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Politics as Government: 
Michel Foucault’s Analysis 
of Political Reason
Barry Hindess*
This article considers Michel Foucault’s work on the rationality of
government and the practices in which it has been implemented.
Specifically, it develops a critique of Foucault’s analysis of politi-
cal reason in relation to the governmental significance of elec-
toral politics, to liberal commitments to the promotion of indi-
vidual liberty, and to the focus on government within states to the
neglect of the international system and the problem of sover-
eignty. KEYWORDS: political, governmental, partisan politics, lib-
eralism, 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, Aristotle’s 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 suf-
ficing for the purposes of life.”2 Politics, the government of the
state, seeks to promote the common interest, and political science,
Foucault’s political reason, considers how that end might best be
pursued. In his writings on government, Foucault normally uses
the term political in precisely this sense—that is, to refer to aspects
of the government of a state. Thus far, it might seem, there is noth-
ing particularly unusual, or even interesting, here: politics, political,
and related terms are frequently used to refer to the work of gov-
erning the population and territory of a state, and Foucault’s usage
appears to be in line with this conventional practice.
Alternatives 30 (2005), 389–413
389
*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 Lectures—“Towards a Criticism of ‘Polit-
ical Reason’”—suggests, Foucault’s concern is neither to endorse
this conventional usage nor to criticize it on the basis of an alter-
native 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 his-
tory 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 commu-
nities and, most especially, the government of oneself to its partic-
ular 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 gen-
eral, his analyses are particularly concerned with its early modern
and modern manifestations—that is, with the rationality of gov-
ernment 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 uncon-
ventional weight. He insists, in particular, that the work of govern-
ing 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 Foucault’s expanded sense, but that have
been neglected by more conventional forms of political analysis.
Foucault’s approach has been taken up by students of govern-
mental 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 Miller’s
“Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government.”4
The suggestion here—that the state is neither the only, nor always
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the most consequential, center of political power at work within
the state’s population and territory—offers 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, Foucault’s 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
Foucault’s lead in this respect, but, since it also offers a critique of
Foucault’s 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 popula-
tions. We shall see that politically oriented action is a major con-
cern of liberal political reason. Another concerns governmental-
ity’s treatment of liberalism, almost in its own terms, as committed
to governing through the promotion of suitable forms of individ-
ual liberty. A third issue is raised by Foucault’s description of politi-
cal reason itself, and especially the sense in which modern political
reason can be said to treat the state as “the highest of all.” The dif-
ficulty here concerns governmentality’s 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 understand-
ing of liberal political reason.
Government
In The Politics, Aristotle uses the term government primarily to de-
note “the supreme authority in states,”6 which suggests that gov-
ernment should be seen as emanating from a single center of con-
trol, and contemporary political analysis generally follows this
usage. But he also writes of the government “of a wife and children
and of a household”7 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 gov-
ernment 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
Foucault’s account of the emergence of the modern art of gov-
ernment thus refers back to the Aristotelian view that the govern-
ment 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 gov-
ernment were careful to distinguish it from “the problematic of the
Prince,” the view that the aim of government is to secure “the
Prince’s 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 govern-
ing a state, his point is to show that Aquinas’s “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 ver-
sion 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 rest-
ing 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 sec-
ond, 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 imma-
nent 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 activi-
ties, and so on.17
This passage suggests not only that the population will often be
“ignorant of what is being done to it”18 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 asso-
ciations, legal and medical professionals, financial institutions, and
so on; in short, by elements of what is now called civil society. Gov-
ernment of the state can thus be seen as a pervasive and heteroge-
neous activity that is undertaken at a variety of sites within the ter-
ritory 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 behav-
ior 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 non-
state 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 contin-
ual 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 Foucault’s work on government; namely, his analysis of liberal-
ism as a specific rationality of government. What particularly dis-
tinguishes 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 liberalism’s more restricted usage of the term government, which
is now confined to the work of the state and certain of its agen-
cies.22 This liberal usage involves a major redefinition of the term:
wheregovernment was once seen as a ubiquitous work of regula-
tion performed by a multiplicity of agencies throughout the popu-
lation, 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 nec-
essarily best served by the actions of government itself.
Foucault’s recuperation of an earlier understanding of the gov-
ernment of the state thus enables him to offer a fresh perspective
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on the familiar liberal critique of government. Liberalism is re-
vealed, 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 Foucault’s account of
liberalism, too, but it is seen now in a very different light: the sig-
nificance 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 counterproduc-
tive. According to this account, liberal political reason sees indi-
vidual 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 pur-
poses, but, unlike the others, it claims to do so in the name of lib-
erty. 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 Foucault’s view, what particularly distinguishes liberal-
ism from governmental rationalities of other kinds is its commit-
ment to governing as far as possible through the promotion of cer-
tain 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 de-
centralized 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 oth-
ers with whom they interact and, at least among more civilized peo-
ples, their interactions are normally expected to take a peaceful
form—the 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 behavior—by 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 improv-
ing the character of less civilized peoples. In this case, authoritar-
ian state intervention to reform property relations and impose con-
ditions that would enable widespread market interaction to take off
may be seen as a liberal move toward a situation in which individ-
uals may be governed through their free interactions.
Governmentality scholars have adapted and extended this
account of liberalism to produce a powerful and innovative analy-
sis of contemporary neo- or advanced liberalism’s uses of market
and audit regimes and of the more general promotion of individ-
ual choice and empowerment in the government of domains pre-
viously 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 Foucault’s
own account of liberalism and the governmentality accounts that
have followed his lead have focussed on the rationality of the gov-
ernment of the state—that is, on the government of state agencies
and of the population and territory over which the state claims
authority. Thus, while eschewing political theory’s normative pre-
tensions, 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 pol-
itics 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 acknowl-
edged in Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s various discus-
sions of the government of the state concerns the implications for
government of electoral politics and other forms of what Max
Weber calls “politically oriented action”—that is, of action that
“aims at exerting influence on the government of a political orga-
nization; especially at the appropriation, redistribution or alloca-
tion 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 such”28—that 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 Foucault’s 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 ratherdifferent 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 Aquinas’s model of government. However, my point is
not that Foucault’s 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 pur-
suit 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 politi-
cally 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 state—as they
will, of course, the actions of nonstate agencies of government.
Second, to promote market interaction and other forms of indi-
vidual liberty is to promote not only the individual pursuit of pri-
vate interests—that is, of interests that are different from, and some-
times 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 pri-
vate interests, and it provides conditions in which individuals can
band together both for this purpose and to pursue their own con-
ceptions of what the common interest requires, sometimes thereby
putting the work of government itself at risk. The ability of mem-
bers of the subject population to freely pursue their private inter-
ests or their own conception of the common interest thus poses a
problem for the government of the state, in part because it threat-
ens to subvert the state’s 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 legit-
imacy: 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 agencies—to
ensure, in other words, that direct action among the populace is
contained within severe limits and that organizations willing to em-
brace 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 dif-
ferent context, “of equipping citizens with the capacity to exercise
rights with some moderation.”30 It is precisely this effort to com-
bine freedom with constraint in its exercise that underlies the
concern in contemporary Western states with citizenship educa-
tion, voter disaffection, and social exclusion. While these states
appear to have addressed such issues with some considerable de-
gree of success, quite how they have managed to achieve this result
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“remains poorly understood”31—and, we might add, remains of lit-
tle concern to mainstream political science. It is tempting, never-
theless, 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 asso-
ciated 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 parti-
sanship might corrupt the government of the state has been a per-
sistent feature of Western political thought. Aristotle tells us that
while true forms of government have regard to the common inter-
est, “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 reso-
nance 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 represen-
tative 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 thisconcern by carefully sep-
arating the work of government from the people themselves and
placing it in the hands of elected representatives and unelected
public servants. It seemed, in Madison’s view, to promise the best
of all governmental worlds: avoiding the specific forms of corrup-
tion associated with government by the one or the few while also
defending the state from the dangers of arbitrary rule by the peo-
ple themselves.
Madison and the other framers of the US constitution main-
tained that the elected representatives of the people would be
drawn from among the better class of persons—that 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 con-
duct 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 corrup-
tion in one part of government will be minimized if it is overseen
by other parts of government. This view of the role of intragovern-
mental 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 Hume’s or Madison’s
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 impor-
tant 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 govern-
ment have continued to emphasize the danger that the people as
a whole, smaller groups within the whole, or professional politi-
cians 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 char-
acterization of liberal government—that is, as focusing on governing
through the decisions of autonomous individuals—must be re-
garded 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 gov-
ernment 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 polit-
ical parties, pressure groups, and public officials—effectively 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
course—and precisely as the above analysis would suggest—they
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 reforms—and even many
of those who were—could 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 polit-
ical 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, Fou-
cault nevertheless accords it a central place in his account of liber-
alism 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 de-
fense of individual liberty—as 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 liber-
alization in much of Latin America, parts of Southeast Asia, and
Central and Eastern Europe.
How do such authoritarian practices relate to the liberal gov-
ernment of freedom? Contributors to the literature inspired by Fou-
cault’s 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 ratherin the fact
that such practices must now be justified on the liberal grounds of
freedom.
Perhaps so. Yet, even in contemporary Western states, liberal-
ism will also be concerned with the government of numerous indi-
viduals 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 peo-
ple 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 promo-
tion 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 populations—to the extent, we might say, that it is seri-
ous about politics—liberalism 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 indi-
viduals and groups and activities within them, can and should be
governed through the promotion of particular kinds of free activ-
ity 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 Mill’s 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 devel-
oped less fully elsewhere.
While such narcissism has provided liberal thinkers with par-
ticularly 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 capac-
ities.45 It is the capacity to make such distinctions that is necessary
to the liberal government of populations, not the particular his-
toricist or other grounds on which they might be made.46 The gov-
ernmental 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 deci-
sion 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. Mill’s argument in
favor of authoritarian rule in India is inconsistent with his liberal-
ism. Pierre Manent’s discussion of Tocqueville’s liberalism com-
pletely 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 ex-
plained away by reference to his nationalism and other nonliberal
factors.49 In response to such claims, it has to be said that the diffi-
culties 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 dis-
tinctions of the kind noted above as necessary elements of any seri-
ous 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. Tocqueville’s 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 recom-
mendations concerning how the subject population should be gov-
erned. With regard to this last issue, their arguments for the neces-
sity of authoritarian rule should be seen not as evidence of Mill’s or
Tocqueville’s 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, divi-
sion of intellectual labor, a division that places the study of rela-
tions that develop between states in one category and relations that
develop within them in another.51 Foucault’s treatment of the mod-
ern 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 mod-
ern 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 Foucault’s 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, rela-
tions between states tend to be seen as largely ungoverned, as a
kind of anarchy that is regulated to some degree by treaties, a vari-
ety 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 West-
ern 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 part-
nerships 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 forms—especially
its extensive reliance on commercial and semicommercial enter-
prises—and its displacement of established, directly hierarchical,
forms of state control. As for the international arena, the govern-
mentality view that the ends and means of the government of a
state can be seen as immanent to the state’s own population cer-
tainly captures an influential modern understanding of govern-
ment. 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 govern-
mental character of the modern division of humanity into the pop-
ulations 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 agree-
ments that brought the Thirty Years War to an end. They sought to
contain the political problems resulting from the existence of pow-
erful 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 sub-
jects 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 high-
est 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 con-
texts in which the system of states and the population it encom-
passes 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 over-
arching system of states to which they belong. Liberalism, perhaps
the most influential contemporary version of the art of govern-
ment, should be seen in similar terms; that is, as focusing on gov-
erning 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 sov-
ereignty 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 effec-
tive government within the member states of the Westphalian sys-
tem 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 success-
ful states. Contrary to Foucault’s 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 sug-
gest, like the English school,62that the contemporary states system is
simply an expanded version of the original Westphalian system. Con-
sideration 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 inde-
pendent 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 subordi-
nation 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 achieve-
ment or imposition elsewhere during the twentieth dismantled one
aspect of imperial rule while leaving the other firmly in place. Polit-
ical independence in the modern sense both expanded the mem-
bership 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 sec-
ond, 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 lim-
its 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 sys-
tem 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 reform—the corpora-
tization and privatization of state agencies, the promotion of com-
petition, 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 on—is the attempt to introduce not
only market and quasi-market arrangements but also empower-
ment, 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 despo-
tism 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 globaliza-
tion of citizenship, and indirect rule within imperial possessions
has been superseded by a less direct system in which the inhabi-
tants of the old imperial domains are governed through sovereign
states of their own, a system that is reminiscent of the older com-
bination of capitulations and the imperialism of free trade. Indi-
rect rule now operates, in effect, through national and inter-
national 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 market—including the internal markets of multi-
national 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 liberalism’s 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 Fou-
cault, vol. 3 (London: Allen Lane; Penguin, 2001), pp. 298–325, at 325.
2. Aristotle, The Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1998), 1253a 19–20; 1275b 21–22.
3. Ibid., 1252a, 4–5.
4. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power Beyond the State:
Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2 (1992):
173–205.
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, 37–38.
8. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Faubion, note 1, pp.
326–348, 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. 205–206.
12. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 17.
13. Foucault, note 10, pp. 204–205.
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. 216–217.
18. Ibid.
19. Mark Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional
Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1699–1800 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1983); Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order: German
Economic Discourse, 1750–1950 (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. 73–79, at
74–75.
22. Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess, introduction to their Governing
Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government (Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–19.
23. Foucault, note 21, p. 76.
24. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 68.
25. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997); Stephen Holmes, Passions and Con-
straints: 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 Soci-
ety (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.
68–91, at 88.
31. Ibid.
32. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 19–21.
33. David Hume, “Of Parties in General,” in his Essays: Moral, Politi-
cal, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 54–63.
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 Sover-
eignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988) argues that this
naïve 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): 137–150, and Mariana Valverde, “‘Despo-
tism’ and ‘Ethical Liberal Governance,’” Economy and Society 25, no. 3
(1996): 357–372.
40. Rose, note 24.
41. Foucault, note 10, p. 206.
42. Barry Hindess, “The Liberal Government of Unfreedom,” Alterna-
tives 26, no. 2 (2001): 93–111.
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 par-
ticipation in politics and, in the hands of the new liberalism of late-nine-
teenth-century Britain, it served to support a powerful case for the pro-
motion of liberty by the state—through 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, 1880–1915
(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 mis-
sion, but many liberal opponents of imperialism—from Adam Smith to 
J. A. Hobson—have 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 Inter-
national 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): 295–318; Melvin Richter, “Toc-
queville on Algeria,” Review of Politics 25 (1963): 362–398.
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
Mill’s 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., Gov-
ernance 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 Lib-
eral 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 West-
phalian 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, Geopoli-
tics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003);
Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the Inter-
national 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: What’s in a Name?” in Larner and
Walters, note 5, pp. 23–39.
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 Soci-
ety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
64. David P. Fidler, “A Kinder, Gentler System of Capitulations? Inter-
national Law, Structural Adjustment Policies, and the Standard of Liberal,
Globalized Civilization,” Texas International Law Journal 35 (1999–2000):
387–413.
412 Politics as Government: Michel Foucault’s Analysis of Political Reason
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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):
1–15, an influential (and still controversial) interpretation of nineteenth-
century British policies. It has an obvious relevance for us all today.
66. Sanjay Seth, “A ‘Postcolonial World’?” in Greg Fry and Jacinta
O’Hagan, ed., Contending Images of World Politics (London: Macmillan,
2000), pp. 214–226.
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.
Barry Hindess 413
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