The relationship between governmentality and law in Michel Foucault’s thought

Abstract

This article analyzes the text "Governmentality," presented by Michel Foucault in the course Security, Territory, and Population (1978). In this manuscript, Foucault proposes an investigation into the security apparatuses that emerge in modernity and which, in his perspective, reveal a new political problematization centered on the population. By examining the functioning of these apparatuses, the author reconstructs the historical shift in forms of power, moving from sovereignty and discipline to governmentality, understood as a set of techniques and rationalities aimed at guiding conduct. Based on the elements of security, territory, and population, Foucault shows how government ceases to be thought of solely as territorial domination and begins to be oriented towards the management of the biological and social processes that characterize collective life. The transformation of the family model as a reference for the State allows, according to Foucault, the emergence of a liberal art of governing centered on the control of the population. In this process, territory ceases to be a simple physical space and becomes the strategic locus of power relations, defining the ways in which individuals are led and administered. Territoriality, jurisdiction, and circulation thus become essential elements for understanding governmentality. In this way, Foucault demonstrates that the liberal art of governing dismantles the idea, typical of 17th-century classical liberalism, that "laissez-faire" would produce a free market, showing that the very functioning of the market structurally depends on governmental action.