From Biopower to Governmentality

This chapter discusses Foucault's conceptualizations of power-biopower, pastoral power, and governmentality developed mainly in his lecture courses at the College de France in the late 1970s. It also explicates his analysis of liberal and neoliberal governmentality central in these lectures-the forms of governmentality that he saw as specific to modern Western societies. Foucault did not intend these lectures to be published-they have only been published posthumously-and he regarded the arguments and ideas central in them as working hypotheses. The demands of biopolitics thus posed a theoretical challenge to liberal governmentality, and biopolitics and liberalism formed a historical intersection: they were linked de facto, not de jure.