Governmentality as a Turning Point

Abstract

The 1978 lectures at the College de France, Security, Territory, Population, are a turning point in Foucault’s thought on power. They indeed inaugurate the focus on governmentality which will be the core of his research until his death, showing that this concept allows him to overcome the paradoxes and contradictions of his first analyses of power. It is rarely noticed that the first three lessons of the 1978 lectures are in fact a thorough rereading of his own findings on political economy as exposed in The Order of Things (OT), and continued the following year in the 1979 lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics. This chapter suggests following that rereading, in order to open a new point of entry into the concept of governmentality: probability and statistics, almost ignored in The Order of Things, give a new grid of understanding to modern phenomena. In this revised analysis, modern power is not solely exercised in the mode of the disciplinary, but also through the production and management of freedom.