Taking Foucault beyond Foucault: Inter-state Governmentality in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

The analysis of governmentality has had a profound impact on the study of liberal, domestic societies over the last two decades, and the conceptual framework has been applied successfully to current global affairs. In this article one possible way of expanding the timeframe and the scope of governmentality studies is explored. Through an immanent critique of Foucault's own comments on the co-constitutive development of states and a state system in early modern Europe, it is argued that a governmentality perspective can in fact add to our understanding of inter-state relations in early modern Europe, and thus also to our understanding of our own time. Carrying out such analyses implies taking the Foucauldian framework beyond Foucault, as his own brief comments on inter-state relations fail to adhere to his own methodological precept of historicising seemingly evidentiary practices.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, “What Our Present Is”, in Sylvère Lothringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), [1981] 2007), p. 141.

2. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007).

6. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3 (London: Penguin, [1977] 2000), p. 120.

3. Stephen Lukes, Power: A Radical View (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1974).

4. Peter Digeser, “The Fourth Face of Power”, Journal of Politics, Vol. 54, No. 4 (1992), pp. 977–1007.

5. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, “Power in International Politics”, International Organization, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2005), pp. 39–75.

7. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1982 2000), p. 340.

8. Foucault, “Truth and Power”, op. cit., p. 117. Cf. also the methodological precaution that “rather than orienting our research into power toward the juridical edifice of sovereignty, State apparatuses, and the ideologies that accompany them, I think we should orient our analyses of power toward material operations, forms of subjugation, and the connections among and the uses made of the local systems of subjugation on the one hand, and apparatuses of knowledge on the other. In short, we have to abandon the model of Leviathan […] We have to study it [power] by beginning with the techniques and tactics of domination” (Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 34). It should, however, be noted that a common reading of Foucault is that his later work on government sought to transcend the dichotomy of sovereignty and domination, seeing power as neither the result of the free play of sovereign wills nor as repressive domination, but instead as productive; Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), p. 25. A gradual move from battle and domination to government can be perceived by comparing “Society Must be Defended” with Security, Territory, Population. Cf. Michel Sennelart, “Course Context”, in Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 369–371.

9. As noted, and criticised, by Jan Selby, there has been a tendency in Foucauldian-inspired IR to focus on meta-theoretical critiques and text alone, rather than the micro-practices and the importance of materiality and practices, in addition to text, in the study of discourse; Jan Selby, “Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance, and the Limits of Foucauldian IR”, International Relations, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2007), pp. 324–345.

10. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 118, 120.

11. Ibid., pp. 88, 231.

12. Ibid., p. 88.

13. Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, op. cit., p. 341.

14. Ibid.

15. Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 97. In a brief throwaway, Foucault describes pastoral power as “government of individuals by their own verity”; Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim”, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3 (London: Penguin, [1979] 2000), p. 312.

16. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 2 (London: Penguin, [1984] 1997), p. 299. As Dean defines it, “Government is any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes” (Dean, op. cit., p. 2).

17. These are, as noted, types or levels of power relations. They are, at least in principle, possible in all forms of human intercourse, and as such are not reducible to the three broad forms of power (sovereignty, discipline and governmental management), on which more below, which are more closely related to polity-centred power and the techniques or mechanisms of power.

18. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 247.

19. Sennellart, op. cit., p. 387.

20. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 165.

21. Ibid., pp. 107–108. The different rationalities do not correspond directly to any existing system of government. They are the ideal ways of governing that can in principle be described as the underlying principles for ordering knowledge, but they are necessarily different from the actual system of government. Cf. ibid., p. 8.

22. Ibid., p. 286.

23. Ibid., p. 277.

24. Ibid., p. 247.

25. Ibid., p. 248. “The state is not a cold monster; it is the correlative of a particular way of governing” (Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008), p. 6).

26. Dean, op. cit., pp. 16–19. That there is a relationship between governmentality and mentality seems obvious, even though Sennelart stresses that “the word ‘governmentality’ could not result from the contraction of ‘government’ and ‘mentality’, ‘governmentality’ deriving from ‘governmental’ like ‘musicality’ from ‘musical’ or ‘spatiality’ from ‘spatial’, and designating, according to the circumstances, the strategic field of relations of power or the specific characteristics of the activity of government” (Sennelart, op. cit., p. 399, n. 126).

27. Sennelart, op. cit., p. 388.

28. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 108–109.

30. Ibid., pp. 18, 27.

29. Cf. Dean's distinction: “The term governmentality seeks to distinguish the particular mentalities, arts and regimes of government and administration that have emerged since ‘early modern’ Europe, while the term government is used as a more general term for any calculated direction of human conduct” (Dean, op. cit., p. 2).

39. Ibid., p. 95.

40. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 4.

41. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 348.

31. From a Foucauldian perspective, periodisation is not uncontroversial. There are important continuities across the periods mentioned here, and changes were gradual, but even Foucault himself suggests that there were different forms of governmentality at different times, and so at least a rough periodisation would seem to be warranted. Since we assume domestic and inter-state governmentality to be interrelated, establishing some grip on the different periods matters to the ensuing analysis.

32. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 247.

33. Ibid., p. 110. The discussion of these three phenomena takes up most of the 1978 lectures.

34. Ibid., p. 231.

35. Ibid., p. 109.

36. Dean, op. cit., p. 6.

37. The seminal works on this remain Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also Dean, op. cit., p. 85; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 65, 88, 93. In later work, Tuck suggests that the direction should be seen as descending rather than ascending. According to him, the idea of the autonomous agent was first developed in thinking about international affairs, then brought “into civil life: all politics was now seen as at least potentially civil war, and our fellow citizens were no different from enemies with whom we lived in uneasy peace” (Richard Tuck, The rights of war and peace: political thought and the international order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 10; emphasis in original). This is a reading that comes closer to Foucault's ideas in “Society Must be Defended”.

38. Dean, op. cit., p. 92.

42. Bruce Curtis, “Foucault on Governmentality and Population: The Impossible Discovery”, Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2002), p. 507.

43. Dean, op. cit., pp. 94–95 and Chapters 5 and 6.

44. Ibid., p. 210. The publication of Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics makes it clear that Foucault was at least to some extent aware of the problems raised by Curtis and Dean.

45. Foucault spends the first three lectures of the 1979 series on this emergence. Dupont and Pearce suggest that in Foucault's account this liberal governmentality becomes a sort of telos, which must overcome blockages to realise itself; Danica Dupont and Frank Pearce, “Foucault contra Foucault: Rereading the ‘Governmentality’ Papers”, Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2001), pp. 123–158. This critique of an “objective idealism” is a lot less potent after the publication of Foucault's entire lecture series. Their critique of “subjective idealism”, the reliance on formal discourses in a few central countries and an intentional reading of them is weakened, but still has some merit. It should nevertheless be noted that the lectures were a first stab, an opening up of a field for research.

46. Dean, op. cit., p. 111.

47. By now it is perhaps obvious, but the choice of “inter-state” is intended to avoid both the anachronism (when dealing with early modern Europe) of “international” and the unwarranted (at the time) “global”.

48. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

49. A useful, if already somewhat dated, overview can be found in Wendy Larner and William Walter, “Introduction: Global Governmentality”, in Wendy Larner and William Walter (eds.), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (Milton Park: Routledge, 2004).

50. Michael Merlingen, “Foucault and World Politics: Promises and Challenges of Extending Governmentality Theory to the European and Beyond”, Millennium, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2006), pp. 181–196.

51. For example, Mitchell Dean, “Nomos and the Politics of World Order”, in Larner and Walter (eds.), op. cit.; Barry Hindess, “Liberalism—What's in a Name?”, in Larner and Walter (eds.), op. cit.

52. Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann, “Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, States, and Power”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2006), pp. 651–672; Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending, “‘The International’ as Governmentality”, Millennium, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2007), pp. 677–701.

53. Such a bias is even more obvious in the general literature; cf. the books and themes covered by Merlingen, op. cit.

54. Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending, Governing the Global Polity: World Politics as Governmentality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2010).

55. See for example, Hindess, “Liberalism”, op. cit.; idem, “Government and Discipline”, International Political Sociology, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2008), pp. 268–270.

56. Richard Devetak, “Foucault, Discipline and Raison d'État in Early Modern Europe”, International Political Sociology, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2008), pp. 270–272.

57. Particularly if we compare Foucault to the predominantly materialist accounts of much historical sociology, e.g. Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-making”, in Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); idem, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Writing at roughly the same time as Foucault, Oestreich lamented that “The elaboration of army organization and state finance, two of the most important instruments at the state's disposal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are held to have resulted from military and political necessity and to have evolved by themselves in response to the requirements of the real world […] Hence, the theories of practical government which were current at the time have been left largely unexamined, as opposed to those which are interesting from the standpoint of legal and constitutional philosophy” (Oestreich, op. cit., p. 36). Later historical sociology has incorporated a larger focus on cultural factors, but a Foucauldian perspective, with an analysis of discourse that incorporates the study of practice and materiality would still seem to have a lot to add to this literature.

58. Mariana Valverde, “Genealogies of European States: Foucauldian Reflections”, Economy and Society, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2007), pp. 159–178. Valverde presents a rich and insightful reading of “Society Must be Defended” and Security, Territory, Population, but does not reflect on the development in Foucault's thought from war/battle to government, and, like Devetak, does not really engage with the inter-state level.

59. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 289.

60. It is notable that post-structural accounts of foreign policy, like that presented by David Campbell, had developed a quite similar model for the co-constitutive emergence of states and state system through foreign policy acting as a wall (rather than a bridge); David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and Politics of Identity, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). However, as noted by Felix Berenskoetter, such views, and indeed most of IR scholarship and modern liberal thought, rest on an ontologically unfounded assumption about necessary enmity between people and units, going back at least to Hobbes. Drawing on Heidegger and Aristotle, Berenskoetter suggests a completely different narrative, where states seek recognition and stabilisation of Self, and where friendship rather than enmity is the normal relation; Felix Berenskoetter, “Friends, There Are No Friends? An Intimate Reframing of the International”, Millennium, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2007), pp. 647–676. In such a perspective, “friendship” (or, for that matter, enmity) is analytically neither prior nor subsequent to the establishment of contact between units, they develop analogously. Foucault quite clearly falls into the “enmity” category, by stressing how states by necessity react against the increasing force of other states by increasing their own force.

61. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 295–297.

62. Ibid., pp. 297–300.

63. Ibid., p. 303.

64. Ibid.

65. One could be forgiven for speculating what would have happened if Foucault had read Headley Bull, as these themes are very similar to the central institutions described by English School authors; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1977). It could easily be argued that one of the main contributions of the “first wave” of post-structuralist IR was to juxtapose Foucauldian (and other post-structural) thought with the alleged canon of IR (including Bull), so as to deconstruct, destabilise, denaturalise and historicise knowledge of the international. See, for example, Richard K. Ashley, “The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Towards a Critical Social Theory of International Politics”, Alternatives, 12 (1987); James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Timothy W. Luke, “Discourses of Disintegration, Texts of Transformation: Re-reading Realism in the New World Order”, Alternatives, 18 (1993); idem, “Governmentality and Contragovernmentality: Rethinking Sovereignty and Territoriality after the Cold War”, Political Geography, Vol. 15, Nos. 6/7 (1996); Geraroid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). While presenting forceful interventions against the current (at the time) practice of (Realist) IR, only some of these authors engaged historical material directly, and only some of them applied a governmentality perspective. To my knowledge, there have been no explicitly governmentality-inspired analyses of any part of the early modern European state system.

66. We will leave pastoral power out of the discussion.

67. Sennelart, op. cit., p. 398, n. 98.

69. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 6.

68. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 5. According to Foucault, raison d'État “was broadly formed during the sixteenth century” (ibid., p. 4), but the assertion that the state was self-sufficient stands quite clearly at odds with the thought of one of the central figures of late 16th/early 17th-century reason of state, Justus Lipsius. Justus Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, translated into English by William Jones (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, [1594]1970). Cf. Oestreich, op. cit.; Halvard Leira, “Justus Lipsius, Neostoicism and the Disciplining of 17th Century Statecraft”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2008), pp. 669–692.

70. A.O. Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 51.

71. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 194.

73. Koselleck, op. cit., p. 21, cf. p. 197.

72. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 290.

74. I owe this formulation to Benjamin de Carvalho.

75. Cf. Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). It is worth noting that “foreign affairs” can be found in use in English as early as 1611, but that “foreign policy” would not appear until 1804, perhaps suggesting that whereas the polity could have interactions with like units in the early 17th century, regularised and planned interaction would have to wait until the early 19th century.

76. An obvious caveat must be mentioned immediately; the European aristocracy (to some extent including royalty) was to a large degree cosmopolitan, and were almost in sole control of diplomacy and higher military positions.

77. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 5.

78. See, in particular, Andreas Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

79. Bartelson, op. cit., pp. 137–139.

80. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 290.

81. On this see, in particular, the works of Krasner and Osiander: Stephen Krasner, “Westphalia and All That”, in Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane (eds.), Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); idem, “Compromising Westphalia”, International Security, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1995/96), pp. 115–151; Osiander, op. cit.; idem, “Sovereignty, International Relations and the Westphalian Myth”, International Organization, Vol. 55, No. 2 (2001), pp. 251–287.

82. It should be noted that Foucault does acknowledge that some states are “more equal” than others, but the regulating framework is still said to be sovereignty; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 297–298.

83. Evgeny Roshchin, “The Concept of Friendship: From Princes to States”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2006), p. 615.

84. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 7.

85. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 290.

86. Lipsius, op. cit.

87. Oestreich, op. cit.

88. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 299.

89. Richard Little, The Balance of Power in International Relations: Metaphors, Myths and Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Torbj⊘rn L. Knutsen, “The Rise of Balance-of-power as an Ordering Institution”, Paper presented at the 48th ISA convention, Chicago, Illinois, 2007.

90. Osiander, The States System of Europe, op. cit.; Knutsen, op. cit.

91. Little, op. cit.

92. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 300–302.

93. See, for example, Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Halvard Leira, “At the Crossroads—Justus Lipsius and the Early-modern Development of International Law”, Leiden Journal of International Law, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2007), pp. 65–88.

94. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 302–305.

95. Ibid., pp. 309–310, nn. 26–30.

96. Anghie, op. cit.

97. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 305–306.

98. Oestreich, op. cit.; Leira, “Justus Lipsius, Neostoicism and the Disciplining of 17th Century Statecraft”, op. cit. and works quoted therein.

100. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 314–315. Foucault gives the Concert of Europe as an example of this, but one is tempted also to relate it to “a balance of power that favors freedom”.

99. On “police”, see in general Oestreich op. cit.

101. The de-differentiation suggests that Foucault might at some level have built on the distinction between inside and outside that has been deconstructed in IR over the last two decades (see, in particular, Walker, op. cit.), particularly since he differentiates much more clearly between the periods of intra-state governmentality, and since the changes between the epistemes of the different ages in question here are central in his earlier writings (such as The Order of Things).

102. Although not a categorical one—we should expect to find self-reflective governmental practices earlier as well, although not in systematic patterns.

103. Bartelson, op. cit., pp. 137–139.

105. Foucault, op. cit., “What Our Present Is”, pp. 138–139.

104. Foucault, op. cit., Security, Territory, Population, p. 354.

106. Der Derian, op. cit.

107. A good introduction can be found in Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

108. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 316.

109. Ashley, op. cit.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Halvard Leira

Thanks are due to the two anonymous reviewers for insightful and stimulating comments, and Nicholas Kiersey for pulling this issue together and keeping spirits up. Full responsibility for any misunderstandings or errors remains with the author.