Governmentality: power and rule in modern society (2nd edn)

2009

Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality defines a complex of heterogeneous practices directed at the conduct of collective bodies and individuals, including their selfconduct. It has resonated strongly in the social sciences, proving very powerful in the analysis of neoliberal forms of government. Although research on governmentality has been carried out since the 1990s,1 Foucault’s lecture series Sécurité, territoire, population and Naissance de la biopolitique held at the Collège de France in 1977/78 and 1978/79, in which he developed his concept and genealogy of governmentality, have only recently been published in their entirety. The strong German interest in Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality is not least marked by the simultaneous publication of the lectures in French and in German translation in 2004 (the English translation appeared in print 2007/20082). With only archival documents and tape recordings to refer to, Thomas Lemke laid the ground for the German r...

Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2006

This review surveys the development of Michel Foucault"s analysis of political power in terms of governmentality and outlines its key characteristics. It examines the spread of this perspective, focusing in particular on how this genealogical approach to the analysis of the conduct of each and of all has been taken up and developed in the English-speaking world. It evaluates some of the key criticisms that have been made of the analytics of governmentality and argues for the continuing productivity and creativity of these ways of analyzing the emergence, nature, and consequences of the arts of government.

Political Geography, 2007

2011

This article presents Foucault's governmentality as an analytical framework that is useful for interpreting and using empirics toward critical theory. Although Foucault viewed the discipline of geography narrowly regarding spatial patterns, his geographic sensibilities connect with contemporary critical human geography, which examines processes relationally from a topological, non-Euclidean view of space. Further, Foucault's novel approach to multiscalar analysis offers critical insight into one debate: whether scale as an analytical concept unproductively reifies hierarchy and obscures the mobilization of power. Foucault's ascending analysis clarifies how scale-sensitive analysis can illuminate the mobilization of power regarding its targets (as per techniques of biopower and disciplinary power) and its diffuse sources, and how actors' practices can become unchained from normalizing societal pressures. Foucault's early scholarship on governmentality represents actors as unconscious of the regulatory framework with which they implicitly are complicit, but his later work on resistance emphasizes reflexivity and the proactive constitution and transformation of the self. The earlier framework on the governance of populations suggests that mentalities and related discourses produce practices, whereas the later framework on the governance of the self suggests the reverse, therein holding important clues for critical theory and the proactive construction of transformation based on a critique of the past and present. The article "assembles" Foucault's scholarship on governance and ethics over the course of his career to present an overall framework that is useful for analyses concerning a variety of questions. Analytical points are exemplified with reference to urban, race-related issues, drawing in part from my own research.

Management & Organizational History, 2012

Michel Foucault has moved from being marginal to organization studies to perhaps the most important authority in critical management studies. Yet his methods, historiography and the theoretical value of his work remain obscure, contested or, even worse, simply taken for granted. Governmentality, Foucault's term for how institutions are imagined, offers a way of understanding how specific forms of knowledge and power emerge, develop and decline. Governmentality brings Foucault very close to Max Weber's concern with rationalization and the ways that individuals come to govern themselves. Governmentality looks at administrative powers and knowledges that shape our everyday lives. For Foucault, as for Weber, administrative power is not of secondary importance but essential to the 'successes' and 'failures' of disciplinary institutions and societies.

Handbook on Governmentality, 2023

Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee, and Nikolas Rose are three of the most original and influential thinkers to have engaged with Foucault and governmentality. This chapter presents a conversation between these scholars on such questions as power, governmentality, populism, biopolitics, and methods and styles of critical inquiry.

Foucault Studies, 2010

, elaborated an analytics of government through which the ever-changing rationalities and technologies governing advanced liberal societies could be diagnosed and contested. With the ideal of the welfare state receding, neo-liberal principles and objectives were becoming ascendant, prompting many to take an interest in Foucault's lectures on the history of governmentality and emergence of neo-liberalism; but Foucault left no extended methodological commentary on genealogy and its application to the study of governmentality. Much of the importance of Dean's first edition of Governmentality, then, resided in the fact that it was among the first comprehensive and systematic attempts to advance the conceptual tools and dimensions of analysis needed to perform this type of study. 1 The analytics of government he put forward in the first chapter has been frequently drawn upon by scholars in a broad range of disciplines, sometimes even outside of the social sciences and humanities. The second edition of Dean's Governmentality has been released amidst a global crisis in capitalism and, as he discusses in the post-script, at the beginning of an emergent crisis in neoliberal governmentality as well. ‚In searching for models for governments to adopt, leaders are [now] looking at the same examples of too much government that, according to Foucault, were the targets of neo-liberal critiques: Roosevelt's New Deal and Keynesian techniques of macroeconomic demand management.‛ (262) It is precisely because of such an unexpected reversal in the fortunes of neo-liberalism that Dean's second edition of Governmentality will continue to be of lasting influence, as it offers the analytical resources to diagnose the ongoing transformations in the arts of government, whilst rejecting any teleological schemas about our socio-political future. Following Foucault, the focus always remains on discerning the possibilities and limits conditioning our experiences in the present, thus opening a thought-space in which to deliberate on whether the possibilities are to be acted upon, or the limits transgressed. Aside from the post-script on the problematization of neo-liberalism, the additions to the second edition include a new introduction and a chapter on international governmentality,

2001

Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security, and Privacy, 2018