The Appearance of an Interminable Natural History and its Ends Foucault’s Lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics at the Collège de France 1979 (original) (raw)

While the analysis of liberalism fills much of The Birth of Biopolitics, the focus of Foucault’s discussion is on the dynamic, equivocal and enigmatic contemporary condition at the intersection of welfare governance, biopolitics and neo-liberalism of the late seventies. This article examines The Birth of Biopolitics as a prolongation of Security, Territoriality and Population by analyzing how Foucault frames liberalism in the wider historical context of governmentality. In Foucault’s view, governmentality should be understood as a secular rationalization of the art of government. While the pastoral power of the Catholic Church was wielded against the backdrop of eschatology and the imminence of the end of worldly power, the early modern concept of reason of state brought with it the idea of an interminable history. Governmentality and reason of state spring from an undecided and precarious European balance of power between competing states. In order to measure up to external competi...