Biopolitics and Governmentality

Foucault's late account of power over life itself — managing the health, conduct, and welfare of whole populations — and the governing of subjects through their own freedom.

Definition

Biopolitics is the modern form of power that takes the life of populations as its object, regulating birth, health, and welfare; governmentality is the art of governing understood as the conduct of conduct, including the ways subjects are led to govern themselves.

Scope

This topic covers Foucault's late concepts of biopower and governmentality and their development in the governmentality studies of Nikolas Rose and others. It does not cover disciplinary power directed at the individual body, which is treated in its own topic.

Core questions

• How did power come to take life and populations as its object?
• What is meant by governing through freedom?
• How do statistics, expertise, and welfare become technologies of rule?

Key theories

Biopower

Foucault argued that from the eighteenth century power increasingly worked to foster and manage the life of populations, supplementing the older sovereign right to take life.

Governmentality

Foucault analysed government as the conduct of conduct, a rationality of rule that operates through institutions, expertise, and the self-government of subjects.

History

In the final volume of his lectures and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault introduced biopower and, in his 1978 lecture, governmentality. After his death these concepts were elaborated into a field of governmentality studies, notably by Nikolas Rose, analysing liberal and neoliberal rule as governing through freedom.

Debates

Biopolitics as care versus control

Scholars dispute whether biopolitical and governmental power should be read primarily as benevolent management of welfare or as a subtle, pervasive form of social control.

Key figures

• Michel Foucault
• Nikolas Rose
• Colin Gordon

Seminal works

• foucault1978
• foucault1991
• rose1999

Frequently asked questions

What is governing through freedom?

The idea, central to governmentality studies, that liberal rule works not by direct coercion but by shaping the choices and self-management of free subjects, for instance through health and lifestyle advice.