Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

Cours au Collège de France/Lectures at the Collège de France #7

by Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell (Translator), Michel Senellart (Editor)

Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the Collège de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of 'bio-power', introduced both in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended and in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault sets out to study the foundations of this new technology of power over population. Distinct from disciplinary techniques, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with technologies of security, and it is to the 18th century developments of these technologies with which the first chapters of the book are concerned. By the fourth lecture however Foucault's attention turns, focusing newly on a history of 'governmentality' from the first centuries of the Christian era through to the emergence of the modern nation state. As Michel Sennerlart explains in his afterword, the effect of this change of direction is to "shift the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government, to such an extent that the latter almost entirely eclipses the former..." Consequently, in light of Foucault's later work, these lectures represent a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" begins.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Theory, Sociology, France

434 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

No onhan tää bängeri, en kai muuten ois tästä tehnyt aikoinaan graduakin. Ei mul muuta.

[Muhammed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Çevirmenin de dile getirdiği üzere Foucault'nun çalışmaları 'iktidar her yerdedir' diyerek kesilip atılacak kadar basit meseleler değildir. Foucault bu eserinde yer alan derslerinde iktidarın güvenlik yönünü inceler. Russell değişken bir iktidardan bahsediyordu. Foucault da bu değişken iktidarı sabitleme şekli olan topraktan bahsediyor. Nüfus kısmında da peygamberlerin erkini onaylayan "kutsal" mesleklerden birini çok çarpıcı bir şekilde kritik ediyor.
Her yönüyle harika bir metindi. Foucault'ya, dinleyicilerine, kayıtları metne dönüştürmekte emeği geçenlere, bu metinleri Türkçeye çeviren İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları'na ve Ferhat Taylan'a teşekkürler.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like I wasn't going to give this five stars. I don't want to go to academic and French hell. ... Let us all pause to contemplate that horror for a moment.

No but seriously this was really great. Like, way greater than I had expected given my limited experience of Foucault, which had been limited to discursive analysis that was driving me up a wall. But I totally see why people love him now.

[Joma Geneciran · Rating 3 out of 5]

I HAVE A LOT OF THOUGHTS.

Governmentality and the state being a practice are useful concepts and clearly have had its afterlife especially in my field of anthropology. The rejection of the state as an instrument of class rule is egregious.

Maybe I’ll edit this later when I have more time.

[Joy Hermans · Rating 1 out of 5]

Je n’ai pas lu jusqu’au bout. C’est absolument insupportable de lire un livre qui n’est qu’un retranscription mot pour pour mot d’un cours…

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing lecture. I recently read another collection of Foucault's lectures and it was amazing. This book contains the next series of lectures from the ones I read.

What I personally want is a negative political theory. I want a politics that is based on preventing power from congealing, and a politics that breaks up power after it congeals.

And these Foucault lectures come close to that. This book is largely asks:

How did the State come about?

How did the world that we live in come into being? The State. Modern capitalism. Whatever. Our world: wrapped in security, surveillance, "freedom of the individual," and the individual as datum points defined by our use value to "society" (how much do we help the market economy?). Foucault draws out how our version of the State came to be. A version of "The State" may extend back into ancient history, but our version is a new invention.

Foucault talks about several things that lead to our world, such as the history and influence of the ideas of population, the pastoral, "police," the politiques and éconimistes, Raison d'État, etc.

Foucault talks about how the idea of the Christian pastoral shaped the "government of men." The idea of the pastoral—the shepherd valiantly watching his flock, yet subject to his flock, and protector of all from the individual to the whole. This idea is a Christian spin on the Judaic idea, and is opposed to governing based on territory. The idea is based on the salvation of a wandering group's individual souls. The idea is based on continual subservience of all to all, and eventually all to God. When this idea is taken up as a political idea in the 17th c. the ideal king shifts—the King is now a servant to his constituency. Eventually, when the king disappears, the idea of all governed by all remains.

Foucault talks about how the idea of population sprang up. He talks about the idea of not just "people," but of "the people" as a whole, as a population, that can measured by statistics; that can be molded; that can be used in the sense of economic and utilitarian goals. Thinkers and rulers start thinking in terms of "principles of nature." When this idea is taken up the ideal king's Will stops being paramount, and the king must now try to find out what principles govern people and how to use them.

Foucault talks about "Raison d'Etat," which is the idea of how to govern a territory, and eventually, a population. (There's also the contemporaneous idea of "coup d'etat," which didn't mean revolution from below or within, but a revolution from the State against counter forces. It was more of what we would call a "state of exception" or "police state.")

Foucault talks about "police," which is not what you think it is. Originally, police did not mean violent guys in uniform who like to crack heads and think they're Judge Dredd or The Punisher. In the 15th and 16th c. "police" was a loose term which meant a community governed by a public authority. In the 17th. c. "police" meant how a State uses its forces and preserves itself. Police meant economics, diplomacy, border control, even promotion of the arts, etc. Only in the last few hundred years has "police" and "policing" been stripped of their former definitions, and reduced to what we know now: cops and surveillance.

Foucault argues that these forces converge, and the idea of the population, surveillance, and security take over. "Freedom" was stressed, both laisse faire economic freedom, and individual freedom, but at the same time, the State consolidated its power and concerned itself with the governance of all through an indirect but omnipresent policing. Raison d'Etat is pushed aside for an interlocking web of power that is predicated on all of these things and has more control of a "population" then ever before.

There's way more to it than that. This is not even a sketch of a sketch of what this series of lectures is about. The book is full of grand histories, ideas, and thoughts, and if it sounds at all interesting to you, then you should pick it up.

[Alex Mchugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent lectures that have changed my recent perspective on many things. The kind of ideas that stick in your mind long after reading. Will probably be re-reading fairly soon, I'm almost sure I missed something good the first time around.

[Hollis Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful introduction to the mind of Michel Foucault. This book inspired me to think in a much different way when it comes to political thought, and what it means to be disabled.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

most useful thing here is the whole “the state is a practice” bit in lecture 10, everything else is like a helpful genealogical addendum of Discipline and Punish.

i think as far as the Foucault / Deleuze split that occurs around the time of these lectures, i gotta go with my man Gilles. he’s right insofar as philosophy can never beat capital, state, civil society, etc, directly and so must wage minor wars from a place of concealment. hence the big split that comes later with the Klaus Croissant case.

it’s easy to deal in abstracts but Foucault couldn’t throw his weight behind any real political action contra western imperialism / liberal democratic expansionism.

when the administrative communist regime finally does come, the vanguard won’t be comprised of sociology grad students. i haven’t really talked about the book much here but that’s ok it’s more of an ambient review

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Looks at the transition from the long duree of sovereignty as the primary operator of - and mode of analyzing/understanding- (state) power to governmentality. The art of government hasn’t so much supplanted sovereignty as supplemented it, and perhaps, if you like, gained the upper hand as the contemporary modality of (state) power. Looking at the suturing of security, territory, and population as technologies of power/governance, Foucault traces a genealogy of power that demonstrates the historical modulation that has inaugurated the biopolitical state concerned with populations, reality effects, and normalization (through the security dispositif). So much in this book but really great. Society Must be Defended; Security, Territory, and Population; and the Birth of Biopolitics are a 1-2-3 punch when it comes to understanding just how governance and power operates today.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent exploration of the various ways rulers and others have attempted to govern populations and/or territories. The tragedy of the book is that modern Leftist intellectuals have used it like Machiavelli's "The Prince," treating it as a handbook of ways they can both challenge legitimate authority and maximize their own power over people and resources.

[Ryan Ananat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starts slow but picks up by the end. Looking forward to the sequel.

[Kyriakos Michail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhat hard to follow but it gives the very first notions of governmentality and what it means based on a historical analysis of Europe.

[Magdalena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a lot of Foucault this year. For reasons that I'm hoping will make sense at some point (even/especially to myself) this was my favorite.

[Neal Spadafora]

Foucault aims to free power from institutions, so that they can be viewed as technologies and, relatedly, so that institutions can be seen as unstable. To this end, Foucault contends that power is not a substance or phenomenon that can be dissected, but a relation between humans, in which one can demand the conduct of another.

For Foucault, the state is only an episode in government, not the other way around. Thus, the state is situated within a longer history of governmental power. In this way, Foucault is set on theorizing the present, as they live in the era of governmentality that began in the 18th century.

In theorizing the present, Foucault contends that Christian pastoral power has been absorbed by state. Foucault's way of demonstrating this long history of pastoral power by juxtaposition it with political power, which is decidedly not pastoral. The pastorate, as a form of governing men, marks the threshold for the modern state, alongside the development of governmentality being a calculated and discursive practice. However, the pastorate is the power most typical power of the west and has made possible an extreme amount of violence. It functions by keeping watching, rather than surveying a territory or jurisdiction. This function of keeping watch demarcates the pastorate capacity to individualize.

Crucially, the pastorate is composed of three spheres: salvation, obedience, and truth. The salvation of the flock and the shepherd are imbricated in one another. There is also the shepherd's paradox: one sheep must be saved at the expense of all others, but all other sheep must be saved at the expense of one. The sheep is also, as a good in itself, entirely subordinated to the pastor. This obedience is actualized through various institutions of Christian history, yet it culminates in the eventual subordination of the sheep's will to the pastorate. Through this, the Church and its pastoral rules lays claim to the daily government of men, which is singular to the Christian tradition throughout world history. In constructing this history, Foucault reads many early Church thinkers (i.e., Cassian, Jerome, Benedict) treatises on the pastorate. Thus, the Christian pastorate is so important to Foucault is so crucial because it governs the conduct of men in a way political thought did not. And it is this governing of men that takes its cue from the pastorate.

Provocatively, Foucault estimates that there has never been an anti-pastoral revolution, by which he means movements and people have never challenged the primacy of conduct, but simply who is fit to conduct oneself.

However, there remains an ambiguity. Is it simply that the pastorate is a precedent for governmentality or is the explosion of governmentality actually derivative of an internal crisis of the pastorate during the Reformation? Foucault hints at both of these narratives, but the precise rule of the pastorate in contemporary politics--outside of governmentality entailing the governing of men--remains unclear. Is the pastorate merely a moment in the history of governmental reason, undoubtedly, for Foucault, the most dominate, or still the structuring motif of the present?

[Kenneth Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are essentially familiar with Foucault's terminology and way of thinking then you should be able to breeze through these lectures - there are various sections that are repetitive or cursory and in fact throughout Foucault is constantly apologizing for spending too much time on basic history. These lectures won't do much for you if you dont understand Foucault's basic logical axiom of "production of knowledge (savoirs)-relations of power-techniques and practices-subjection (l'assujettissement)"

This is Foucault's basic logical paradigm in his monographs, where he explores institutional power - power within the medical clinic, within the "insane asylum" and within the prison in terms of "production of knowledge (savoirs)-relations of power-techniques and practices-subjection (l'assujettissement)"

BUT and here's why you have to read these lectures, these lectures, as the dust jacket of the book proclaims, are a massive turning point in Foucault's thought, in fact he begins to reject his earlier analysis of power within institutions such as the medical clinic, the insane asylum, the prison, he says that these institutions are merely localized examples of the prevailing power of governmentality and biopolitics.

The only monograph that Foucault mentions biopolitics is History of Sexuality vol 1, which was published about 3 years prior to these lectures. But clearly Foucault was starting to solidify his ideas around the idea of biological management as the core rationale for sovereign and disciplinary power.

[Davide Orsato · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Mi tocca fare una lezione in più, ma non siete obbligati a venire"
E nella lezione in più sforna il colpo di genio del corso: la nascita della governance moderna, della "ragion di stato" è strettamente correlata alla rivoluzione portata dall'economia classica, dalla statistica e dalla demografia. Il concetto che sta alla base della "biopolitica". Per il resto, leggere un corso di Focault, particolarmente questo, è come prendersi una birra che l'amico nerd che ha letto di tutto, e per di tutto si intende polverosi tomi del '600 sulla gestione delle epidemie e oscuri manoscritti sulle eresie in Asia Minore. E riesce a collegare tutto, una meraviglia.

[Minäpäminä · Rating 3 out of 5]

Melko pitkäpiimäistä ja yksityiskohtaista eikä sinällään varmastikaan kovinkaan kiinnostavaa, mutta jos lukija osaa kytkeä pohdinnot Foucault'n muuhun tuotantoon, erityisesti vallan historiallisten muotojen teoretisointiin, TAV avaa paikoittain kiinnostavia näköaloja. Luennoissaan Foucault on tosiaan selkeimmillään, mutta toisaalta myös keskeneräisimmillään; nämä ovat ikään kuin luonnoksia tai laboratorioita, joista valmiimmat muotoilut kumpuavat - ja toisaalta, joita valmiimpia muotoiluja luennot sitten jälkijättöisesti kommentoivat ja korjailevat. (Foucault vaikuttaa yhtä aikaa melko neuroottiselta ja huolimattomalta ilmaisunsa suhteen.)

[Aivaras Žukauskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

What it sometimes lacks in detail and consistency, it more than makes up for it by providing a broad, yet informative overview of Foucault's project of governmentality analysis in modern Western states. Not a bad intro to Foucault's thinking as a whole, and the analysis of police and other notions is as Foucauldian (as in, awesome) as it gets.

[Lorena Torrez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Looks at how security goes beyond the physical, integrating technology and control. Security systems, such as surveillance cameras, offer protection, but also pose dilemmas about privacy and power. A key reflection on the balance between surveillance and freedom.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

God these lecture series are a breath of fresh air, so much easier to read. first couple of chapters are good, don't fully agree with the conclusions. Lil Foucault having a field day with "evidence" and "facts" in this one.

[James Dueñas · Rating 5 out of 5]

El libro es una simposio de los que debería ser el Estado, desde su nacimiento hasta ahora se debe de enfocar en el bien común, pero los gobiernos han fracasado, intereses personales han hecho que la nación -Estado no sea viable en gran parte del mundo.

[Era H · Rating 3 out of 5]

had to read it for my philosophy course which is probably why i hated it so much because to be fair: it's quite interesting to read, but i still was confused by some conclusions. ugh. so glad i am done reading this

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Más allá de la elaboración conceptual sobre la biopolítica, más allá de los aportes de la filosofía de Foucault en general, más allá de todo eso: qué hermoso hablaba. Necesito haber ido a una clase suya.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 semanas de este libro para realizar una matriz de lectura, donde Foucault analiza como ejercer el poder desde las formas de gobierno desarrollando el concepto de biopoder, que está centrado en la gestión y regulación de la vida de la población.

[De.B. Dubois · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book if you want to understand how societies are formed and how governments function.

[Pablo]

Combinado con el Suplicio de Vigilar y Castigar - Bibliografía MECLAP.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

dieser mann ist völlig affenscheißge gegangen genial

[Jill]

Chapters 4,5,6,7,8,11

[Matt Hatch · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! The first satisfactory definition of liberalism I’ve ever received. He masterfully demonstrates or at least helps bring light to the way ideas have been woven together.