A Study On Foucault’s Governmentality

As one of the most important contemporary thinkers, Michel Foucault developed his unique system of theory with the nourishment from literature, history, sociology, politics and philosophy. His theories command the attention of the world when they clash and crash with various intellectual legacies with strong vitality. In the mid-1970’s, Foucault took up the study of biopolitics, with the proposition of the technology of knowledge/power and governmentality as a result, which involves life and society, enabling the former investable and the latter easier to control.The dissertation discusses Foucault’s governmentality with a review of its history. As one of the several dimensions of Foucault’s biopolitics study, governmentality serves as a different version of both political philosophy and the theories of subject and power. Referring to these two aspects and Foucault’s texts, the dissertation sketches the genealogy of governmentality, in hope that new ideas about Foucault’s political philosophy and theories of subject and power could be put forward.Chapter one studies the origin of governmentality, which is traced back to Hebraic pastoral power. Different from the Greek tradition of power, which enriches itself from the universality of law, pastoral power is beneficent, which individualizes, and which drifted away from politics. The pastoral power developed and became known as the Christian pastorate, and could later break out from the religious and into the political with strength gathered in the movement of conduct and counter-conduct.Chapter two analyzes raison d’Etat-the first concretization of governmentality. The16th century witnessed the hot debate on governmentaltiy with Machiavelli’s The Prince as the target. This provided it with the admission to the political field, where a political one formalized itself as raison d’Etat. Raison d’Etat adopted the mode of economie, taking shape of two assemblages of technology:the domestic "police" with its infinite governance and the military-diplomatic one with its balancing strategy.Chapter three is about the metamorphosis of governmentality. Mercantilism was on the decline facing in vain the incongruity between the delicate economie and the clumsy frame of sovereignty. Raison d’Etat became now the obstacle of the development of governmentality. During the second half of the18th century, with the help of population-wealth, physiocracy made it possible for economie to be no longer the governance mode but its object. Instead of infinite governance, the "nature" of population and economy required a finite one. This marked the turning point.Chapter four investigates the least government of raison d’Etat-liberalism. To Foucault, liberalism equipped itself with political economy as its intellectual instrument and the market as its practice site, where law and truth coupled to keep an eye on the mechanism of the production and consumption of freedom. The mechanism implied both the possibility of self-limitation of governmentality and the internal crisis of liberalism, the latter formed the starting point of neo-liberalism.Chapter five examines German Ordoliberalism. At the point of intersection of Husserl’s phenomenology, Max Weber’s sociology and neo-Kantian philosophy, German Ordoliberalism tried to restructure the relationship among country, market, society and people, being mindful of the correlation between economic processes and legal structures so as to ensure that the freedom of economic processes not produce any social distortion, and on which a powerful new Germany could be established.Chapter six scrutinizes American neo-liberalism. To Foucualt, it means a kind of hermeneutics of being and thinking generated from economy. Hume’s empiricist philosophy holds that the purposeful conduct of choice, the choice of interest, begins not from reasoning but from instinctive preference to interest. Instinct and its irreducibility is the reason why we can understand economy and society from conduct. This led us into the spacious civil society where homo oeconomicus actively engaged.Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality unveiled a brand-new political philosophy, which is not a meditation of essence, but a chance to act and practise. The study of governmentality has enriched power relationship, deepened the theory of subjectification while offering new possibilities to life.