Authoritarianism, Governmentality and the COVID-19 Response

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic raises important questions about biopolitics and governmentality, not least, what are the limitations of governing through not governing too much? Important questions concern the role of the state, citizenship, privacy, and concerns about populist movements and personal freedom. The pandemic challenges the idea that liberal government is the most effective way to care for populations while raising the spectre of an underlying authoritarianism. Indeed, the triangle of governance, sovereignty and discipline remains the most effective way to conceptualise the current situation. The article will explore how authoritarian elements underlie liberal governmentality while noting the paradox that this might not necessarily be such a bad thing if it enhances pastoral care for the population.

KEYWORDS:

• Governmentality
• foucault
• COVID-19 pandemic
• authoritarianism

It is well noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated new thinking on biopolitics, governmentality and other Foucauldian concerns (Hannah, Hutta, and Schemann 2020; Sarasin 2020). Whether the pandemic itself is a game-changer remains to be seen. It might be the case that it has accelerated processes that were already underway – notably digital transformation, restrictions on movement, issues around civil rights, populism and authoritarian trends. It has raised questions about the different roles and responsibilities of the state, ideas of citizenship and social obligations, the role and functioning of the market and private sphere, digitisation and the collection of data, privacy and transparency and particularly where strong populist movements are present, personal freedom and libertarianism. The pandemic has also thrown into light one of the main claims of liberal governmentality, namely the need for limitations on government and the promotion of governance from a distance. From a biopolitics perspective, it also raises the question of the most effective way to “care” for the population and secure their health, welfare and well-being.

This contribution is not so much about how states have responded to the pandemic, although it is focused primarily on the state since one thing the pandemic has done is highlight the state's importance. The concern below is more about configurations of government and biopolitics within the state. Rather than looking at different examples – although there is some discussion about the UK response to the pandemic – the idea is to raise wider questions about how states operate in the face of significant challenges. Whether all the above-mentioned issues can be dealt with under the umbrella of governmentality or even biopolitics is highly debatable. Rather than trying to find a means of fully capturing all these complex developments and debates, the most fruitful task, as we continue to witness the post-pandemic fallout, is to take stock and try and discern certain trends and areas for conceptual interrogation. While much focus has rightly been given to the failures of neoliberal markets in coping with the pandemic and its requirements for medical care, equipment provision and rapid deployment of resources (e.g. Zebrowski and Chmutina 2020), attention should equally be given to the failures of neoliberal governmentality as it relates to the governing and management of populations, particularly during periods of intense crisis. Meanwhile, the issue of “authoritarian” responses to the pandemic has raised its head both in relation to “non-liberal” countries like China and supposedly liberal countries in the West.

The article will proceed by outlining how authoritarian elements in fact always underlie liberal forms of governmentality, starting with Foucault's well-known views on the sovereignty, discipline, and governance relationship and the work of Dean, Hindess and others in their identification of authoritarian governmentality within the liberal tradition. The notion of not governing too much will be contrasted with more interventionist and coercive forms of state power as well as the duties and responsibilities of the state in relation to its pastoral role of care for the population. This takes us into the territory of biopolitics, disciplinary power and their complex relationship to governmentality. We will also highlight how care for the population during the pandemic was linked to the crucial matter of state legitimacy. While the exercise of pastoral power may well be a good thing, we note that the reasons for caring for the population may well be more motivated by maintaining legitimacy, while the methods used might well be described as “authoritarian pastoralism.” Indeed, a recent argument is that during crisis moments political legitimacy may actually require authoritarian governance (Mittiga 2022). Rather than considering the pandemic as something in its own right, we consider it as a revealing process (Bratton 2021), re-casting governmentality alongside disciplinary and sovereign forms of power while also revealing paradoxical issues relating to authoritarianism and the merits of state coercion of populations in the interests of saving lives and protecting the vulnerable, even while the main concern might be maintaining the legitimacy of sovereign power.

Governmentality in context

Governmentality is frequently understood as governing through freedom or not governing too much. Foucault patiently outlines how this emerges in European thinking in the eighteenth century (Foucault 2001, 220). For those who have analysed Foucault's arguments, this is essentially what characterises liberal governmentality. These liberal forms of governmentality can be distinguished from non-liberal forms of rule on the basis of their “conception of limited government characterized by the rule of law that would secure the rights of individual citizens” (Dean 2009, 173).

The pandemic shows the limitations of the limitations. It has shown that governing through not governing too much is unable to deal with serious shocks and stresses that require a decisive, coordinated, perhaps forceful response and that governing through freedom such as by encouraging responsibilised behaviour often does not produce the intended public outcomes, particularly if targeted at “individual citizens.” Indeed, liberal governmentality and neoliberal individualism have been exposed. This much we can detail in the following discussion. However, we can also point to the limitations that are built into governmentality itself and which are well outlined but often overlooked when considering Foucault's account of the emergence of governmentality. This is to see governmentality as already bound up with and limited by the concurrent processes of sovereignty and discipline. The pandemic has laid bare some of these mechanisms. It has highlighted what Foucault calls the governmentalisation of the state (Foucault 2007, 109), more often than not – certainly in the US and UK – not through its successes, but through its failures to act decisively and in a clear and coordinated way. It should be noted, therefore, that in this same passage Foucault goes on to call the governmentalisation of the state a “particularly contorted phenomenon” (Foucault 2007, 109) with the pandemic laying bare precisely those issues (and the confusions they produce in times of emergency) as what is internal or external to the state, how the tactics of governance help define what should or should not fall within the state's domain, what is public and what is private, what falls within the state's competence and other related matters (Foucault 2007, 109).

These passages are among Foucault's best-known, still it is worth going over them to stress that they not only highlight the gradual transition to governmentality, but the continued relevance of sovereignty and disciplinary power even when governmentality is predominant. The transition from a regime dominated by structures of sovereignty to one based on techniques of government that revolve around population is brought about by the development of economic concerns relating to territory and wealth and requiring the birth of a political economy (Foucault 2007, 105). Foucault is explicit in stating that this is not “the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say, of government and he goes on to talk of the ‘triangle' between sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management” (Foucault 2007, 106-7). This means, therefore, not a replacement of disciplinary power and sovereignty, but their recasting in relation to the new concerns of the population and its optimisation which is seen in terms of wealth, health, happiness, prosperity and efficiency. Thus, Foucault never sees governmentality as something clearly separate from sovereignty and discipline and these in turn are inseparable from of the health, welfare and life of populations – i.e. biopolitics (Dean 2009, 30).

This is important when it comes to understanding what the pandemic is doing for liberal governmentality and where the authoritarian elements of this rule are coming from. From the above, it should be clear that they are not coming from the outside but are the exercising of powers already inscribed into modern forms of rule. The above-mentioned phrase “governmentalisation of the state” is useful in this sense for it refers not to governmentality as a fixed and finished condition, but governmentalisation as a process that is ongoing, and which might be understood in relation to differing developments and tendencies within the balance of state-societal relations. Indeed, on this latter point we might add that to understand the governmentalisation of the state we also need to see its flip-side – the state's fabrication of civil society.

To continue with Security, Territory, Population, Foucault indeed refers to governmentality as a tendency: “I understand the tendency, the line of force, that for a long time, and throughout the West, has constantly led towards the pre-eminence overall other types of power – sovereignty, discipline, and so on – of the type of power that we can call “government”” (Foucault 2007, 107). The use of tendency suggests possible counteraction or reversibility in this three-way relationship. Or at least in a causal sense, its development is dependent on the other two variables. Governmentalisation of the state is, therefore, a tendency towards the development of an ensemble of “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics” (Foucault 2007, 107) and of certain related governmental apparatuses (appareils) and forms of knowledge (savoirs). In terms of governing through freedom and from a distance, Foucault sees this as a shift from governing through the imposition of laws, to governing through the encouragement of “dispositions.” As he writes:

This word “disposer” is important because, that enabled sovereignty to achieve its aim of obedience to the laws, was the law itself; law and sovereignty were absolutely united. Here, on the contrary, it is not a matter of imposing a law on men, but of the disposition of things, that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, or, of as far as possible employing laws as tactics; arranging things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means (Foucault 2007, 99).

This is important when considering such developments as tendencies rather than definite ends. It raises the question of how these dispositions are to be maintained, whether the tactics can always be employed effectively and what happens when things go wrong? Again, this is where the pandemic has introduced an element of uncertainty. The “instruments of government will become diverse tactics rather than laws;” however, this is dependent on “the perfection, maximisation, or intensification of the processes [government] directs” (Foucault 2007, 99). Foucault says that consequently law recedes, but this should not necessarily be so. Not if these tactics cannot achieve their ends as has been shown during such moments of crisis and emergency. If these tactics do not work, as understood in relation to their perfection, maximisation and intensification, then it might be the tactics of indirect governance that we see receding, while law and other more direct or coercive mechanisms once more start advancing. This must be so if we take seriously Foucault's comments about the triangle between sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management. This also suggests that we should be careful of overemphasising the use of “tactics” while losing sight of the wider “strategy” that might lie behind this.

It is this triangle that allows us to make sense of varieties of governmentality if that is the right term to use. Perhaps what we see is not so much varieties of governmentality as varieties of the triangle between governmentality, disciplinary power and sovereign authority. However this is posed, we can see that it is a useful way to conceptualise the balance between more direct and less direct management of populations. This was already an issue before the pandemic when scholars were seeking to understand such things as “Chinese governmentality” (Jeffreys 2009; Han 2021) and the forceful introduction of liberal technologies of governance in non-Western contexts. It has also been used to talk about the features of colonial rule in the past and its continuation into the present. However, the pandemic reminds us that this way of understanding is required to make sense not only of the features of “authoritarian governmentality” present in China or (post) colonial relations – to single these out for special treatment would be to adopt a mentality more consistent with their reproduction rather than their careful consideration – but to understand the shifting balance towards authoritarian governance within the so-called liberal democracies, particularly during moments of crisis.

To summarise thus far, we might consider three options which in turn might work in combination. One would be to consider varieties of governmentality ranging from the liberal to the authoritarian. Another would be to maintain the position that governmentality tends to be of a liberal character but that it finds itself in a triangle with sovereign and disciplinary forms of power. A third option which we explore below is that it is within liberalism itself that these authoritarian forms exist.

The authoritarian side of liberal governmentality

Liberal governmentality is relational to non-liberal strategies which might be considered as either non-liberal governmentality or governmentality's complex positioning alongside disciplinary power and sovereignty. If we see this as a spectrum, then we can compare such an understanding to Dean's important work on authoritarian governmentality. In this section, we draw heavily on a particular strand of arguments found in the contributions of Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess, before asking some questions about their applicability. In outlining his position, Dean states that authoritarian governmentality can be seen as made up of elements of both biopolitics and sovereignty and that, like more liberal forms of governmentality, authoritarian forms are located somewhere along the trajectory of the governmentalisation of the state (Dean 2009, 155).

We have seen that liberal governmentality is based on a conception of individual freedom. However, this emphasis on governing through freedom necessarily entails a distinction between those deemed capable of responsibly exercising that freedom and those who, to put it in mild terms, might need guidance. According to Dean's conceptualisation, liberal governmentality does not stand entirely separate from authoritarian governmentality but in fact entails it: “The former's emphasis on governing through freedom means that it always contains a division between those who are capable of bearing the responsibilities and freedoms of mature citizenship and those who are not” (Dean 2009, 171). This latter group are subject to a “despotic provision for their special needs” which sometimes may take the form of “good despotism” and sometimes open coercion, containment, confinement and even elimination, particularly if these groups are deemed not to have any value (Dean 2009, 171). Mainly, however, this is about managing those groups deemed unable to exercise responsible freedom and who must therefore be governed as obedient rather than free subjects (Dean 2009, 155).

It should be noted that this is a permanent question in all societies, hence the appeal of applying these arguments to “authoritarian” states like China. Hindess defines those subjected to this form of rule as those whose conduct is seen as falling below the “civilised norm” and who must therefore be subject to discipline before they can be considered capable of responsible self-government. Within liberal societies, this group would include children (and hence we might define it as a paternalistic form of discipline), the unemployed (which introduces ideas of duty and obligation) and deviant members of the metropolitan societies (a normative question) and which is increasingly mobilised against (minority) fellow-citizens (populism and hyperpartisanism) (see Simon 2023). It also importantly includes the practice of colonial rule (Hindess 2001, 104) and should be of no surprise that liberal political reason and authoritarian or despotic rule are joined, in Hindess's words, like two sides of the same coin (Hindess 2001, 94). This is exactly the point made by critics of liberalism, particularly by Marxist and postcolonial scholars in the discipline of International Relations who argue that liberalism's colonialist expansion depends upon the notion of non-liberal people (justified in classical writings such as Locke) who lack maturity and development and can be therefore subjected to colonial governance and exploitation (Jahn 2018).

Writing on this relationship Hindess states:

Liberal political reason has been as much concerned with paternalistic rule over minors and adults judged to be incompetent as with the government of autonomous individuals, as much concerned with the subject peoples of imperial possessions as with the free inhabitants of Western states. Western colonial rule has long since been displaced, but its paternalistic perspective remains influential both in the programs of economic and political development promoted by international agencies and the governmental practices adopted by independent, postcolonial states (Hindess 2001, 94 and 95).

Liberalism, we know, is required to define itself against a non-liberal other. This is an issue of international relations, used to justify imperialism and colonial rule as well as recent forms of global governance that draw on ideas like good governance, democratisation, failed states and the turn to notions like neotrusteeship (Fearon and Laitin 2004) which neatly captures the paternalistic attitudes behind discourses of global governance. It is also a strong feature of the internal societal relations within supposed liberal democracies. For Dean, within liberal forms of government:

there is a long history of people who, for one reason or another, have been deemed not to possess or to display the attributes (e.g. autonomy, responsibility) required of the juridical and political subject of rights and who have therefore been subjected to all sorts of disciplinary, bio-political and even sovereign interventions. The list of those so subjected would have included at various times those furnished with the status of the indigent, the degenerate, the feeble-minded, the aboriginal, the homosexual, the delinquent, the dangerous, or even, and much more generally, the minor. (Dean 2009, 158)

The governmentalisation of the state requires what we termed its flip side – the fabrication of civil society – and these state-societal relations concerning what is inside or outside the state and the norms of liberal government requiring coercive enforcement through policing liberal rationality. This relates to who is or is not capable of bearing the freedoms and responsibilities of liberal or bourgeois citizenship. For Dean, those who are “deemed not to possess the characteristics necessary for such a task … are thus liable to a range of disciplinary, sovereign and other interventions” (Dean 2009, 159) while for Neocleous, well-known for his work on police and security, those subject to police power are the ones who constitute a threat to social ordering and thus require disciplining into society (Neocleous 2014, 134). Finally, for Hindess, authoritarianism, or what he calls the “government of unfreedom”, plays an important part both in the government of those states claiming a commitment to the maintenance and defence of individual liberty, and in asserting the power of governance over other states in the realm of international politics (Hindess 2001, 94).

The point is that liberal governance, both domestic and international, depends upon “authoritarian foldings” (Dean 2002, 40) to maintain its principles of limited governance and individual liberty, to govern through freedom while maintaining obligations and to construct civil society as “exterior” to the state. In fact, civil society and state are not separate, but represent overlapping spheres conceived as an ensemble of techniques and technologies of governance and multiple and contested identities (Jessop 2020, 233).

Given this complexity, it is the very attempt to place limitations on the sphere of governance and to construct civil society as a counterpart to the state that makes liberalism reliant on authoritarian techniques and practices.

Dean usefully sees this duality in terms of the entwined facilitative and authoritarian sides of liberal governance (Dean 2002, 40). Civil society is constituted as exterior to the formal governance of the state, but the enactment of liberal governance through civil society requires authoritarian techniques of enforcement and non-liberal interventions in relation to those unable to play by liberal rules. In relation to the pandemic, we can see Covid-19 as something of an external shock (albeit its full monstrosity is a product of unchecked neoliberalism) that has worked to highlight these processes and what those following Agamben (1998) would call the “bare life” that lies behind them. It has shed light on the processes of inclusion and exclusion and the relationship between sovereign power and the bare lives of its citizens. It has shown that the above-mentioned “triangle” of sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality is very much at work when it comes to urgent state-led responses to emergencies and the corresponding state-led decisions about how to treat different sections of the population.

Authoritarian pastoralism

Pastoral power is another of Foucault's contested terms. Whether it is relevant to today is a matter for debate given that it is strongly connected to the Christian Church and presented as a proto-governmental regime foreshadowing later governmentality's focus on individuals and populations (Foucault (2007, 169–171; Martin and Waring 2018, 1299). However, a case can be made that, like the relation between liberalism, authoritarianism and sovereignty, so pastoral power is not replaced but reconfigured as a form of concern for populations and individuals. This updates the idea of the pastor caring for the “flock” while also maintaining those elements of power with a more disciplinary and subjectifying character. The Christian origins of pastoralism may be problematic but might be overcome with an updated emphasis on worldly achievements such as health, wealth and wellbeing. As Foucault writes,

We may observe a change in its objective. It was no longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world but rather ensuring it in this world. And in this context, the word “salvation” takes on different meanings: health, well-being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents. A series of “worldly” aims took the place of the religious aims of the traditional pastorate (Foucault 1982, 784)

This understanding also allows a better fit with non-Western cases today such as might be found in the response of the Chinese state to the Covid-19 pandemic. These examples embody both a concern for the population, and a strong exercising of discipline and authority. We will therefore use the term “authoritarian pastoralism” to draw attention to these two sides of this form of power – discipline, surveillance and subjectification on one side, care and concern on the other. A focus on Western responses also draws attention to the way that states treat different sections of the population according to their ability to exercise their freedom responsibly and to behave according to liberal norms. An “authoritarian” response to different social groups is particularly evident during an event like a pandemic where responsible behaviour is required – notably mask-wearing, social distancing and self-isolating – and where certain norms relating to health and hygiene are to be adhered to. Those deemed to fall outside these “civilised” norms and expectations of personal and social conduct are deemed legitimate objects of intervention and policing, particularly if they pose a threat to social ordering and the safety and security of others, as often noted during the pandemic.

At the same time the “pastoral” element notes that governments and social bodies must decide who is worthy of protection, another side of intervention that carries a health and welfare-related responsibility of the socio-political body.

Authoritarian pastoralism thus has a dual responsibility for intervention and policing of populations as revealed during the pandemic. First, to act “in the interests of the social body” to discipline, control and manage those sections of the population deemed not capable of exercising legitimate responsibility or able to conform to the norms of responsible behaviour – exceptional or otherwise. Second, a duty of pastoral care to those sections of the population deemed to be vulnerable or at risk and who need the protection of the state or the social body. This, on the face of it, is a progressive function, a recognition of the state's duty of care for the people, but it also entails the authoritarian and disciplinary power of differentiation. We therefore find two simultaneous processes of differentiation – on the one hand, the differentiation of those capable of exercising responsible behaviour, on the other hand, the differentiation of groups to determine those deemed worthy of care and protection. In both cases this is driven by a paternalistic logic that may vary in response, ranging from “good despotism” through to open coercion, containment and confinement.

Here may lay one of the issues behind the superficial distinction between the responses in the East and the West. Within China and elsewhere there may be a greater expectation for paternalistic intervention by the state into people's lives according to a pastoral logic of duty of care for the population. This could be termed authoritarian or perhaps, to avoid pejorative labelling, the exercising of authority by a “total state”. By contrast, in certain Western countries like the USA and UK, there is a more pervasive neoliberal counter-logic that stresses the importance of the market and individual enterprise, therefore differentiating their populations according to social or economic “usefulness”. The particular implications of this can be discussed at some length, but the underlying point concerns the politics of differentiation and the underlying authoritarian logic inherent in all liberal forms of governmentality that determines not only who has what duties and responsibilities, but also, in more extreme circumstances, those who are deemed worthy and have the right to care and ultimately the right to live or die. Thus, neoliberal and libertarian ideas drive the view that certain sections of the population were considered “expendable” or even, as Taskale puts it, “the biopolitical economy becomes more prominent, making plain that the valuation of life is based on its sacrificability to capital” (Taşkale 2022, 276).

However, this view should be tempered by the way that early pandemic responses lacked the coherence of a strategy, whether in favour of capital, the rich and wealthy, the individual, or any other privileged element. Instead, these responses wavered between libertarian laissez-faire and more coercive forms of intervention to protect vested interests. This is consistent with the view that liberalism and neoliberalism are to be understood as employing coercive mechanisms to ensure liberal norms of conduct – something that is particularly important during an emergency or disruptive event. However, it is also the case that not everything can be reduced to a liberal or neoliberal logic. The crisis generated by the pandemic has revealed different, often conflicting dynamics including care for the population as central to the legitimacy of the state and justification for its interventions. Most notably, the UK government of Boris Johnson came in for significant public criticism not only for its incompetence and mishandling of the pandemic, but its perceived callousness in its approach to care for vulnerable sections of the population deemed expendable according to neoliberal standards of economic usefulness (Guardian 2020).

The UK's pandemic doctrine, as Bourgeron (2022) notes, had been based on behavioural economics and radically individualistic healthcare doctrines that reduce public health issues to individual responsibility (Bourgeron 2022, 405). This explains the popularity of concepts like resilience and individual wellbeing and why the UK's pandemic response was initially articulated through the notion of “herd immunity”. As Finkenbusch (2024) argues, this is approach is a low-cost way of avoiding state intervention and evading government responsibility. However, it backfired, and the government was forced to revert to a more traditional public health response of vaccinations as well as non-pharmaceutical interventions such as lockdowns. A similar argument is made by Jones and Hameiri (2022). They note how “the government's technocratic policy framework also swiftly collapsed on contact with popular sentiment”. While technocrats decided in initially on a laissez-faire approach based on the belief that controlling the pandemic was impossible, public indignation forced a very swift abandonment of this approach (Jones and Hameiri 2022, 1042).

This reveals the two-way dynamic of responsibilities and obligations. Indeed, if sovereignty persists as part of Foucault's triangle of forms of rule, then the very legitimacy of the state might be at stake in relation to how it handles something as serious and challenging as a pandemic. This two-way dynamic of responsibilities and obligations is captured by the twin Foucauldian notions of the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game both of which have been strained by the pandemic (Foucault 1988). The city-citizen game has been described above in terms of the expectation that the subject is self-governing. We have seen that this particular game requires a particular type of liberal subject. We will discuss below how those who are unable to play by these particular rules are subjected to various practices that divide populations according to whether they have the attributes to play the game (Dean 2009, 156, 162). This might be seen more clearly in initial responses to the pandemic.

Alongside the city-citizen game is the shepherd – flock game which, as Dean explains, is intimately related to Foucault's notions of biopolitics and pastoral power. This is “a pastoral power that takes the form of a bio-politics of the administration of life and a form of sovereignty that deploys the law and rights to limit, to offer guarantees, to make safe and, above all, to legitimate and justify the operations of bio-political programmes and disciplinary practices” (Dean 2009, 256). Giving this type of power the title of pastoral invokes a Christian tradition of caring for the “flock” (Foucault 2007) and looking after its well-being by means of acquiring an intimate knowledge of its characteristics, needs and requirements.

While there might be an individualising element to this form of power-knowledge, the universal imperative of compassion and care tends to be neglected by critics (Dean and Villadsen 2016, 114).

Therefore, it should be emphasised that there is a very positive element to this form of power that is currently being missed by those critiques of the biopolitics of pandemics that follow Agamben’s (2021) recent line of criticism. Rather than being an example of a defensive or even paranoid security state, this, and responses to Covid-19, show the state's concern with the health and welfare of citizens. This concern is pastoral in character because it is power exercised over a multiplicity rather than on a territory (Foucault 2007, 129). As Poe notes, pastoral power is the power of care, but of course, the exercise of this power creates all kinds of pathologies (Poe 2020, 46). The state as a pastoral shepherd must cultivate, protect and advance the flock and in so doing, must watch out for dangers, both internal and external – Poe notes the wolf on the outside and the danger of “corruption” from the inside. This requires the policing of the flock to safeguard against corruption, or as governmentality, to encourage the members of the flock to police themselves. Covid-19 can be seen as providing a unique opportunity for the state to further develop policing mechanisms against perceived dangers while reminding citizens of the need to police themselves (Poe 2020, 46). It is perhaps the “on the inside” dimension of this that encourages the mistaken views of Agamben, but this is in fact an intensification or extension of the normal exercise of such powers, not a politics of exception.

It is certainly true though that just as the city-citizen game requires the exercise of disciplinary power towards those unable to conform to liberal norms and expectations, so the shepherd-flock game, despite seeming to be of a pastoral or caring/protective nature, also contains a strong authoritarian impulse. In Dean's view, liberalism can never fully check the “demonic” possibilities contained in such care for the flock (Dean 2009, 256) while for Hannah, the logic of biopower might be oriented towards the good of the population, but this is nevertheless manifested in complex exercises of power and interventions in social life that can be problematic, contradictory and contestable (Hannah, Hutta, and Schemann 2020, 5). Again, this is revealed by the pandemic and the problematic issue of how to deal with those who are either unable (protection) or unwilling (punishment) to care for themselves or meet the societal standards of public health.

What Poe calls internal corruption might, post-pandemic, be rephrased as contamination. This relates to Dean's point about those who might not possess the attributes required to play the city – citizen game and the fear (enhanced by pandemic conditions) that the lack of responsible autonomy among some might spread to ever-larger sections of the population (Dean 2009, 162). One way to deal with this is a tried and trusted measure, used since the Middle Ages in times of plague and sickness. This is to categorise and classify different sections of the population and to divide it up into different groups.

This is necessarily an authoritarian process that makes decisions over what it is to count as a liberal “free subject” and who is to be treated as such. As Dean writes, there are two aspects to this process – subjects and subject: “The first and most obvious way concerns those practices and rationalities that will divide populations and exclude certain categories from the status of the autonomous and rational person. The second is the way in which the free subject of liberalism is divided against him or herself in so far as the condition of a mature and responsible use of freedom entails a domination of aspects of the self” (Dean 2009, 156).

These divisions work according to liberal assumptions about who is considered a rational subject and paternalist considerations as to who might need guidance concerning what is in their best interests. As Dean's neat turn of phrase explains, this is a mode of government “that acts in the best interests of those who cannot act in their own best interests” (Dean 2002, 48). It requires the acquisition of specialist knowledge relating to the pathologies, dependencies and exceptions to be balanced against the abstract and universal freedoms protected by legal powers and liberal order (Dean 2002, 57).

For Foucault, those requiring specialist methods of knowledge and governance include those with certain mental and physical illnesses, those with certain drug addictions and significant sections of the elderly. It also includes those who are chronically welfare-dependent, and it is here that the use of authoritarian methods within liberal democracies is clear. One aspect to consider would be the use of methods learned from colonial governmentality. Another familiar image would be that of Victorian workhouses and poor laws. However, we should also note the more recent neoliberal emphasis on freedom and opportunity, most graphically illustrated by the New Labour government of Tony Blair in the UK which used the language of Foucauldian governmentality to emphasise how individuals have no rights without responsibilities, invoking a notion of a strong civil society where individuals have duties as well as rights (Fairclough 2000, 40). Indeed, long-term welfare dependents have a duty to society, to act to help themselves and to show individual enterprise and initiative (Fairclough 2000, 64). The authoritarian impulse of neoliberal welfare policy in the UK famously withdrew the right to be “unemployed” and instead required welfare dependents to become active “jobseekers.”

This should be contrasted with non-liberal approaches to welfare not because these have differing degrees of authoritarianism, but because non-liberal pastoralism does not invoke this particular notion of the liberal subject. As mentioned at the beginning, whether all this can be covered under the umbrella of governmentality is debatable. The dividing line between what is governmentality and what is biopolitics, along with the different configurations of the sovereignty, discipline, governmentality triangle, is a complex matter. This should also raise a few questions about whether there can be such a thing as “Chinese governmentality” since without the appeal to a liberal subject and governing through the freedom of the individual this sounds a lot closer either to biopolitics, or the sovereign and discipline elements of the triangle.

If we follow the discussions around the response to the pandemic, then what is seen as distinctive about the Chinese state's approach to governing its population is the reliance on more direct and coordinated methods of intervention. This is a longstanding characteristic, outlined by Dean as such:

The Chinese policy thus inscribes sovereign elements (of decree, interdiction, punishment and reward) within a detailed bio-political intervention into the intimate lives of its population. It does this not in the name of the fatherland, blood and racial purity, but in terms of the targets envisaged by the plan. On one point, it is clear that the Chinese policy is nonliberal in that it does not rely on the choices, aspirations or capacities of the individual subject. This does not stop it having some similarity with early liberal policies, particularly Malthusian informed poor policies. In both cases, the process of economic liberalization and the recommendation of prudential procreation are linked. (Dean 2009, 168)

However, we will now go on to explore non-liberal and authoritarian aspects of the Western states in order to dispel any simplistic distinctions between East and West. A somewhat similar point has been made by Sotiris (2020) in describing this distinction as a simplification that reduces the dilemma of how to respond to Covid-19 to a choice between authoritarian biopolitics and a liberal reliance on persons making rational individual choices. As we have seen, liberal societies reserve the right to decide who should be considered capable of making rational individual choices, using greater degrees of coercion in relation to sections of the population. While it might superficially seem that China is better able to make use of sovereign power to impose lockdowns and increase surveillance, are such measures to be considered any more authoritarian than neoliberal responses that make decisions on the right to life and death while considering certain sections of the population as dispensable? To see things differently might be to consider whether the Chinese state makes more use of pastoral power, whether, being a “total state”, its legitimacy relies more on its ability to care for the flock. These are not easy questions to answer, but one effect of the pandemic has been to turn such questions back upon Western societies themselves so that the contrast between East and West only further raises questions about authoritarianism within the liberal states. We will now explore this through arguments about visibility and necropolitics, a term which we do not particularly favour, but which has been used a lot to analyse the pandemic.

Discipline, visibility and necropolitics

The connection between biopolitics and visibility is highlighted in a useful intervention by Matthew Hannah. During emergencies such as the pandemic, we can see a clear shift from governmentality to disciplinary power as expressed through the act of making it visible: “A core principle of disciplinary power is the comprehensive visibility of human bodies and behaviours to authority. Observation of behaviour forms the basis for carefully calibrated proportionalities between infringements of rules and corresponding punishment” (Hannah, Hutta, and Schemann 2020, 2).

This again points to the need to recognise the limits of governmentality as a means of managing populations during crises. To the extent that subjects cannot internalise the required responses to the pandemic, it is required that they be rendered more visible in order to be more directly managed. The biopolitical means of doing this also return us to Foucault's “triangle” of governmentality, sovereignty and discipline. Relating this to the politics of “making live” and “letting die”, Hannah describes how states have sought the “re-biologisation” of their populations. Again, this need not be seen as a negative thing if the aim is to keep as many people alive as possible. What it does mark is a return to the more familiar tools of state sovereignty – orders, decrees, use of police and military to enforce restrictions, forbidding certain activities, and passing or suspending various laws. Hannah writes that “‘making live’ points to the fact that the life of the population, its economic activity, health, family structures, hygiene, nutrition, demographic characteristics, etc., have come to be seen as positive targets of state activity” (Hannah, Hutta, and Schemann 2020, 4). We should place emphasis here on the word “seen”. In that sense, sovereign tools are used biopolitically to render populations visible in order to better impose discipline and social order. This is a far cry from the latest thinking on governing from a distance or promoting individual resilience in the face of uncertainty and unknowability (Joseph 2013; Finkenbusch 2024). Rather, it is an attempt to provide clarity, precision and predictability. As Hannah writes:

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that the practices and structures of urban quarantine implemented in 17th-century Europe to combat outbreaks of the plague clearly illustrate the principles of disciplinary power. The entire population is meticulously fixed in place, registered and rendered visible in an urban space divided unambiguously into reporting districts. (Hannah, Hutta, and Schemann 2020, 3)

Today we see tactics like lockdowns, quarantine and contact tracing that are not that far removed from these tactics, although the technologies of implementation are significantly enhanced by digitalisation. The ever-present ontological threats of uncertainty and unknowability are countered by such efforts to provide visibility and predictability. Indeed, if we follow Sarasin’s (2020) argument, increased ability to provide knowability allows for a shift from a “plague model” of total shutdown – seen in Wuhan and in lesser form with various curfews and lockdowns – to a “smallpox model” where large amounts of data and digital technology (South Korea and Singapore are good examples) allow isolation and control to replace full lockdowns. This could gradually give way to governance through various liberal norms of conduct – notably the observation of social distancing – that allow for a restoration of liberal freedoms.

In the management of this process, the very legitimacy of sovereign power is on the line. The state must be seen to be in control of the situation and provide reassurance to those who look to it for answers. The “care” behind this concern for populations is less driven by kindness and concern than by the protection of the state's legitimacy through the restoration of order and then the restoration of social norms of conduct.

The pastoral element, we also clearly see, is an impulse drawn from colonial or authoritarian approaches to governance based on dividing practices, categorisations and distinctions between the included and excluded, the more and less privileged, those to be granted more freedoms and others to be subjected to tougher measures (Hannah, Hutta, and Schemann 2020, 14). Biopolitics, as Lorenzini (2021) argues, is always a politics of differential vulnerability. Indeed, it structurally relies on practices of social differentiation and the construction of hierarchies. The pandemic highlights the exposure of certain groups to significantly higher health and social risks. Racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination make such differential exposure a “condition of acceptability” (Lorenzini 2021), or as Sandset puts it, we need to “better understand how pandemics and health disparities are the results of a necropolitics that is not only a state of exception but rather a state of acceptance” (Sandset 2021, 1414).

Necropolitics is a contentious term. It is not our intention to deploy it here, but its pertinence should be recognised as should competing interpretations which might affect how we understand the pandemic. In particular, Sandset interprets the necropolitics of the pandemic as a state of acceptance of slow deaths rather than a state of exception and more direct violence. We can accept a general definition of necropolitics derived from Foucault as meaning the sovereign's capacity to decide over life and death (Foucault 1978, 135–159). Foucault later clearly links this to a discussion of racism, arguing that “racism justifies the death function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger” (Foucault 2003, 258) and that this depends on a process of “othering” the inferior, the abnormal and degenerate (Foucault 2003, 255). This is a precondition of a normalising society and is the basis upon with Mbembe develops his notable account of necropolitics which clearly links it to colonialism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, Nazism and modern colonial occupation (Mbembe 2003). It is also linked to a state of exception, tying in with the work of Giorgio Agamben. However, Agamben's more recent claim that the pandemic is a means to justify the use of exceptional measures directed against the poor and dispossessed (Agamben 2021) can be challenged by the other reading of necropolitics as slow death. Of course, the two approaches can both be in play – exceptional decisions over who has the right to live or die on the one hand, acceptance of the inevitability that more vulnerable groups within society will be exposed to a slow violence faced on an everyday basis. The latter is something already playing out prior to the pandemic in the politics of dealing with refugees, asylum seekers and victims of war (Wahab 2022, 1). On the second view, as Sandset argues (2021, 1414), it is not exceptional violence, but a slow violence that is gradual, more dispersed and less visible. Indeed, returning to the issue of visibility, we might say that the exercise of disciplinary power during the pandemic is aimed at rendering bodies more visible in order to exercise power directly, yet the underlying social distinctions between these bodies – the health disparities between groups, the racialised disparities and the gender disparities – are simultaneously rendered less visible so that slow violence is more acceptable.

In any case, the concern of this article is not to define necropolitics but to look at the related issue of differential treatment of social groups and the resonance of authoritarian and disciplinary forms of power even as liberal discourses of free conduct are being articulated. Even what might seem like a laissez-faire policy like “heard immunity” can have behind it a calculated and deliberate decision to sacrifice the most vulnerable groups as expendable for the sake of others (Taskale 2022, 279). Racialisation, discrimination and precarity have meant that certain groups have been more exposed to the risks of Covid-19 due to such things as poor housing, overcrowding and high-risk contacts and occupations, particularly frontline workers. We also see the situation of more women being exposed to domestic violence due to lockdowns. The pandemic is a process of revealing these intersecting issues, highlighting the underlying socio-political structures that create such “necropolitical conditions” (Sandset 2021, 1420), with neoliberalism making some groups and communities more vulnerable and more precarious than others.

However, we should turn back to the question of sovereignty and legitimacy. In the triangular relationship, neoliberal approaches to governance work to undermine the sovereignty of the state so that the pandemic highlighted the inability of the state to respond to emergencies effectively. As Lee argues, the pandemic exposed the inadequacies of neoliberal governance and caused a wider crisis of sovereignty insofar as countries like the United Kingdom and United States were hampered by years of austerity and the privatisation of medical care. This made their responses inadequate and undermined the credibility of the state and the legitimacy of government in the eyes of its citizens. The pandemic has “highlighted a long-term failure among some states to sustain public health, to sustain life, through their commitment to neoliberal agendas to end state welfare in favour of privatization” (Lee 2020). Hence Covid-19 is not simply a medical or epidemiological crisis; it is a crisis of sovereignty itself (Lee 2020; Sandset 2021, 1412).

Conclusion

It has been suggested here that the pandemic is particularly useful in revealing the triangle of sovereignty, discipline and government. The current situation represents a constellation of these three elements in uneven and shifting patterns (Hannah, Hutta, and Schemann 2020, 16). While Agamben and conspiracy theorists would see increased state intervention as a trend towards authoritarianism, a better description is increased “authority” as represented by discipline and sovereign power at the expense of governance from a distance. The UK government initially suggested a policy of “herd immunity” (an ironic term for Foucauldians that might be interpreted as something like “tough love” for the flock), allowing the virus to take its course and accepting as necessary that significant numbers of the most vulnerable would die. Esposito (2020) talks of flock immunity as a form of eugenics since it entails the deaths of many who would overwise live. In part, this rationality might be attributable to a “capital-friendly policy” (Hannah, Hutta, and Schemann 2020, 20) with little thought for the health consequences. In part, it might be considered a deliberate biopolitical policy of autoimmunisation that protects life by allowing the death of a part of the population (Esposito 2020).

The only way out of this seemed to be the implementation of a policy of lockdown prior to the development of a proper vaccine. Sensible Foucauldian commentaries on the appropriate response saw this as risky but still preferable to herd immunity (Esposito 2020). It was also necessary from the point of view of preserving the legitimacy of government. As Sotiris (2020) says, the state may turn in desperation to disciplinary measures drawn from the repertoire of nineteenth-century public health manuals, but simply denouncing public health measures like quarantines and social distancing, as biopolitics, misses their potential usefulness, particularly for the most vulnerable groups that the populist authoritarians would let die. This is well summed by Hannah:

one thing the current crisis demonstrates is that both the preference for liberal means and the tendency to see biopolitical ends (the good of the population) in liberal individualistic terms are contingent and reversible … [and that] in crises, the strategies and techniques of government that emerge from the liberal play of interests may not themselves be “liberal”. As in the current crisis, the population may be temporarily “re-biologized” as a vulnerable, embodied, mortal demographic collectivity. Protecting the re-biologized social body can then seem to require the deployment of discipline, sovereignty and other technologies in various combinations. The current Covid-19 crisis confirms the continued relevance of biopower, the project of protecting the population, of “making live or letting die”, demonstrating that it remains operative, even where it has been submerged or pressed to the margins by neoliberal ideologies. (Hannah, Hutta, and Schemann 2020, 13)

In conclusion, the pandemic does not represent the “return” of disciplinary and sovereign power because these never went away. They have always coexisted with and enabled governmental power and are there to be called upon should the situation require it. This is particularly so during a potential legitimacy crisis. Nor is there anything exceptional about the authoritarian use of power. The productivity of governance from a distance was only ever sustained by the illusion that more restrictive and disciplinary forms of power had disappeared. What Covid-19 has done is showed that the camp, the asylum, prison are never that far away. Indeed, what has happened to populations during the pandemic – measures for their discipline, regulation, classification and control – is something that certain groups, notably refugees coming to Europe, are already subjected to on an everyday basis.

“Freedoms” can be suspended for anyone. That is because governmentality is an ideal type that never exists in a pure form but only ever in combination with other forms of power.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the extensive help of Julia Simon and her useful comments, along with those of Jan Busse and Mitchell Dean, made at the EWIS workshops in Amsterdam.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).