Secularization as pastoral power: Governmentality and Christianity

I focus on Foucault's Lectures at the College de France in order to show how his genealogy of the modern normalizing society leads him to trace the historical beginnings and the condition of possibility of bio-disciplinary practices of individual and collective government- together with the discourse of the hermeneutics of the subject that serves to justify them- to the organization and development of the Christian pastorate from the fourth century onwards. Taking up Nietzsche's critique of Western Christianity, Foucault analyses the emergence and deployment of the procedures or modalities of modern governmentality as effects of the extension or generalization of pastoral power beyond its ecclesiastical institutionalization after the Reformation.