Theoria

A bit from Mariana Valverde’s review essay of Foucault’s ‘Society Must be Defended’ and Securite, territoire, population lectures at the College de France from, respectively, 1975-6 and 1977-8. The latter series of lectures includes the infamous “governmentality” lecture. I wasn’t particularly impressed with Valverde’s discussion of ‘Society Must be Defended,’ so I haven’t included any of her comments on it. Her comments on Security, Territory, Population (incidentally, the next set of lectures to be published in English – likely this spring) are somewhat more interesting. Her essay is titled “Genealogies of European States: Foucauldian reflections” and is taken from the February 2007 issue of Economy & Society (which has an interesting article, by the way, from Barry Hindess on British Althusserianism, originally conceived as a reply/comment on Ian Hunter’s “History of Theory” piece from a recent issue of Critical Inquiry – infamously discussed here and here).

Police

After several lectures on security and several devoted mainly to pastoral power, Foucault moved on to the topic of police, in the lecture of 29 March 1978. The lecture was somewhat delayed because Foucault, as he breathlessly explains, was stuck in a traffic jam. This contretemps could not be more apt: the regulation of all manner of traffic in the service of the smooth circulation of people, goods and wealth was one of the key objects, if not the key object, of the new arts of governance pioneered by physiocrats in France and by Polizeiwissenschaft experts in Germany.

By the eighteenth century, ‘police’ had acquired a fairly settled meaning as one of the key dimensions of state power. The diplomatic-military dimension was routinely distinguished from the ‘revenue’ function of the state, and both of those were in turn distinguished from ‘police’ – the regulatory and preventive governance of the internal order of the kingdom. Urban space was the site par excellence of police regulations (as legal historians have shown). Commenting on treatises that attempted to collate the multifarious regulations that made up the field of ‘police’, Foucault concludes that ‘to police and to urbanize are one and the same thing’; ‘police is the condition for the existence of the urban’. Transportation was also a crucial arena for the development of what in the US came later to be called ‘the police power of the state’, with harbours, rivers, markets and roads all being important sites for central and local regulatory measures that often interfered significantly with private property rights.

If the content or object of police governance is generally to ensure that movement (of people, things and wealth) is orderly and efficient, police also takes a distinctive form. Foucault points out that Catherine the Great’s police regulations manual states that law/right is composed of general rules, whereas police works on details. Indeed, as legal historians have documented, police regulations are in fact nothing but lists of details, with little by way of overriding rationale. Police power being largely discretionary and often unenumerated, authorities acting under the banner of police are always seeking particular solutions to specific and ever-changing problems of order and security. Large-scale, highly theorized, largely static legal frameworks are suitable for declarations of sovereignty as well as declarations about the limits of sovereignty (the rights of man and the citizen). By contrast, police power is usually exercised not through grand principles but through detailed regulations affecting only specific groups of people (the vagrants, pedlars and prostitutes of classic police regulations) and/or specific activities, spaces and times (where one can beg, gamble or, today, smoke, where one can sell beer and at what time, etc.)

That labour (‘the police of the poor’), urban space, transportation, moral and social order and later, public health, were the main sites giving rise to police innovations and regulations is well known. But what is distinct about Foucault’s account, particularly the long account of police given in the STP lectures, is the analysis of the crucial location of ‘police’ as a rationality of governance that articulates sovereignty with biopolitics and discipline. Police thus provides the site of and some of the tools for a large-scale transformation in European modes of state power/knowledge. Police, Foucault comments, reconciles or aligns the welfare of the people in general – the public interest in prosperity, public health and order – with the concern to preserve and enhance state power. Tearing down someone’s warehouse without compensation to make way for a port (the classic US ‘police power of the state’ situation) is an exercise of sovereign power. But, unlike more purely coercive moves, such expropriation is justified through – and may well actually serve – the general interest of the commercial and consuming publics, which is what US law calls ‘salus populi’ or ‘general welfare’.

Perhaps because he uses French, German, Italian and Russian sources much more than English sources, Foucault’s account of police stresses the absolutist uses of police power. ‘Police is the direct governmentality of the sovereign as sovereign’, Foucault states, ‘police is the permanent coup d’etat’. Because the sovereign and specifically absolutist dimension of police science and police power is so heavily emphasized, the liberal revolution in law and in economics is presented as a negation of police, rather than as a revision or modification of police techniques.

At the end of the final 1978 lecture, Foucault had run out of time and did not develop the analysis of liberalism that had been foreshadowed in the first few lectures; but he concludes his account of the ‘governmentalization’ of modern states by stating that liberal governmentality opposed itself in every respect to the governmentality developed within the idea of a police state (‘un Etat de police’). It is of course true that writers such as Adam Smith furthered their arguments about freeing the natural processes of the marketplace by denouncing the regulatory constraints of the old ‘police’ economy, but in the moral and social fields, as distinct from the economic, Smith certainly did not believe in abandoning police mentalities and practices, and neither did liberal legal authorities. The relation between police and liberalism is not necessarily a negative one, as Foucault – perhaps following his sources too closely – claims here.

A final feature of the discussion of police in the STP lectures is strangely relevant to our post-September 11 international situation. Departing from the conventional view of police as the purely domestic ordering of the kingdom, Foucault tells us (with very few references, unfortunately) that police is not a strictly domestic governmentality. The European equilibrium of states established by the Treaty of Westphalia, Foucault argues, is also a site of and for police. Each of the European states – and Europe is defined as a plurality of states in equilibrium, a diagram of power elsewhere contrasted to the unitarian and expansive logic of empire – has to treat the internal order and economy of the other states as integral to its own welfare. ‘Equilibrium is only maintained to the extent to which each of the states is capable of increasing its own strength [but] at a rate that does not threaten other states’. Therefore, each state must be assured that other states are minding their own order, their own police. ‘The European equilibrium thus functions as a sort of inter-state police or inter-state law [droit]. The European equilibrium gives the community of states the right to make sure that police matters are in good order in each of its states’. This quasi-international law doctrine justifying intervention in what were not yet called failed states was formalized, Foucault claims, in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna.

Clearly, these comments on international police are highly relevant to today’s international law and international police discussions – much more relevant now than they were in the Cold War, two-superpower world of 1978.

Governmentality/security

‘Governmentality’ has been the subject of so many discussions that a brief and general overview of the term and its implications has become almost impossible. In any case, a recent essay covers much of this ground. Thus I will here focus on something not previously discussed in the governmentality literature, namely, the way in which ‘governmentality’ emerges, briefly in the second lecture and in full-dress form in the fourth lecture, as a replacement for what in the course summary and the title of the lecture series Foucault had earlier called ‘security’.

The first thing to note is that the meaning of the English word ‘security’ does not coincide exactly with that of the French word ‘securite’ as Foucault uses it. Securite is the future-oriented management of risks; by contrast, national security and security forces would fall under the rubric of ‘surete’. Machiavelli, Foucault tells us, is certainly keen to defend the surete of the sovereign, but is not yet able to think in terms of security. In keeping with this the Quebec provincial police’s official title is ‘Surete du Quebec’, whereas in Canadian discussions of social security or food security, the term is ‘securite’. Security in this latter sense is somewhat detached from (or is not contained by) the project of sovereignty. One way of characterizing it is by saying that security is positioned as the larger, overarching rationale within which police mechanisms do a great deal of their work. Elsewhere Foucault states that governmentality (i.e. what had in the first three lectures been called security) is made up of three elements: pastoral power, diplomatic-military strategies and ‘la police’.

Security, as Jeremy Bentham pointed out, is the necessary complement of liberty. But it is, or at least it becomes, an end in itself as well as a means to the end of liberty. For Bentham as for Hobbes, security is the ultimate end of law – security is what sovereignty is for. And maintaining security is difficult for modern states not only because people are keen to pursue individual liberty but also because with the rise of modern economic and social practices and modern knowledges, new entities have to be secured (e.g. public health, labour markets, human capital), entities unknown to princes concerned only with territories and loyal subjects.

Foucault explains the difference between the logic of sovereignty and that of security in the first lecture with an example: while a theft is treated by the system of sovereign criminal law as an act to be punished, assemblages of security (‘le dispositif de securite’) insert the phenomenon of theft – turned into an aggregate – into a series of probable events, and set out to govern the general problem of future thefts as it affects not individuals, or the sovereign, but rather ‘the population’. Indeed, security only begins to exist as a goal and a rationality of governance as ‘the population’ emerges from older entities, such as ‘subjects’ and ‘souls’.

This is a relatively familiar argument and so need not detain us here. What is worth pointing out here, however, is the fact that ‘governmentality’ was a neologism with which Foucault began to experiment only as he was actually delivering the lectures. And, frustratingly for ‘governmentality’ scholars, he does not explain why he changed terms. He simply walks in one day (1 February 1978) and declares that if he were able to go back and correct the theme and title of that year’s lectures, he would no longer use the advertised title ‘Securite, territoire, population’ but rather ‘lectures on governmentality’. Then he goes on to talk about techniques of ‘governmentality’, with ‘security’ quietly receding into the background.

One possible explanation of the shift from ‘assemblages of security’ to governmentality may lie in the fact that ‘security’ had strong statist and authoritarian connotations for Foucault’s audience, even after he distinguished it from surete. Given the fact that Foucault sought to emphasize the contrast between police (and reason of state) rationalities, on the one hand, and (liberal) governmentality, on the other, ‘security’ was perhaps not the best term. Security includes police as a discursive field and, at the level of practice, relies on police techniques. The neologism ‘governmentality’, by contrast, had no authoritarian, police-force associations, and was thus better suited to Foucault’s project, which was to highlight the novel features of what he called the ‘governmentalization’ of the state. If Foucault had not changed his mind, and had kept ‘security’ as the title of the lecture that found its way into The Foucault Effect, the central role of police practices and rationalities in modern liberal states would have been clearer. On the other hand, the innovations of neoliberalism would have become less visible if ‘security’ had remained the overarching title.

Graham Burchell, for instance, writing in the volume that contained the lecture that the editors of The Foucault Effect entitled ‘Governmentality’, contributed an important essay gathering together the elements of Foucault’s sympathetic analysis of liberalism that did not take into account the ‘security’ theme. This essay for the first time brought Foucault in close relation to classic English thinkers of liberalism, especially Pocock. In it, Burchell looks to Foucault for inspiration for his own rather positive account of liberalism (an account that remains silent about the persistence of coercive sovereign practices and negative biopolitical projects within classically liberal states). And surveying the governmentality literature that developed in the 1990s does suggest that the effort to bring Foucault close to certain forms of liberal thought and practice was facilitated by the change in terminology from security to governmentality.