economy of power which has the form [of], or which is at any rate dominated by, the technology of security” (11).
• Foucault says he’ll divide his analysis into four features of the security apparatus:
• Space & security
• How to deal with uncertainty with security
• The relationship between normativity and security
• Population as obj. and subj. of techniques of security.
• He first turns to space and security, noting how the evolution of the town in the 18th century posed problems for security.
• Foucault goes into great detail about the physical construction and layout of towns to support a larger point about disciplining in space. This disciplining doesn’t act on individuals qua individual. Rather, it disciplines them en masse.
• As capitalism matures, town must consider the needs of circulation and therefore remove structures that once provided an element of security (e.g., walls around the city). “In other words, it was a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad” (18).
• The mechanism of security in town planning worked through probabilities (20).
• There’s a great summary of what he’s getting at on (20), in which he outlines the development of environmental mechanics (i.e. milieu).
• As a natural and artificial environmental medium, the milieu is concerned with how things, both good and bad, circulate in a town.
• The elaboration on milieu serves to show how humans as a species interacting en masse with an artificial and natural environment becomes a rather new concern for power.

Questions for Ch.1

• Foucault spends some time in the beginning carving out a space for this lecture. What is it he’s interested in analyzing and what is he not? (2, 4, 11)
• How does Foucault’s explication of milieu and circulation help us understand security’s emergence and its consideration of man as a species within a territory (i.e. how it works on multiplicities of individuals)?

Chapter 2

• Here Foucault turns to scarcity and the mechanisms mercantilist states turned to as a way to avoid scarcity of, for example, grain. Things like price controls and laws against hoarding and exporting too much were imposed by the state as a technique of managing a possible future even.
• However, as laissez faire capitalism emerges in the political economists of the 18th century, this system of scarcity control changes.
• Physiocratic economic theorists of the 18th century moved away from trying to prevent scarcity through laws. Rather they move toward economic principles and policies that should regulate the price of grain more efficiently, especially since they viewed its fluctuations as part of nature.
• Foucault goes into great detail about the economic debates about grain circulation and scarcity. The point is that there’s a move toward market corrective mechanisms as a way to secure the needs of a population. There’s a marked shift from preventative law to “natural” mechanisms.
• The apparatus becomes an economic mechanism that takes into consideration world markets, modes of production, and homo economicus. Scarcity moves away from a population-level scourge to a self-regulating system wherein only a few suffer. Things or analysis, interventions maybe, work at the level of the population, not individuals or multiplicities of individuals. (41-42).
• This represents the emergence of a population as subject, a totally new thing.
• Foucault contrasts discipline as centripetal--isolating, protecting, delimiting a space--and security as centrifugal--”New elements are constantly being integrated: production, psychology, behavior, the ways of doing things of producers, buyers, consumers, importers, and exporters, and the world market” (45). So security is not a disciplinary power. Rather, its concern is the security of man as species as a population who behaves within the mechanisms it desires.
• As Foucault continues to contrast discipline and security, he notes that security tries to deal with “reality” as such. It is this world of physics, matter/reality, that compels security. He then elaborates on the relationship between liberalism and security, noting that the hands off/freedom ideals espoused in security are apparati of security.

Questions

• At the end of Ch.2, Foucault notes of shift away from disciplinarity (laws, prohibitions, codes) and toward security. Without delving into 18th-century grain economics, what are the general differences, and how does this relate to the ideals of liberalism? (41-49)
• Help me understand the following quote: “The law prohibits and discipline prescribes, and the essential function of security, without prohibiting or prescribing, but possibly making use of some instruments of prescription and prohibition, is to respond to a reality in such a way that this response cancels out the reality to it responds--nullifies it, or limits, checks, or regulates it” (47).

Chapter 3

• Foucault takes as an early example of security apparatuses outbreaks and security measures with smallpox. He points to inoculation practices that work to understand the reality of the disease (induce it in people) as a way to nullify it. He also points out that this shows other ways of considering threats that become more prevalent as security continues.
• It was thought of as a relationship between disease and a population and space.
• A notion of understanding and predicting risk.
• Evaluating risk allows one to consider varying levels of danger.
• Things are conceived at the level of a crisis that requires natural or artificial intervention.
• Analyzing the above allows for the calculation of morbidity rates/norms. Therefore, security intervenes at the level--it is its technique--of pulling something deviant back to the norm.
• On p. 63, Foucault gives a great explanation of how the norm works in disciplinary vs. security. With discipline, the norm is what one bends to and creates what is abnormal. In security, the norm and abnormal are discovered in relation to a phenomenon (reality) and then there are either acceptable or unacceptable deviations from a norm.
• “We see the emergence of a completely different problem that is no longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are canceled out” (65).
• Foucault comments on p. 66 about the shift in panoptic power, that of the sovereign surveilling everyone all the time, to one of populations--a use of mechanisms that track only phenomena as not related to individuals.
• The population is first considered as something other than more people and less people in the mercantilist age when the population was something that secured the wealth of the sovereign and therefore must be highly disciplined in order to maximize productive force. Populations for the physiocrats and economists are only relatable to government through specific, dependent variables (e.g., marriage, customs, taxes, etc.). Therefore, power operates not on populations, people, but on factors or forces that will affect the population: “having  hold on things that seem far removed from the population, but which, through calculation, analysis, and reflection, one knows can really have an effect on it” (72).
• Foucault calls the factors of a population that can be acted upon, the naturalness of a population. The naturalness, then, are its characteristics in reality.
• Foucault turns to one mode of managing a population: desire. If people pursue their self-interests, they’ll benefit the whole population, but it is also desire that provides the node for management of a population.
• It’s also important to note that the population is no longer viewed as a group of individual men of rights (mankind) but as a species and a public.
• Foucault believes the emergence of population in security power (biopower) since it extends the issues of wealth to the level of the population causes a field like political economy to rise.

Questions

• How does the case of smallpox help illustrate security in population?
• What is the difference between norms in disciplinary power and norms in security? (63)
• What are populations if not a group of individuals? How does power vis a vis security understand and operate on populations? What are their mechanisms and how are these different from liberalism (i.e. man of rights)? (70-79)

Chapter Four

• Foucault takes as his starting point the diverging concerns for those in power that differ from The Prince and other political thinkers. Whereas Machiavelli was concerned with how to maintain hold of a territory or principality, later anti-Machiavelli literature was concerned with the art of governing.
• Foucault views a few texts, showing that government ranges from sovereign to self to family. However, there’s an expressed interest in all to insert economics into political practice. “The word ‘economy’ designated a form of government in the sixteenth century; in the eighteenth century, through a series of complex processes that are absolutely crucial for our history, it will designate a level of reality and a field of intervention for government” (95).
• He adds to this development the idea that government governs things: a combination of men and things like customs, habits, ways of thinking (96). It also has an end in mind.
• The art of government that emerged contra Machiavelli utilized a method of knowing called “statistics,” which Foucault points out means “the science of the state” (101).
• The emergence of an art of government comes with mercantilism, which uses the means of sovereignty to secure the power of the sovereign. However, this runs counter to the desire of new mercantilist classes and jurists who impose a contract theory on social relations.
• Coupling the art of government and the problem of the population, Foucault claims there’s a demotion of the family as the economic interface with the government. Now, family “falls to the level of the population” and can be known or perceived by statistic characteristics (105).
• At the end of the chapter, Foucault moves away from the development of political economy, and instead begins to explain the modern state as one involved in governmentality, which means:
• A state that uses “the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument” (108).
• Knowledges and apparatuses in the service of sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower.
• The way justice was governmentalized.

Questions

• The bulk of this chapter is dedicated to how an art of government emerged, what it took as it purview, and how it operates on that object. However, Foucault turns to governmentality at the end. He writes, “What is important for our modernity, that is to say, for our present, is not then the state’s takeover of society, so much as what I would call the “governmentalization” of the state” (109). What does he mean by this, and how does his work thus far in the lecture series (i.e. security, population, political economy, etc.) help us understand this?

Chapter 5

• Foucault begins this lecture explaining why he would approach something like the state, government, and populations. He explains that like earlier explorations of institutions, to understand them is to do 3 things methodologically:
• Try to move outside to see the technology of power at work
• Focus on strategies and tactics rather than function
• Try to understand how a field of knowledge (an object) came to be without using the already established criteria of that thing.
• Foucault turns to outlining the emergence of the modern state as a governing force. He settles on a meaning of government that roots governing not with territory or structure but with people.
• Foucault contrasts the state as looking after the state/territory (Greek) and that which looks after people (Babylonian, Hebrew, Egyptian). In the Eastern histories, the head of the state is a shepherd of people.  
• The pastoral power of the East was also one of salvation and beneficence, meaning that the leader sought the subsistence and health of the flock.
• The shepherd serves as an intermediary between the pasture and the people. He is the protective covering (128).
• Foucault ends the lecture early due to illness. But he points out that the implantation of Christian pastoral leadership, that of the one being part of a flock whose health is looked after by a shepherd, leads to widely successful and bloody civilizations.

Chapter 6

• Foucault picks up on some objections to his premise that the Greeks did not see the shepherd as an apt metaphor for the state or the leader of the state. He spends some time defending this and then turns to Plato’s The Statesmen. In this text, Plato eventually rejects the shepherd because they cannot come to consensus on what man is and how it is that one should provide all the care that others (doctors, bakers) do. Are they who also provide considered shepherds of the people? He is more inclined to the weaver who must weave these different parts together to form a stable whole. The weaver replaces in politics what the divine did in an earlier age.
• Foucault places the shepherd style of governance with the emergence of Christianity--a term that denotes the confluence of a religion, an institution in the church, and the goal of regulating men’s lives to preserve their afterlife.
• Thought Foucault spends a long time developing the idea of pastoral power, his ultimate point is that this kind of power, embodied by a pastor, priest, or bishop, allows for the existence of one who governs the day-to-day lives of individuals and the flock without impeding on the power of sovereigns. That is, there develops in the Christian West a kind of power that governs the practices and conduct of individuals under the leadership of a person, but it is not that person who leads the state. It’s a powerful institution inside of and separate from the province of the state.

Questions:

• Foucault spends two chapters (5, 6, & 7 ) exploring the pastoral, its historical roots in the East, and its flourishing in the Christian West. What is the point here? Why contrast the Greek weaver and the pastoral shepherd as forms of power? Why is it important to note this extra-sovereign power of the pastors, bishops, priests, etc.? Over whom did they rule and how? (165, 172-174, 182-183)

Chapter 7

• Foucault again returns to the pastorate, but his primary consideration this time is the technique by which pastors governed conduct: in Christianity the pastorate gave rise to an art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating men, an art of monitoring them and urging them on step by step, an art with the function of taking charge of men collectively and individually throughout their life and at every moment of their existence” (165).
• The importance of pastoral power is its origin of the modern state (165).
• Foucault contrasts the Greek man who allowed himself to be led by law and rhetoric to the Christian theme of complete subordination or obedience to individual government, that of the single sheep to the shepherd who knows how best to treat that one sheep.
• The history of the pastorate is the emergence of a power over individuals and individualization.
• There’s a great summary of Foucault’s points at the end of CH. 7 (183-185)

Questions

• What is the difference between how the Greek man and Christian will let himself be ruled? (172-174).

Chapter 8

• The problem is not the emperor vs. the church (pope), but rather the state and the ministers whose task it was to oversee the conduct, government, or economy of souls, which as noted in the previous three chapters involved complete submission and obedience to a pastor.
• Foucault turns to the problem of the pastorate within the state, the conducting of souls.
• This chapter begins by focusing on counter-conducts. That is, Foucault wants to explore the ways people react to the state or political institution’s desire to conduct their actions.
• For example, Foucault turns to desertion. Once a regular practice of deciding not to be a soldier, once the state became a power that exercised over one’s conduct for the betterment of the flock, desertion as a counter-conduct was no longer inoffensive.
• Foucault is interested in the modes of counter-conduct that run parallel to pastoral power. Whereas pastoral power is obedience to another, Christian counter-conduct (e.g., asceticism) is more akin to the self’s submission or mastery over the self.
• Foucault also examines communities, mysticism, reading scripture, and eschatological beliefs as modes of counter-conduct

Questions:

• At the end of ch. 8, Foucault provides a rationale for his extensive exploration of pastoral power and counter-conduct. On p. 215 he writes, “In wanted to stress this in order to try to show you that my reason for taking the point of view of pastoral power was, of course, in order to try to find the inner depth and background of the governmentality that begins to develop in the sixteenth century. It was also to show you it is not a question of undertaking anything like an endogenous history of power that develops on the basis of itself in a sort of paranoiac and narcissistic madness. Rather, the point of view of power is a way of identifying intelligible relations between elements that are external to each other...If we do not take the problem of the pastorate, of the structures of pastoral power, as the hinge or pivot of these different elements external to each other...if we do not take it as a field of intelligibility, as the principle establishing relations between them, as the switch-point between these elements, then I think we are forced to return to the old conceptions of ideology, [and] say that the aspirations of a group, a class, and so forth, are translated, reflected, and expressed in something like a religious belief. The point of view of pastoral power, of this analysis of the structures of power, enables us, I think, to take up these things and analyze them, no longer in the form of reflection and transcription, but in the form of strategies and tactics” (215-216). This is an important step back from 4 weeks of lectures to explain his purpose. So, what is it? What is this type of analysis and how does it avoid relying on ideology?

Chapter 9

• Foucault leaves the pastoral to look at how counter-conduct and ecclesiastical/pastoral power changes in the 16th century. His point is that counter-conduct is representative of a time of upheaval and revolt.
• There’s in the 16th century an intensification in the power over conduct such that it becomes part of the public/political sphere, education of children (pedagogy).
• As it intensifies and becomes a problem for the sovereign, the questions focus on what rationality and upon what object or domain this power over conduct will utilize.
• Between 1580-1660 the mode of sovereign power changes to one of divine appointment, shepherd, or pastor. The emergence of natural law and principles of matter and mathematics, and the emergence of the public domain, mean that the sovereign must govern through an art of government. The great question was how to govern. There was a conflict between natural principles and the reason for the state. To be clear, Foucault is pointing out here that there’s a division between natural principles (this includes reason/logic) and the state.
• In this era much of people’s discussions of the art of state are centered around Machiavelli, either in direct opposition or through dismissal of his efforts as having nothing to do with the running and preservation of a state.
• This chapter basically shows how there’s a disruptive period between modes of sovereign and pastoral government between 1580-1660 that raise the question of government. On what is it based? With what does it reason? On what does it operate? Foucault shows that this is focused mainly in response to Machiavelli, politics, and definitions of the state. This chapter works with Ch. 4. It almost seems like an extension of it.

Chapter 10

• The reason of the state Foucault is attracted to in this lecture doesn’t concern itself with a founding legitimacy and it acts conservatively and takes as its problem how to last indefinitely (259). “We are always already in a world of government...and the state” (259).
• In addition to having no origin, it takes no endpoint into consideration. There is nothing final at which it aims.
• The state can exist in peace, not as a dominant force, but as a force that maintains a balance with other forces so that no one power is greater than the other.
• The reason for the state is founded not on law but on necessity. Foucault shows that the state will act against law (often through politics) in order to secure the salvation of the state.
• It’s important to note that Foucault is using the notion of coup d’Etat to examine raison d’Etat. When it becomes necessary to use violence to take control we can see with what reason the violence acts, revealing the characteristics of the raison d’Etat. (265)
• Foucault turns to a piece by Francis Bacon on sedition, its representations and causes. The main point of using this text is to show how one treats seditious acts that threaten the state. On p. 270, Foucault shows how the remedies are to remove the conditions that cause the sedition. The role of the state is to secure the means for the state’s future.
• Bacon’s work on how to run a state runs counter to Machiavelli. Bacon is concerned with the security of the state, fear of the common people.
• The domain or interface for ruling in this time is economy (mercantilism) and the cultivation of opinion.
• The knowledge needed to govern a state became statistics rather than knowledge of the law.
• The art of the state also takes into consideration the public and public opinion

Questions

• Foucault approaches raison d’Etat by way of coup d’Etat and a comparison between Bacon and Machiavelli. What are some of the characteristics of the state that begins to emerge?

Chepter 11

• Foucault begins the chapter by basically saying what he’s been trying to do: illustrate the rise of politics in the West, which was a new way of thinking how to govern. The state becomes both function and object; it is the area of intelligibility and the objective.
• Foucault points also to a change in the way states function in opposition to one another. The goal is no longer empire aligned with a specific religion but an economic competition. Therefore, empire for one religion over another cedes to territorial expansion in order to support economic dominance. Essentially, state relations to other states moves from rivalry to competition.
• With the shift from rivalry to competition, the state turns its attention to force, which will be the object  and intelligibility of the state. Force will become “the principle of intelligibility of political reason” (295).
• Foucault links the problem of securing force to the development of two new state-apparatuses: the military-diplomatic apparatus and police, who must preserve, maintain, and develop a “dynamic of forces” and will come be called mechanisms of security (296).
• The emergence of competition between states meant that the military-diplomatic apparatus had to maintain a precarious balance with other states: diminish their ability to obtain what you need but don’t enfeeble them so much that they collapse or are provoked into war. Therefore, the European states sought equilibrium and balance in power amongst the states, which could allow for an end goal of peace.This is not to say, however, that there will be no war. States could go to war to ensure the balance; to make sure no state upsets the equilibrium. War, then, is a form of security, of maintaining balance that no longer needs some official, juridical offense or wrong.
• Diplomatic apparatus: Essentially, after the Treaty of Westphalia the states of Europe established permanent ambassador positions with the hope of securing balance.
• Military: The military becomes a permanent standing and professional force with a means of recruitment, a strategy for implementing wartime success, and an infrastructure that aides it.
• So the main thrust of this chapter is to highlight the shift toward balance among European states. This was primarily concerned not with rivalry and empire, but balance, homeostasis. To execute and secure this balance, states established means to secure it: diplomats, military permanence, and as he’ll get to in the next chapter, police.

Questions

• This chapter explores a monumental shift in how states relate to one another. Briefly sketch out how states’ reason in post-Westphalia Europe.

Chapter 12

• This lecture is dedicated to exploring the development of police in Europe as a security apparatus in the spirit of competition dedicated to maintain equilibrium.
  
• The word police, however, diverges substantially from the modern term. It is, rather, a means to maintain internal “splendor” through the use of statistics to know and evaluate forces (314-15).
• So, police concern themselves with things like ensuring levels of education, professionalization, military training, public health, commerce, wealth.
• The police state is concerned with men’s activities and the way their actions contribute to the collective force of the state. So, we can see here a connection to the overall art of government wrapped in competition and balance. The police state helps develop and secure forces at home.

Questions

• What does Foucault mean by “police”? What is their objective? How are they part of the art of government existing in an era of competition and balance in Europe? By what means to their act?

Chapter 13

• Foucault begins with two points: the object of police is an urban project and it is wholly wrapped up with market objectives.
• This meant that the organization of a territory assumed or was shaped by the same principles that ordered a well operating town. Towns were formed to meet the needs of police, so it is because of police that towns took the shape they did.
• The market and commerce became the node by which the state could impact people and secure the forces it needed.
• Foucault states that the police of the 17th and 18th century only know how to intervene in the form of a coup d’Etat--a regulatory manner, a constant disiplining.
• Foucault then turns to the economists and how their technology of operating the state differed from the discipline of police. Essentially, there’s is a mode of thought concerned with maintaining or understanding a population in reference to certain data points or specific objectives (e.g., workforce, birth rates, wages not too high or low, free trade rather than regulation).
• Foucault is essentially interested in this chapter of how the economists allow for a movement away from discipline (politiques) to biopower (economistes).
• Raison d’Etat issues a break with the old “natural order” of connection between God and state. However, the economists usher in a new kind of “nature” (349). This brings about the emergence of civil society as the interfacing element of man with the state (350).
• Political economy makes a claim to scientific knowledge that one MUST govern with but it must not be confused as a science of government.
• Regulations become under a economics an infringement on the rights and freedom of man and a display of governmental incompetence that doesn’t respect natural law.
• The dominance of economics shifts the responsibility of the police. The economic project will be to allow natural law to take place while the police will ensure the elimination of disorder in the population (354).

ENG 735 Week #3 Reading: Security, Territory, Population

A note on not getting lost

Keep in mind how Foucault begins the lecture series: “This year I would like to begin studying what I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power” (1). He goes on to say that the lectures will investigate “where and how, between whom, between what points, according to what processes, and with what effects, power is applied,” noting, however, that he will present “not a theory of what power is, but simply of power in terms of the set of mechanisms and procedures that have the role or function and theme, even when they are unsuccessful, of securing power” (2). He also indicates in lecture four that he’s not completely happy with the title of the series and would have chosen something that suggests a history of governmentality (108).

Possible cuts we could make

• The historical trajectory that leads to the modern state
• Operations of power in different economic structures (feudal, mercantilist, early capitalism)
• The changing interfaces for power (e.g., pastoral-individual/flock, population-characteristics of a population, civil society)
• Techniques/mechanisms for governing (state statistics, obedience, counter-conduct)
• The changing nature of “natural” from divine law to something like physics and natural economic law.

Lecture Organization by Book	Lectures Organization by Theme/Chrono
1-space & security (town) 2-scarcity & security (grain) 3-security & population	5 6 7
4-anti-Machiavellian raison d’Etat	8- Counter-Conduct to Pastoral
5-East vs. West Pastoral 6-Defending Christian Pastoral (Plato) 7-Pastoral as Precursor to Western Governing	4 9 10
8-Counter-Conduct	11 12
9-anti-Machiavellian raison d’Etat 10-raison d’Etat as coup d’Etat	1 2 3
11-Competition (diplomatic-military, balance) 12-Competition (police)	13- The Science of Economics
13-Rise of Economics

Questions Organized by Theme/Chronological Order

Chapters 5, 6, & 7

• Foucault spends three chapters (5, 6, & 7) exploring the pastoral, its historical roots in the East, and its flourishing in the Christian West. What is the point here? Why contrast the Greek weaver and the pastoral shepherd as forms of power? Why is it important to note this extra-sovereign power of the pastors, bishops, priests, etc.? Over whom did they rule and how? (165, 172-174, 182-183)

Chapter 8

• At the end of chapter 8, Foucault provides a rationale for his extensive exploration of pastoral power and counter-conduct. On p. 215 he writes, “I wanted to stress this in order… but in the form of strategies and tactics” (215-216). This is an important step back from 4 weeks of lectures to explain his purpose. So, what is it? What is this type of analysis and how does it avoid relying on ideology?

Chapters 4, 9, & 10

• Ch. 4: The bulk of this chapter is dedicated to how an art of government emerged, what it took as it purview, and how it operates on that object. However, Foucault turns to governmentality at the end. He writes, “What is important for our modernity, that is to say, for our present, is not then the state’s takeover of society, so much as what I would call the ‘governmentalization’ of the state” (109). What does he mean by this, and how does his work thus far in the lecture series (i.e. security, population, political economy, etc.) help us understand this?
• Ch. 4 & 9: Much of these two chapters take Machiavelli as a point of departure. Why do political theorists reject Machiavelli? What are they looking for in his place?
• Ch. 10: Foucault approaches raison d’Etat by way of coup d’Etat and a comparison between Bacon and Machiavelli. What are some of the characteristics of the state that begins to emerge?

Chapters 11 & 12

• Ch. 11: This chapter explores a monumental shift in how states relate to one another. Briefly sketch out how states’ reason in post-Westphalia Europe.
• Ch. 12: What does Foucault mean by “police”? What is their objective? How are they part of the art of government existing in an era of competition and balance in Europe? By what means to their act?

Chapters 1, 2, & 3

• Ch. 1: How does Foucault’s explication of milieu and circulation help us understand security’s emergence and its consideration of man as a species within a territory (i.e. how it works on multiplicities of individuals)?

• Ch. 2: At the end of Ch.2, Foucault notes of shift away from discipline (laws, prohibitions, codes) and toward security. Without delving into 18th-century grain economics, what are the general differences, and how does this relate to the ideals of liberalism? (41-49)

• Ch. 3: What is the difference between norms in disciplinary power and norms in security? (63)
• Ch. 3: What are populations if not a group of individuals? How does power vis a vis security understand and operate on populations? What are their mechanisms and how are these different from liberalism (i.e. man of rights)? (70-79)

Chapter 13

• What is the concern of the economists and how do they differ from police? How does the rise of governing via economic theory change the role of the police in society? (353-54)
• What is the natural order of the economists and how is this different from a previous natural order that organized the state? (349)
• The economists make a claim to a scientific knowledge. How does this knowledge differ from a raison d’Etat?