Alternatives: Global, Local, Political

http://alt.sagepub.com/ Politics as Government: Michel Foucault's Analysis of Political Reason

Barry Hindess Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2005 30: 389 DOI: 10.1177/030437540503000401 The online version of this article can be found at: http://alt.sagepub.com/content/30/4/389

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Politics as Government: Michel Foucaults Analysis of Political Reason

Barry Hindess*

This article considers Michel Foucaults work on the rationality of government and the practices in which it has been implemented. Specifically, it develops a critique of Foucaults analysis of political reason in relation to the governmental significance of electoral politics, to liberal commitments to the promotion of individual liberty, and to the focus on government within states to the neglect of the international system and the problem of sovereignty. KEYWORDS: political, governmental, partisan politics, liberalism, states-system

When, in the conclusion to his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Michel Foucault tells us that political rationality has grown and imposed itself all throughout the history of Western societies,1 his use of the word political clearly invokes the classical understanding set out in, for example, Aristotles The Politics, where political means, quite simply, pertaining to the government of the state that is, of the polis. Aristotle tells us that the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part and that it is a body of citizens sufficing for the purposes of life.2 Politics, the government of the state, seeks to promote the common interest, and political science, Foucaults political reason, considers how that end might best be pursued. In his writings on government, Foucault normally uses the term political in precisely this sensethat is, to refer to aspects of the government of a state. Thus far, it might seem, there is nothing particularly unusual, or even interesting, here: politics, political, and related terms are frequently used to refer to the work of governing the population and territory of a state, and Foucaults usage appears to be in line with this conventional practice.
*Australian National University. E-mail: b.hindess@anu.edu.au

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Such an impression could hardly be more misleading. First, as the subtitle of his Tanner LecturesTowards a Criticism of Political Reasonsuggests, Foucaults concern is neither to endorse this conventional usage nor to criticize it on the basis of an alternative view of how politics itself should be understood. Rather, it is to investigate and, at least in these lectures, to criticize a type of reason that, in his view, has been particularly influential in the history of Western societies and that, following the usage just noted, could well be described as political. It is a type of reason that treats the state as the highest of all forms of community,3 and consequently aims to recruit the government of all lesser communities and, most especially, the government of oneself to its particular purposes. Thus, while recognizing that this political reason has often been criticized for its totalizing effects, Foucault insists that its prioritizing of the state also leads to individualizing effects that are no less problematic: political reason can be criticized, in his view, on the grounds that it operates as an oppressive principle of subjectivation. While Foucault directs his critique at political reason in general, his analyses are particularly concerned with its early modern and modern manifestationsthat is, with the rationality of government of the modern state. Here he shows that government was once understood more broadly than is usually now the case, and he suggests, in effect, that this early modern understanding can serve as a particularly revealing device for analyzing more recent developments. As a result, his use of political to refer to the government of a state also carries a somewhat critical and unconventional weight. He insists, in particular, that the work of governing the population and territory of a state is not performed only by the state itself, that it may be dispersed throughout the population and performed by a variety of public and private agencies. This claim opens up for examination a sphere of practices that are clearly governmental, in Foucaults expanded sense, but that have been neglected by more conventional forms of political analysis. Foucaults approach has been taken up by students of governmental rationalities who have thus explored the various ways in which, in the government of contemporary Western states, state and society, the national population, and the individuals, groups, and organizations within it have been understood both as posing problems that government has to address and as providing resources for dealing with those problems. The promise of this approach is nicely captured by the title of Nikolas Rose and Peter Millers Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government.4 The suggestion herethat the state is neither the only, nor always

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the most consequential, center of political power at work within the states population and territoryoffers a new perspective on the traditional liberal concern that the state may be governing too much, and it thereby opens the way for a powerful and innovative account of liberalism as a rationality of government. In his writings on government, Foucaults interest is less in the question of how politics and related terms should be used although, as noted above, he does offer some tactical suggestions than it is in investigating the character of political reason and the practices in which it has been implicated. This article follows Foucaults lead in this respect, but, since it also offers a critique of Foucaults analysis of political reason, it does so at a certain remove. It begins by outlining the Foucaultian treatment of government and its implications for our understanding both of political reason in general and of liberalism as a specific rationality of government. Such a powerful new perspective on political analysis can hardly avoid raising issues that have yet to be properly addressed, and this article focuses on three of them. One involves the governmental significance of electoral politics and other forms of what Weber calls politically oriented action, which must surely be regarded as occupying a central place in the modern government of populations. We shall see that politically oriented action is a major concern of liberal political reason. Another concerns governmentalitys treatment of liberalism, almost in its own terms, as committed to governing through the promotion of suitable forms of individual liberty. A third issue is raised by Foucaults description of political reason itself, and especially the sense in which modern political reason can be said to treat the state as the highest of all. The difficulty here concerns governmentalitys focus on government within the state and its relative neglect of the international system of states and the problem of sovereignty.5 I conclude by suggesting that this issue, too, has important implications for our understanding of liberal political reason.

Government In The Politics, Aristotle uses the term government primarily to denote the supreme authority in states,6 which suggests that government should be seen as emanating from a single center of control, and contemporary political analysis generally follows this usage. But he also writes of the government of a wife and children and of a household7 and the government of a slave, two forms of rule that he is careful to distinguish from the government of a

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state. In yet another usage, government may refer to a rule that one exercises over oneself. Foucault notes that, for all the many differences between them, these distinct practices of government nevertheless share a concern with the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed. . . . To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others8 or, indeed, of oneself. Thus, while it will often act directly to determine the behavior of individuals, government also aims to influence their actions indirectly, by acting on the manner in which they regulate their own behavior and the behavior of others. Government, in this sense, is a special case of power: it is a way of acting on the actions of others, and even of oneself.9 Nevertheless, while noting such differences and continuities, Foucault pays particular attention to one form of government that, from the early modern period onward, has been seen as special and precise; namely, the particular form of governing which can be applied to the state as a whole.10 His concern here is both to distinguish this modern art of government from the rule exercised by feudal magnates, independent cities, the church, and various others over the populations of late-medieval Europe and, most especially, to show that this modern understanding of government follows the classical view in treating the state as the highest of all. He notes, for example, that while those who wrote of the art of government in the early modern period constantly recall that one speaks also of governing a household, souls, children, a province, a convent, a religious order, a family, they also treat these other kinds of government as internal to the state or society, thereby always giving the government of the latter a superior status.11 Foucaults account of the emergence of the modern art of government thus refers back to the Aristotelian view that the government of the state has its own distinctive telos, a telos that requires that it should have a regard to the common interest.12 It also points forward to the peculiar secularism of the liberal state. He notes, on the one hand, that those who promoted the art of government were careful to distinguish it from the problematic of the Prince, the view that the aim of government is to secure the Princes ability to keep his principality.13 Rather, they argued, the state should be governed according to rational principles which are intrinsic to it.14 On the other hand, he is careful to distinguish the political rationality of government, which treats the state as the highest of all, from the reasoning one finds in theological accounts of rule. When he notes, for example, that Aquinas seeks to derive the order of government from the order of nature that is ordained by

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God, not from principles that are intrinsic to the work of governing a state, his point is to show that Aquinass model for rational government is not a political one.15 What particularly distinguishes the political art of government, as Foucault describes it, from such theological rationalizations of rule is not the view that religion has no place in the government of a state; rather, it is the insistence that the place of religion in the government of the state should be determined by the interests of the state, not by theology. It is on such grounds that Thomasius and Pufendorf, both of whom were deeply religious, argued in favor of a limited degree of religious toleration. Their concern was that if the state took on the task of imposing religious doctrine, it would place itself at risk of being taken over by one of the more powerful contending sects and that the consequent pursuit of sectarian objectives would undermine the interests of the state itself.16 In its promotion of a certain kind of secularism, this early version of the modern art of government can be seen as one of the precursors of the modern liberal state. It differs most obviously from what we now take to be the liberal view of government in resting its case for toleration on the interests of the state, not on the rights of the individual. But it also differs from liberalism in a second, perhaps more fundamental respect: it takes a broader view of government itself. The art of government, Foucault tells us:
has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, its longevity, health, etc.; and the means that the government uses to attain those ends are all in some sense immanent to the population itself; it is the population itself on which government will act either directly, through large scale campaigns, or indirectly, through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of birth rates, the directing of the flow of population into certain regions or activities, and so on.17

This passage suggests not only that the population will often be ignorant of what is being done to it18 by government but also that the work of governing the state is not confined to the direct action of the state itself. Much of this work will also be performed by agencies of other kinds, by churches, employers, voluntary associations, legal and medical professionals, financial institutions, and so on; in short, by elements of what is now called civil society. Government of the state can thus be seen as a pervasive and heterogeneous activity that is undertaken at a variety of sites within the territory and population of the state concerned.

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The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European science of police understood the government of the state in precisely such terms: its ambition was to promote the happiness of society by deploying state and nonstate agencies to bring all forms of behavior under some appropriate kind of regulation.19 When Foucault cites police science as an important early version of the modern art of government, his point is to show that, while later perspectives on the government of the state may seem to have adopted more modest regulatory ambitions, the governmental use of both state and nonstate agencies has continued. Governmentality, he argues, is at once internal and external to the state:
[I]t is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, etc.20

Thus, far from emanating directly from the agencies of the state itself, as liberalism tends to suggest, the modern art of government treats these agencies as one set of instruments among others. This last point brings us to perhaps the most influential aspect of Foucaults work on government; namely, his analysis of liberalism as a specific rationality of government. What particularly distinguishes liberalism, as Foucault describes it, from earlier versions of the art of government is not the view, which is also shared by the science of police, that nonstate agencies play an important part in the life of the population. Rather it is, first, the concern that the state may be governing too much, that there may be cases in which it is needless or harmful for [the state] to intervene.21 I return to this issue in a moment. Second, and no less important, is liberalisms more restricted usage of the term government, which is now confined to the work of the state and certain of its agencies.22 This liberal usage involves a major redefinition of the term: where government was once seen as a ubiquitous work of regulation performed by a multiplicity of agencies throughout the population, it now comes to be identified more narrowly with the work of the state and its agencies. Government is no longer regarded as a field of activity that constitutes and maintains the social order from within, but rather as acting on this order from without. The happiness of society remains of fundamental concern, as it was in the era of police, but since government is now identified with the activities of the state, it is no longer seen as something that is necessarily best served by the actions of government itself. Foucaults recuperation of an earlier understanding of the government of the state thus enables him to offer a fresh perspective

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on the familiar liberal critique of government. Liberalism is revealed, not so much as seeking to reduce the size and the scope of government in its broadest sense, but rather as aiming to change its form: it is a tactics of government that operates by shifting the work of government from state to nonstate agencies. Liberals often present themselves as embracing a normative doctrine that regards the maintenance of liberty as an end in itself and therefore sees it as setting limits to both the ends and the means of government. Individual liberty plays an important part in Foucaults account of liberalism, too, but it is seen now in a very different light: the significance that liberalism attaches to individual liberty, he suggests, is intimately related to a prudential concern that the state might be governing too much, that the attempt to regulate certain kinds of behavior through state agencies might in fact be counterproductive. According to this account, liberal political reason sees individual liberty as a limit, if not to the legitimate reach of the state then certainly to its effectiveness. Foucault argues that the image of the market plays the role of a test in liberal political thought, a locus of privileged experience where one can identify the effects of excessive governmentality.23 In fact, Foucault goes further to suggest that liberalism also sees individual liberty as a resource: like other forms of political reason, it aims to recruit the government of oneself to its own larger purposes, but, unlike the others, it claims to do so in the name of liberty. As Nikolas Rose puts it:
The importance of liberalism is not that it first recognized, defined or defended freedom as the right of all citizens. Rather, its significance is that for the first time the arts of government were systematically linked to the practice of freedom.24

Thus in Foucaults view, what particularly distinguishes liberalism from governmental rationalities of other kinds is its commitment to governing as far as possible through the promotion of certain kinds of free activity and the cultivation among the governed of suitable habits of self-regulation. According to this account, the image of the market is emblematic: it is seen by liberalism as a decentralized mechanism of government that operates at two rather different levels. At the first and most immediate level, individuals are thought to be governed, at least in part, by the reactions of others with whom they interact and, at least among more civilized peoples, their interactions are normally expected to take a peaceful formthe market itself providing the most obvious example. This view suggests that, while the promotion of suitable forms of free interaction may be an effective way of dealing with the government

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of civilized populations, it is likely to be less successful in other cases. Secondly, over the longer term, interaction with others is thought to influence the internal standards that individuals use to regulate their own behaviorby affecting, for example, their sense of good and bad conduct, of what is acceptable or unacceptable in particular contexts, and so on. At this level, market interaction itself is seen as a powerful instrument of civilization, inculcating such virtues as prudence, diligence, punctuality, self-control, and so on.25 This view suggests that, if only suitable forms of property can be set securely in place and nonmarket forms of economic activity reduced to a minimum, then market interaction itself may function as a means of improving the character of less civilized peoples. In this case, authoritarian state intervention to reform property relations and impose conditions that would enable widespread market interaction to take off may be seen as a liberal move toward a situation in which individuals may be governed through their free interactions. Governmentality scholars have adapted and extended this account of liberalism to produce a powerful and innovative analysis of contemporary neo- or advanced liberalisms uses of market and audit regimes and of the more general promotion of individual choice and empowerment in the government of domains previously subject to more direct forms of regulation.26 Nevertheless, I will suggest that in spite of its many achievements this Foucaultian view of liberalism as committed to governing through freedom is far too restricted. A limitation of a different kind is that Foucaults own account of liberalism and the governmentality accounts that have followed his lead have focussed on the rationality of the government of the statethat is, on the government of state agencies and of the population and territory over which the state claims authority. Thus, while eschewing political theorys normative pretensions, the governmentality approach nevertheless shares its view that liberalism is concerned primarily with the field of intrastate relations, and it therefore shares also the limitations entailed by that view. Before proceeding to discussion of these issues, however, we should note that the practice of liberal government, as Foucault describes it, creates conditions for the emergence of a partisan politics that liberalism has generally perceived as posing a serious threat to the work of government itself. The significance of partisan politics for liberal reflections on government is hardly acknowledged in Foucaults account of liberalism, or of the modern art of government more generally, and in this respect, too, I suggest that his analysis must be regarded as seriously incomplete.

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Government and Partisan Politics Perhaps the most curious absence from Foucaults various discussions of the government of the state concerns the implications for government of electoral politics and other forms of what Max Weber calls politically oriented actionthat is, of action that aims at exerting influence on the government of a political organization; especially at the appropriation, redistribution or allocation of the powers of government.27 Weber goes on to explain that he uses the term politically oriented action in order to distinguish this kind of action from political action as such28that is, from the action of the state itself. There is a considerable degree of overlap between the work of government and politically oriented action, but they must nevertheless be regarded as distinct. Political reason, in Foucaults sense, addresses the problem of how best to govern the population and territory of the state, but the calculations involved in politically oriented action are concerned with a rather different problem; namely, how best to influence the manner in which the work of government is performed. Where the one focuses on the pursuit of the interests and the welfare of the state and the population ruled by the state, the other focuses on the partisan promotion of sectional interests and values, including disputed conceptions of the common interest itself. There is an obvious sense in which such politically oriented action might be said to involve a kind of political reasoning, and the same might be said of the Machiavellian problematic of the Prince or Aquinass model of government. However, my point is not that Foucaults discussion of political reason should be extended to include the rationality of politically oriented action that is, to politics, in what is perhaps the most conventional of contemporary senses of the term. Having set itself one task, the Foucaultian analysis of government can hardly be blamed for not performing another. Rather, it is that the consequences of parties, and of partisan politics more generally, for the governmental pursuit of the common interest have always been among the central concerns of the modern art of government. Its failure to examine the problem that politically oriented action poses for modern political reason is thus one of the more striking limitations of the Foucaultian analysis of government. This failure is especially significant for our understanding of liberal political reason. While we might expect politically oriented action to appear under all forms of government, we should expect it to flourish under conditions of liberal rule, where government itself is concerned, at least in certain respects, to promote and to

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work through the freedom of members of the subject population. The next section of this article disputes the view that liberalism is always committed to governing through the promotion of various kinds of free activity. For the moment, however, we should note two rather different ways in which the promotion of liberty and politically oriented action may be connected. The first and most obvious is simply that free individuals will sometimes use their liberty in attempts to influence, or to resist, the actions of the stateas they will, of course, the actions of nonstate agencies of government. Second, to promote market interaction and other forms of individual liberty is to promote not only the individual pursuit of private intereststhat is, of interests that are different from, and sometimes indifferent to, the common interest (however that might be understood)but also the image of the individual as one who can be expected to pursue such interests. Liberal rule thus encourages and anticipates the pursuit of private interests, and it provides conditions in which individuals can band together both for this purpose and to pursue their own conceptions of what the common interest requires, sometimes thereby putting the work of government itself at risk. The ability of members of the subject population to freely pursue their private interests or their own conception of the common interest thus poses a problem for the government of the state, in part because it threatens to subvert the states own attempts to promote the common interest and even, in extreme cases, the institutions of the state itself. This raises a distinctly liberal version of the problem of legitimacy: how to govern a population of free individuals so that its members accept the legitimacy of the work of government itself. The problem here is not, at least in the first instance, how to prevent opposition to government programs or how to get these programs through a parliament or congress; rather, it is to ensure that expression of such opposition does not substantially interfere with the governmental work of state and nonstate agenciesto ensure, in other words, that direct action among the populace is contained within severe limits and that organizations willing to embrace such action (like Greenpeace) have only limited support. It is the problem of what Herbert Marcuse calls repressive tolerance,29 or, as Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth describe it in a rather different context, of equipping citizens with the capacity to exercise rights with some moderation.30 It is precisely this effort to combine freedom with constraint in its exercise that underlies the concern in contemporary Western states with citizenship education, voter disaffection, and social exclusion. While these states appear to have addressed such issues with some considerable degree of success, quite how they have managed to achieve this result
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remains poorly understood31and, we might add, remains of little concern to mainstream political science. It is tempting, nevertheless, to suggest that the competitive party system of modern democracy plays an important part here, both in providing a space in which legitimate opposition might be expressed and in directing its energies into relatively harmless channels. There are important and difficult questions to be addressed here, but this article focuses on a different set of issues: those associated with the liberal problem of corruption. Where the problem of legitimacy concerns the possibility of active disaffection from the governmental work of the state, or even from the state itself, that of corruption concerns attempts to recruit the governmental work of the state to the pursuit of private purposes. The fear that partisanship might corrupt the government of the state has been a persistent feature of Western political thought. Aristotle tells us that while true forms of government have regard to the common interest, those which regard only the interests of the rulers are all defective and distorted forms.32 This and the more general fear that individuals banding together for their own purposes might corrupt the work of government has always had a particular resonance for liberal reflections on government. David Hume, for example, observes that parties
are plants which grow most plentifully in the richest soil; and though absolute governments be not wholly free from them, it must be confessed, that they rise more easily, and propagate themselves faster in free governments, where they always infect the legislature itself, which alone could be able, by the steady application of rewards and punishment, to eradicate them.33

The most interesting features of this comment are its suggestions first, that partisan politics is a damaging infection of government, and secondly, that government itself should be able to keep it under control. It is for this reason that Hume describes the founders of sects and factions [as deserving] to be detested and hated. . . . Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation.34 Similarly, James Madison proposes to defend government from the dangerous vice of faction by means of a system of representative government that promotes the limited involvement of the people in their government through periodic elections alongside the total exclusion of the people, in their collective form, from any share in the work of government.35 The classical fear of democracy reflects a concern that the common interest will be poorly served by a government that is dominated by the poor and
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poorly educated, who constitute a clear majority of all citizens.36 Representative government addresses this concern by carefully separating the work of government from the people themselves and placing it in the hands of elected representatives and unelected public servants. It seemed, in Madisons view, to promise the best of all governmental worlds: avoiding the specific forms of corruption associated with government by the one or the few while also defending the state from the dangers of arbitrary rule by the people themselves. Madison and the other framers of the US constitution maintained that the elected representatives of the people would be drawn from among the better class of personsthat they would be cultivated and intelligent men of clearly superior character.37 Be that as it may, the more important point to notice here is that while the design of representative government addresses the traditional fear of popular corruption, it leaves the more general problem of the corruption of government by faction and self-interested conduct relatively untouched. There are moments when Madison seems to be aware of this problem. He acknowledges, for example, that the people may possibly be betrayed by their representatives,38 and it is partly to address this issue that he advocates the separation of governmental powers. His suggestion is that the risks of corruption in one part of government will be minimized if it is overseen by other parts of government. This view of the role of intragovernmental oversight and of checks and balances more generally in countering political corruption has played an important part in modern understandings of democracy. Western states are not what they were in Humes or Madisons day: their military and administrative apparatuses are substantially larger and political parties and organized interest groups are now regarded as necessary components of representative government. The problem their presence is now thought to pose is not, as Hume suggests, how to eradicate them, but rather how to manage their interactions, both with each other and with the state, without too much damage to the work of government itself. There is an important study to be written of liberal attempts to control the new sources of the corruption of government that have emerged within the framework of representative government. For our purposes, however, it is sufficient to note that liberal reflections on government have continued to emphasize the danger that the people as a whole, smaller groups within the whole, or professional politicians and public servants may conduct themselves in such a way as to divert the state from its pursuit of the common interest.

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This, indeed, is one of the ways in which the Foucaultian characterization of liberal governmentthat is, as focusing on governing through the decisions of autonomous individualsmust be regarded as seriously incomplete. It is precisely because its promotion of individual autonomy is thought to foster conditions in which individuals are able to band together for their own purposes that liberalism is so fundamentally concerned to defend the government of the state from the impact of partisan politics. One of the aims of the neoliberalism that became so influential in the latter part of the twentieth century was to take this defense of the work of government further by privatizing or corporatizing important areas of state activity in the West and blocking their development elsewhere, promoting market and quasi-market relations between and within government agencies and deliberately insulating central banks from political control by elected governments. In practice, of course, these reforms were pursued for a host of different reasons, but two conflicting aspects of this neoliberal development are particularly worth noting here. On the one hand, they were often promoted as serving to limit the influence of political parties, pressure groups, and public officialseffectively by excluding substantial areas of public provision from the realm of political decision and relying instead on provision through suitably organized forms of market interaction. In terms of the broad understanding of government noted earlier, however, this should be seen less as a matter of restricting the overall size of government or of preventing its expansion than of regulating the manner in which government is exercised: forms of government that work through the administrative apparatuses of the state are displaced in favor of those that work through the disciplines imposed by others in market and quasi-market interactions. On the other hand, of courseand precisely as the above analysis would suggestthey were implemented by political parties and other agencies with clear factional interests of their own. For this reason, those who were not persuaded by the neoliberal case for such reformsand even many of those who werecould see ample scope in their implementation for the pursuit of new forms of partisan advantage.

Governing Liberty Political theorists commonly describe liberalism as a normative political doctrine that treats the maintenance of individual liberty as an end in itself and therefore views liberty as setting limits of principle

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both to the objectives of government and to the manner in which those objectives might be pursued. I noted above that, while not perceiving the issue of individual liberty in normative terms, Foucault nevertheless accords it a central place in his account of liberalism as a rationality of government: the significance that liberalism attaches to individual liberty, he suggests, is intimately related both to the aim, which it shares with political reason more generally, to recruit the government of oneself to its own larger purposes, and to a prudential concern that the state might be governing too much, that state regulation of certain kinds of behavior might in fact be counterproductive. In practice, however, it is clear that authoritarian rule has always played an important part in the government of states that declare themselves to be committed to the maintenance and defense of individual libertyas it has, of course, in the government of states that do not make that commitment. Nineteenth-century Western states restricted the freedom of important sections of their own populations and imposed authoritarian rule on substantial populations outside their own national borders. Even now, long after the collapse of Western colonialism, coercive and oppressive practices of government continue to play an important part, not only in the independent states that took over the old imperial domains, but also in Western states themselves: in systems of criminal justice, the policing of Romany people, immigrant communities and the urban poor, the provision of social services, and the management of large public and private sector organizations. Authoritarian rule has also been invoked as a necessary instrument of economic liberalization in much of Latin America, parts of Southeast Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe. How do such authoritarian practices relate to the liberal government of freedom? Contributors to the literature inspired by Foucaults analysis of the modern art of government have, like many contemporary liberals, tended to treat authoritarian rule as playing no significant part in liberal political reason.39 Nikolas Rose, for example, acknowledges that coercive and oppressive practices are clearly still employed in the government of Western societies.40 He goes on to argue, however, that the significance of liberalism here is to be seen, not in these practices themselves, but rather in the fact that such practices must now be justified on the liberal grounds of freedom. Perhaps so. Yet, even in contemporary Western states, liberalism will also be concerned with the government of numerous individuals and significant areas of conduct that seem not to be amenable to available techniques of governing through freedom. Indeed if, as

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Foucault suggests, the market plays the role of a test, then it is a test that surely cuts both ways, indicating not only that some people and some fields of activity can best be governed through the promotion of suitable forms of free behavior, but also that there are other cases in which more direct regulation by the state will be required. In this respect, the description of liberal political reason, considered as a rationality of the government of the state as a whole,41 as being concerned with governing through the promotion of certain kinds of liberty must be regarded as incomplete. It will also be concerned with determining which individuals and which areas of conduct within the state can best be governed in this way and which cannot, and with deciding what, if anything, can be done about governing the latter.42 I have made this point in relation to the Foucaultian analysis of liberalism, but it would apply equally well to more conventional accounts of liberalism as a normative political theory or ideology committed to the maintenance and defense of individual liberty. To the extent that it is concerned with the government of actual states and populationsto the extent, we might say, that it is serious about politicsliberalism can hardly avoid the question of what to do about individuals and areas of conduct that seem not to be amenable to government through the promotion of suitable forms of individual liberty. Thus, rather than describe liberalism as committed to governing through freedom, it would be more appropriate to present it as claiming only that there are important contexts in which free interaction might be the most appropriate means of regulation: that certain populations, or significant individuals and groups and activities within them, can and should be governed through the promotion of particular kinds of free activity and the cultivation of suitable habits of self-regulation, and that the rest just have to be governed in other ways. Indeed, many of the historical figures who have described themselves as liberals or who, like John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, or Immanuel Kant, have been posthumously recruited into the liberal camp43 were clearly concerned to distinguish between what can best be governed through the promotion of liberty and what should really be governed in other ways.44 Liberals have drawn the line in very different places and rationalized their decisions by means of correspondingly diverse arguments, but they have done so most commonly in historicist, developmental, and gendered terms. They have argued, in other words, that the capacity to be governed as a free agent is itself a product of civilization, or improvement, to use one of John Stuart Mills favorite expressions, and therefore that it will be developed most fully among people like themselves,

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the highly cultivated inhabitants of civilized societies, and developed less fully elsewhere. While such narcissism has provided liberal thinkers with particularly congenial foundations on which to erect their distinctions between what can be governed through the promotion of liberty and what cannot, it would be misleading to suggest that liberalism is necessarily committed to a developmental view of human capacities.45 It is the capacity to make such distinctions that is necessary to the liberal government of populations, not the particular historicist or other grounds on which they might be made.46 The governmental promotion of a sphere of religious freedom in parts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe could also be said to represent a kind of liberalism. However, the decision in this case to tolerate a limited range of religious observances did not reflect a commitment to inalienable rights of the individual: It arises, as noted earlier, from a pressing concern to protect the state from the consequences of religious dispute. Nor did the corresponding decision to suppress observances that fell outside the range of toleration need to draw on any historicist view of the differential development of human capacities in the religious communities concerned.47 This example suggests that the historicist and developmental view of humanity that played such an important role in the era of liberal imperialism should not be seen as an indispensable feature of liberal political reason. If we treat liberalism as committed to the maintenance and defense of individual liberty, then the active involvement of liberal political theorists and administrators in the practice of imperial rule must appear to be incomprehensible, at least in liberal terms.48 John MacMillan, for example, asserts that J. S. Mills argument in favor of authoritarian rule in India is inconsistent with his liberalism. Pierre Manents discussion of Tocquevilles liberalism completely ignores his defense of and practical involvement in French rule in Algeria, while Jennifer Pitts and Melvin Richter insist that it can only be regarded as an aberration, as something to be explained away by reference to his nationalism and other nonliberal factors.49 In response to such claims, it has to be said that the difficulties that these commentators seek to address arise not from the actual writings of Mill or Tocqueville, whose arguments in favor of authoritarian rule in certain cases are generally fairly clear,50 but rather from the limited understanding of liberalism that they bring to their analysis. Thus, if we take a broader view of liberalism, if we treat distinctions of the kind noted above as necessary elements of any serious liberal reflection on the government of states and populations,

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then the fact of liberal complicity in the practice of imperial rule appears in a very different light. Tocquevilles nationalism may help to account for his enthusiastic defense of the French takeover of Algeria, but it tells us nothing about the reasons for his recommendations concerning how the subject population should be governed. With regard to this last issue, their arguments for the necessity of authoritarian rule should be seen not as evidence of Mills or Tocquevilles inconsistency, but rather as part and parcel of their liberalism.

Government and the System of States Rob Walker and others have noted that the modern system of states is associated with a powerful, and powerfully restrictive, division of intellectual labor, a division that places the study of relations that develop between states in one category and relations that develop within them in another.51 Foucaults treatment of the modern art of government falls squarely within the latter category and therefore exhibits both the strengths and the weaknesses of the division of labor on which it rests. He proposes to analyze the modern art of government as pursuing ends, and adopting means to those ends, that are seen as being in some sense immanent to the population of the state in question.52 While the achievements of this approach are undeniable, I argue that its state-centered focus represents a serious limitation, both of Foucaults own studies of government and of the more general governmentality school that has taken up and developed his work in this area. Few commentators would deny that geopolitical conditions have played an important role in the development of modern states. The standard view nevertheless remains that government is something that operates essentially within states. As a result, relations between states tend to be seen as largely ungoverned, as a kind of anarchy that is regulated to some degree by treaties, a variety of less formal accommodations, and the occasional war between them. This state-centered view of government has been brought into question by influential figures in the disciplines of public administration and international relations, who have used the notion of governance to describe the recent development in Western states of forms of governing that cannot be seen as emanating from a supreme authority; that is, to the emergence of governing without government.53 They argue that the work of government within states is increasingly being conducted by public/private partnerships and by formal and informal networks involving state and

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nonstate agencies, while, in the international sphere, states and other actors are regulated by an expanding web of conventions, treaties, and international agencies, all of which operate without the backing of an overarching Hobbesian power. Where Foucault understands government in the broad sense noted earlier, the governance literature starts from the conventional identification of government with the state and sets out to address the recent development of forms of governing that, in both the domestic and the international arenas, are not directly performed by states themselves. For all their differences, the governance and the governmentality literatures both suggest that we are governed in ways that cannot properly be grasped by the state-centered view of government noted above. There are, however, important respects in which both might be regarded as incomplete. Against the governance literature, we might note that government without the direct involvement of the government is hardly a new development within Western states. It was, in ambition if not in practice, all-pervasive in the police states of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe,54 and nonstate agencies have played a major role in governing the populations of their successors.55 If there is anything distinctive about recent developments within Western states, it lies less in the fact of governing without government than in the novelty of some of its formsespecially its extensive reliance on commercial and semicommercial enterprisesand its displacement of established, directly hierarchical, forms of state control. As for the international arena, the governmentality view that the ends and means of the government of a state can be seen as immanent to the states own population certainly captures an influential modern understanding of government. Yet it also raises important questions, which are rarely addressed in the governmentality literature itself,56 concerning how it is that states have been able to assume a substantial role in the government of these populations, and thus about the governmental character of the modern division of humanity into the populations of states. Conventional accounts of the modern states system suggest that it has its origins in seventeenth-century European attempts to bring destructive religious conflict under some kind of control, and particularly in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and other agreements that brought the Thirty Years War to an end. They sought to contain the political problems resulting from the existence of powerful religious differences between Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists by granting territorial rulers supreme political

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authority within their domains, leaving it to rulers and their subjects to reach some accommodation in matters of religion. These political arrangements, designed to pacify warring populations, effectively transformed the condition of the Western part of Europe. Populations that had been subject to a variety of overlapping and conflicting sources of authority were assigned to rulers who were themselves acknowledged as having the primary responsibility for the government of the populations within their territories and who related to each other as independent sovereign powers.57 This view of the formation of the modern system of states has fundamental implications for our understanding of government, both within the member states themselves and more generally. Indeed, if government, in its most general sense, aims to structure the possible field of action of others,58 then the modern system of states should itself be seen as a regime of government, albeit one that operates, like civil society and the market, with no controlling center. Thus, where the classical view treats the state as the highest of all forms of community,59 the modern system of states reflects the emergence of a more complex form of political reason. The state clearly retains its privileged position with regard to its own population, but there are also important governmental contexts in which the system of states and the population it encompasses is now regarded as the highest of all. The modern art of government has thus been concerned with governing not simply the populations of individual states but also the larger population encompassed by the system of states itself. It addresses this task first by promoting the rule of territorial states over populations, and secondly by seeking to regulate the conduct both of states themselves and of members of the populations under their control. States are expected to pursue their own interests, but to do so in a field of action that has been structured by the overarching system of states to which they belong. Liberalism, perhaps the most influential contemporary version of the art of government, should be seen in similar terms; that is, as focusing on governing both the populations of particular states and the population (which now incorporates the whole of humanity) of the system of states more generally.60 Where contractarian political theory tends to present the state as constituted internally, by real or imaginary agreements between its members, this governmental perspective suggests that the sovereignty of a state is in part a function of its recognition as a state by other members of the system.61 This, in turn, suggests that effective government within the member states of the Westphalian system is thus predicated in certain respects on political conditions

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that operate above the level of the individual states themselves. Not only is the order that obtains within the more successful states dependent on the order that prevails in the relations between states, but so, too, is much of the disorder that affects less successful states. Contrary to Foucaults account, not all of the means that the government of a state uses to attain its ends are immanent to the population of the state itself. The European system of states and the sovereignty that interactions within that system secured for participating states provided conditions in which the modern art of government within states could take root and develop. However, to close the discussion at this point would be to suggest, like the English school,62 that the contemporary states system is simply an expanded version of the original Westphalian system. Consideration of the manner in which this expansion took place suggests a less anodyne view. The Westphalian states system was specifically European, imposing few constraints on the conduct of participating states toward those who inhabited territories not covered by these agreements and who were thought to possess no sovereign states of the European kind. Thus, while European states were consolidating their rule over their own populations, some were also engaged in imperial adventures elsewhere. Perhaps the most striking result of these adventures was that much of humanity was brought within the remit of the modern system of states through direct imperial rule, while the remainder were brought into the system indirectly; that is, through the complementary and interdependent deployment of a standard of civilization in the dealings of member states with independent states elsewhere,63 the imposition of elaborate systems of capitulations that required independent states to acknowledge the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Western states,64 and also, of course, through the imperialism of free trade.65 Most discussions of Western imperialism focus on the subordination of substantial non-European populations to rule by particular European states. No less important, however, was the incorporation of those populations and the territories they inhabited into the European system of states. Direct or indirect imperial domination was the form in which the European system of states first became global in scope. The achievement of independence throughout much of the Americas during the nineteenth century and its achievement or imposition elsewhere during the twentieth dismantled one aspect of imperial rule while leaving the other firmly in place. Political independence in the modern sense both expanded the membership of the system of states and set in place a radically new way of bringing non-Western populations within its governmental regime.66 As a result, these populations found themselves governed both by modern states of their own and by the overarching system of
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states within which their own states had been incorporated. The second, twentieth-century wave of independence marks the point at which all of humanity comes to be governed through the medium of independent states and citizenship within them. These last points are hardly new, but they do establish the limits of a conception of the government of the state that sees it as relying on means that are immanent to the population of the state in question. I bring this article to a close by suggesting that this focus on the governmental character of the modern states system and its continuities with the states system of the colonial era can help us to understand the emergence of neoliberalism in both the domestic and the international spheres. What unites the many late-twentieth-century projects of neoliberal reformthe corporatization and privatization of state agencies, the promotion of competition, individual choice, and autonomy in health, education, and other areas of what Western states once regarded as the proper sphere of social policy, and so onis the attempt to introduce not only market and quasi-market arrangements but also empowerment, self-government, and responsibility into areas of social life that had hitherto been organized in other ways. Related developments can be observed in the international arena. Where liberalism could once rely on the decentralized despotism of indirect rule over colonial subjects,67 it now has to treat most of those who it sees as being in need of considerable improvement as if they, too, like the citizens of Western states, were endowed with the capacity to exercise rights with some moderation.68 The old imperial divisions between citizens, colonial subjects, and noncitizen others has been displaced by a postimperial globalization of citizenship, and indirect rule within imperial possessions has been superseded by a less direct system in which the inhabitants of the old imperial domains are governed through sovereign states of their own, a system that is reminiscent of the older combination of capitulations and the imperialism of free trade. Indirect rule now operates, in effect, through national and international aid programs that assist, advise, and constrain the conduct of postcolonial states, through international financial institutions, and also, of course, through that fundamental liberal instrument of civilization, the marketincluding the internal markets of multinational corporations. It is tempting, then, to place these domestic and international developments together and conclude with the suggestion that the problem of how to govern the postcolonial system of states may be one of the more important sources of liberalisms vastly increased emphasis on the governmental uses of the market and of nonstate agencies more generally.
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Notes 1. Michel Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason, in James D. Faubion, ed., Power: Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3 (London: Allen Lane; Penguin, 2001), pp. 298325, at 325. 2. Aristotle, The Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1253a 1920; 1275b 2122. 3. Ibid., 1252a, 45. 4. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government, British Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2 (1992): 173205. 5. Some of the exceptions can be found in Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds., Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004). 6. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 27. 7. Ibid., 1278b, 3738. 8. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Faubion, note 1, pp. 326348, at 341. 9. Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1995). 10. Michel Foucault, Governmentality, in Faubion, note 1, pp. 201 222, at 206. 11. Ibid., p. 205206. 12. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 17. 13. Foucault, note 10, pp. 204205. 14. Ibid., p. 213. 15. Foucault, note 1, p. 315 (emphasis added). 16. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 17. Foucault, note 10, pp. 216217. 18. Ibid. 19. Mark Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 16991800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 17501950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 20. Foucault, note 10, p. 221. 21. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, in Paul Rabinow, ed., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 7379, at 7475. 22. Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess, introduction to their Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporar y Rationalities of Government (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 119. 23. Foucault, note 21, p. 76. 24. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 68. 25. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraints: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 26. Rose, note 24, is the most ambitious elaboration of this account of liberalism; Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999) is a useful survey of the field.
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27. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 54. 28. Ibid., p. 55. 29. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Abacus, 1972). 30. Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth, Popular Sovereignty and Civic Education, in Denise Meredyth and Jeffrey Minson, eds., Citizenship and Cultural Policy: Statecraft, Markets, and Community (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 6891, at 88. 31. Ibid. 32. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 1921. 33. David Hume, Of Parties in General, in his Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 5463. 34. Ibid., p. 54. 35. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1987), nos. 10, 63. 36. Jennifer T. Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 37. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988) argues that this nave view was soon undermined by the coarse realities of US political life. Perhaps it was in some contexts, but in others it seems to have survived the challenge of empirical refutation remarkably well. 38. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, note 35, no. 63. 39. But see Dean, note 26, Christine Helliwell and Barry Hindess, The Empire of Uniformity and the Government of Subject Peoples, Cultural Values 6, no. 1 (2002): 137150, and Mariana Valverde, Despotism and Ethical Liberal Governance, Economy and Society 25, no. 3 (1996): 357372. 40. Rose, note 24. 41. Foucault, note 10, p. 206. 42. Barry Hindess, The Liberal Government of Unfreedom, Alternatives 26, no. 2 (2001): 93111. 43. The term liberal was not used to denote political allegiance before the early years of the nineteenth century; see Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1995). 44. Helliwell and Hindess, note 39. 45. Nor is my point that this view of human development should be seen as merely an ideological support for Western imperialism. It provided J. S. Mill with an important part of his argument for increased public participation in politics and, in the hands of the new liberalism of late-nineteenth-century Britain, it served to support a powerful case for the promotion of liberty by the statethrough intervention in labor-market contracts and working conditions, as well as in housing, education, and other areas of social policy: Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in Britain, 18801915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Liberal imperialists, of whom there were many among the new liberals, have commonly seen such historicist views as justifying what they liked to think of as a civilizing mission, but many liberal opponents of imperialismfrom Adam Smith to J. A. Hobsonhave held equally historicist views. 46. Hindess, note 42. 47. Hunter, note 16.

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48. Various aspects of this involvement have been amply documented in the British case by, for example, Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 49. John MacMillan, On Liberal Peace: Democracy, War, and the International Order (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Jennifer Pitts, Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question, Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2000): 295318; Melvin Richter, Tocqueville on Algeria, Review of Politics 25 (1963): 362398. 50. Although there are obvious difficulties of interpretation presented by the draft dispatches that Mill prepared as part of his duties in the East India Company. The careful examination in Zastoupil, note 48, shows that Mills own views can often be clearly discerned. 51. See R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 52. Foucault, note 10, p. 217. 53. R. A. W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance (Buckingham, Eng.: Open University Press, 1997); J. N. Rosenau and E.-O. Czempiel, eds., Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 54. Raeff, note 19. 55. Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London: Routledge, 1991); Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon, 1979). 56. But see note 5. 57. There is an extensive literature on the emergence of the Westphalian system and its geopolitical effects; see, for example, Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism, and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York, Telos Press, 2003); Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003); Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Walker, note 51. 58. Foucault, note 8, p. 34 59. Aristotle, note 2, 1252a, 5. 60. Barry Hindess, Liberalism: Whats in a Name? in Larner and Walters, note 5, pp. 2339. 61. Cf. Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 62. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1984). 63. Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of Civilization in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 64. David P. Fidler, A Kinder, Gentler System of Capitulations? International Law, Structural Adjustment Policies, and the Standard of Liberal, Globalized Civilization, Texas International Law Journal 35 (19992000): 387413.

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65. This phrase derives from John Gallagher and Roland Robinson, The Imperialism of Free Trade, Economic History Review 2d ser., 6, no. 1 (1953): 115, an influential (and still controversial) interpretation of nineteenthcentury British policies. It has an obvious relevance for us all today. 66. Sanjay Seth, A Postcolonial World? in Greg Fry and Jacinta OHagan, ed., Contending Images of World Politics (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 214226. 67. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 68. Hunter and Meredyth, note 30, p. 88.

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