Barry Hindess_Politics as Government_ Michel Foucault's Analysis of Political Reason

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2005 30: 389Alternatives: Global, Local, PoliticalBarry Hindess

Politics as Government: Michel Foucault's Analysis of Political Reason

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Politics as Government:Michel Foucaults Analysisof Political Reason

Barry Hindess*

This article considers Michel Foucaults work on the rationality ofgovernment and the practices in which it has been implemented.Specifically, it develops a critique of Foucaults analysis of politi-cal reason in relation to the governmental significance of elec-toral politics, to liberal commitments to the promotion of indi-vidual liberty, and to the focus on government within states to theneglect of the international system and the problem of sover-eignty. KEYWORDS: political, governmental, partisan politics, lib-eralism, states-system

When, in the conclusion to his Tanner Lectures on Human Values,Michel Foucault tells us that political rationality has grown andimposed itself all throughout the history of Western societies,1 hisuse of the wordpoliticalclearly invokes the classical understandingset out in, for example, Aristotles The Politics, where politicalmeans, quite simply, pertaining to the government of the statethat is, of the polis. Aristotle tells us that the state is by natureclearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole isof necessity prior to the part and that it is a body of citizens suf-ficing for the purposes of life.2 Politics, the government of thestate, seeks to promote the common interest, and political science,Foucaults political reason, considers how that end might best bepursued. In his writings on government, Foucault normally usesthe termpoliticalin precisely this sensethat is, to refer to aspectsof the government of a state. Thus far, it might seem, there is noth-ing particularly unusual, or even interesting, here:politics, political,and related terms are frequently used to refer to the work of gov-erning the population and territory of a state, and Foucaults usageappears to be in line with this conventional practice.

Alternatives 30 (2005), 389413

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*Australian National University. E-mail: [email protected]

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Such an impression could hardly be more misleading. First, asthe subtitle of his Tanner LecturesTowards a Criticism of Polit-ical Reasonsuggests, Foucaults concern is neither to endorse

this conventional usage nor to criticize it on the basis of an alter-native view of how politics itself should be understood. Rather, itis to investigate and, at least in these lectures, to criticize a type ofreason that, in his view, has been particularly influential in the his-tory of Western societies and that, following the usage just noted,could well be described as political. It is a type of reason thattreats the state as the highest of all forms of community,3 andconsequently aims to recruit the government of all lesser commu-nities and, most especially, the government of oneself to its partic-

ular purposes. Thus, while recognizing that this political reasonhas often been criticized for its totalizing effects, Foucault insiststhat its prioritizing of the state also leads to individualizing effectsthat are no less problematic: political reason can be criticized, inhis view, on the grounds that it operates as an oppressive principleof subjectivation.

While Foucault directs his critique at political reason in gen-eral, his analyses are particularly concerned with its early modernand modern manifestationsthat is, with the rationality of gov-

ernment of the modern state. Here he shows that governmentwas once understood more broadly than is usually now the case,and he suggests, in effect, that this early modern understandingcan serve as a particularly revealing device for analyzing morerecent developments. As a result, his use of politicalto refer to thegovernment of a state also carries a somewhat critical and uncon-ventional weight. He insists, in particular, that the work of govern-ing the population and territory of a state is not performed only bythe state itself, that it may be dispersed throughout the population

and performed by a variety of public and private agencies. Thisclaim opens up for examination a sphere of practices that areclearly governmental, in Foucaults expanded sense, but that havebeen neglected by more conventional forms of political analysis.

Foucaults approach has been taken up by students of govern-mental rationalities who have thus explored the various ways inwhich, in the government of contemporary Western states, stateand society, the national population, and the individuals, groups,and organizations within it have been understood both as posing

problems that government has to address and as providing resourcesfor dealing with those problems. The promise of this approach isnicely captured by the title of Nikolas Rose and Peter MillersPolitical Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government.4

The suggestion herethat the state is neither the only, nor always

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the most consequential, center of political power at work withinthe states population and territoryoffers a new perspective onthe traditional liberal concern that the state may be governing too

much, and it thereby opens the way for a powerful and innovativeaccount of liberalism as a rationality of government.

In his writings on government, Foucaults interest is less in thequestion of how politics and related terms should be usedalthough, as noted above, he does offer some tactical suggestionsthan it is in investigating the character of political reason andthe practices in which it has been implicated. This article followsFoucaults lead in this respect, but, since it also offers a critique ofFoucaults analysis of political reason, it does so at a certain remove.

It begins by outlining the Foucaultian treatment of government andits implications for our understanding both of political reason ingeneral and of liberalism as a specific rationality of government.

Such a powerful new perspective on political analysis can hardlyavoid raising issues that have yet to be properly addressed, and thisarticle focuses on three of them. One involves the governmentalsignificance of electoral politics and other forms of what Webercalls politically oriented action, which must surely be regarded asoccupying a central place in the modern government of popula-

tions. We shall see that politically oriented action is a major con-cern of liberal political reason. Another concerns governmental-itys treatment of liberalism, almost in its own terms, as committedto governing through the promotion of suitable forms of individ-ual liberty. A third issue is raised by Foucaults description of politi-cal reason itself, and especially the sense in which modern politicalreason can be said to treat the state as the highest of all. The dif-ficulty here concerns governmentalitys focus on governmentwithin the state and its relative neglect of the international system

of states and the problem of sovereignty.5 I conclude by suggestingthat this issue, too, has important implications for our understand-ing of liberal political reason.

Government

In The Politics, Aristotle uses the term governmentprimarily to de-note the supreme authority in states,6 which suggests that gov-

ernment should be seen as emanating from a single center of con-trol, and contemporary political analysis generally follows thisusage. But he also writes of the government of a wife and childrenand of a household7 and the government of a slave, two forms ofrule that he is careful to distinguish from the government of a

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state. In yet another usage, government may refer to a rule thatone exercises over oneself. Foucault notes that, for all the manydifferences between them, these distinct practices of government

nevertheless share a concern with the way in which the conduct ofindividuals or of groups might be directed. . . . To govern, in thissense, is to structure the possible field of action of others8 or,indeed, of oneself. Thus, while it will often act directly to determinethe behavior of individuals, government also aims to influence theiractions indirectly, by acting on the manner in which they regulatetheir own behavior and the behavior of others. Government, in thissense, is a special case of power: it is a way of acting on the actionsof others, and even of oneself.9

Nevertheless, while noting such differences and continuities,Foucault pays particular attention to one form of government that,from the early modern period onward, has been seen as specialand precise; namely, the particular form of governing which canbe applied to the state as a whole.10 His concern here is both todistinguish this modern art of government from the rule exercisedby feudal magnates, independent cities, the church, and variousothers over the populations of late-medieval Europe and, mostespecially, to show that this modern understanding of government

follows the classical view in treating the state as the highest of all.He notes, for example, that while those who wrote of the art of gov-ernment in the early modern period constantly recall that onespeaks also of governing a household, souls, children, a province,a convent, a religious order, a family, they also treat these otherkinds of government as internal to the state or society, therebyalways giving the government of the latter a superior status.11

Foucaults account of the emergence of the modern art of gov-ernment thus refers back to the Aristotelian view that the govern-

ment of the state has its own distinctive telos, a telos that requiresthat it should have a regard to the common interest.12 It alsopoints forward to the peculiar secularism of the liberal state. Henotes, on the one hand, that those who promoted the art of gov-ernment were careful to distinguish it from the problematic of thePrince, the view that the aim of government is to secure thePrinces ability to keep his principality.13 Rather, they argued, thestate should be governed according to rational principles whichare intrinsic to it.14

On the other hand, he is careful to distinguish the politicalrationality of government, which treats the state as the highest ofall, from the reasoning one finds in theological accounts of rule.When he notes, for example, that Aquinas seeks to derive theorder of government from the order of nature that is ordained by




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God, not from principles that are intrinsic to the work of govern-ing a state, his point is to show that Aquinass model for rationalgovernment is not apolitical one.15What particularly distinguishes

the political art of government, as Foucault describes it, from suchtheological rationalizations of rule is not the view that religion hasno place in the government of a state; rather, it is the insistencethat the place of religion in the government of the state should bedetermined by the interests of the state, not by theology. It is onsuch grounds that Thomasius and Pufendorf, both of whom weredeeply religious, argued in favor of a limited degree of religioustoleration. Their concern was that if the state took on the task ofimposing religious doctrine, it would place itself at risk of being

taken over by one of the more powerful contending sects and thatthe consequent pursuit of sectarian objectives would underminethe interests of the state itself.16

In its promotion of a certain kind of secularism, this early ver-sion of the modern art of government can be seen as one of theprecursors of the modern liberal state. It differs most obviouslyfrom what we now take to be the liberal view of government in rest-ing its case for toleration on the interests of the state, not on therights of the individual. But it also differs from liberalism in a sec-

ond, perhaps more fundamental respect: it takes a broader view ofgovernment itself. The art of government, Foucault tells us:

has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfareof the population, the improvement of its condition, the increaseof its wealth, its longevity, health, etc.; and the means that thegovernment uses to attain those ends are all in some sense imma-nent to the population itself; it is the population itself on whichgovernment will act either directly, through large scale campaigns,or indirectly, through techniques that will make possible, without

the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of birth rates, thedirecting of the flow of population into certain regions or activi-ties, and so on.17

This passage suggests not only that the population will often beignorant of what is being done to it18 by government but alsothat the work of governing the state is not confined to the directaction of the state itself. Much of this work will also be performedby agencies of other kinds, by churches, employers, voluntary asso-

ciations, legal and medical professionals, financial institutions, andso on; in short, by elements of what is now called civil society. Gov-ernment of the state can thus be seen as a pervasive and heteroge-neous activity that is undertaken at a variety of sites within the ter-ritory and population of the state concerned.

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The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European science ofpolice understood the government of the state in precisely suchterms: its ambition was to promote the happiness of society by

deploying state and nonstate agencies to bring all forms of behav-ior under some appropriate kind of regulation.19 When Foucaultcites police science as an important early version of the modern artof government, his point is to show that, while later perspectives onthe government of the state may seem to have adopted more modestregulatory ambitions, the governmental use of both state and non-state agencies has continued. Governmentality, he argues, is atonce internal and external to the state:

[I]t is the tactics of government which make possible the contin-ual definition and redefinition of what is within the competenceof the state and what is not, the public versus the private, etc.20

Thus, far from emanating directly from the agencies of the stateitself, as liberalism tends to suggest, the modern art of governmenttreats these agencies as one set of instruments among others.

This last point brings us to perhaps the most influential aspectof Foucaults work on government; namely, his analysis of liberal-

ism as a specific rationality of government. What particularly dis-tinguishes liberalism, as Foucault describes it, from earlier versionsof the art of government is not the view, which is also shared by thescience of police, that nonstate agencies play an important part inthe life of the population. Rather it is, first, the concern that thestate may be governing too much, that there may be cases inwhich it is needless or harmful for [the state] to intervene.21 Ireturn to this issue in a moment. Second, and no less important,is liberalisms more restricted usage of the term government,which

is now confined to the work of the state and certain of its agen-cies.22 This liberal usage involves a major redefinition of the term:where government was once seen as a ubiquitous work of regula-tion performed by a multiplicity of agencies throughout the popu-lation, it now comes to be identified more narrowly with the workof the state and its agencies. Government is no longer regarded asa field of activity that constitutes and maintains the social orderfrom within, but rather as acting on this order from without. Thehappiness of society remains of fundamental concern, as it was in

the era of police, but since government is now identified with theactivities of the state, it is no longer seen as something that is nec-essarily best served by the actions of government itself.

Foucaults recuperation of an earlier understanding of the gov-ernment of the state thus enables him to offer a fresh perspective




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on the familiar liberal critique of government. Liberalism is re-vealed, not so much as seeking to reduce the size and the scope ofgovernment in its broadest sense, but rather as aiming to change

its form: it is a tactics of government that operates by shifting thework of government from state to nonstate agencies. Liberals oftenpresent themselves as embracing a normative doctrine that regardsthe maintenance of liberty as an end in itself and therefore sees itas setting limits to both the ends and the means of government.Individual liberty plays an important part in Foucaults account ofliberalism, too, but it is seen now in a very different light: the sig-nificance that liberalism attaches to individual liberty, he suggests,is intimately related to a prudential concern that the state might be

governing too much, that the attempt to regulate certain kinds ofbehavior through state agencies might in fact be counterproduc-tive. According to this account, liberal political reason sees indi-vidual liberty as a limit, if not to the legitimate reach of the statethen certainly to its effectiveness. Foucault argues that the image ofthe market plays the role of a test in liberal political thought, alocus of privileged experience where one can identify the effects ofexcessive governmentality.23

In fact, Foucault goes further to suggest that liberalism also sees

individual liberty as a resource: like other forms of political reason,it aims to recruit the government of oneself to its own larger pur-poses, but, unlike the others, it claims to do so in the name of lib-erty. As Nikolas Rose puts it:

The importance of liberalism is not that it first recognized,defined or defended freedom as the right of all citizens. Rather,its significance is that for the first time the arts of governmentwere systematically linked to the practice of freedom.24

Thus in Foucaults view, what particularly distinguishes liberal-ism from governmental rationalities of other kinds is its commit-ment to governing as far as possible through the promotion of cer-tain kinds of free activity and the cultivation among the governedof suitable habits of self-regulation. According to this account, theimage of the market is emblematic: it is seen by liberalism as a de-centralized mechanism of government that operates at two ratherdifferent levels. At the first and most immediate level, individualsare thought to be governed, at least in part, by the reactions of oth-

ers with whom they interact and, at least among more civilized peo-ples, their interactions are normally expected to take a peacefulformthe market itself providing the most obvious example. Thisview suggests that, while the promotion of suitable forms of freeinteraction may be an effective way of dealing with the government

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of civilized populations, it is likely to be less successful in othercases. Secondly, over the longer term, interaction with others isthought to influence the internal standards that individuals use to

regulate their own behaviorby affecting, for example, their senseof good and bad conduct, of what is acceptable or unacceptable inparticular contexts, and so on.

At this level, market interaction itself is seen as a powerfulinstrument of civilization, inculcating such virtues as prudence,diligence, punctuality, self-control, and so on.25 This view suggeststhat, if only suitable forms of property can be set securely in placeand nonmarket forms of economic activity reduced to a minimum,then market interaction itself may function as a means of improv-

ing the character of less civilized peoples. In this case, authoritar-ian state intervention to reform property relations and impose con-ditions that would enable widespread market interaction to take offmay be seen as a liberal move toward a situation in which individ-uals may be governed through their free interactions.

Governmentality scholars have adapted and extended thisaccount of liberalism to produce a powerful and innovative analy-sis of contemporary neo- or advanced liberalisms uses of marketand audit regimes and of the more general promotion of individ-

ual choice and empowerment in the government of domains pre-viously subject to more direct forms of regulation.26 Nevertheless, Iwill suggest that in spite of its many achievements this Foucaultianview of liberalism as committed to governing through freedom isfar too restricted. A limitation of a different kind is that Foucaultsown account of liberalism and the governmentality accounts thathave followed his lead have focussed on the rationality of the gov-ernment of the statethat is, on the government of state agenciesand of the population and territory over which the state claims

authority. Thus, while eschewing political theorys normative pre-tensions, the governmentality approach nevertheless shares its viewthat liberalism is concerned primarily with the field of intrastaterelations, and it therefore shares also the limitations entailed bythat view.

Before proceeding to discussion of these issues, however, weshould note that the practice of liberal government, as Foucaultdescribes it, creates conditions for the emergence of a partisan pol-itics that liberalism has generally perceived as posing a serious

threat to the work of government itself. The significance of partisanpolitics for liberal reflections on government is hardly acknowl-edged in Foucaults account of liberalism, or of the modern art ofgovernment more generally, and in this respect, too, I suggest thathis analysis must be regarded as seriously incomplete.




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Government and Partisan Politics

Perhaps the most curious absence from Foucaults various discus-

sions of the government of the state concerns the implications forgovernment of electoral politics and other forms of what MaxWeber calls politically oriented actionthat is, of action thataims at exerting influence on the government of a political orga-nization; especially at the appropriation, redistribution or alloca-tion of the powers of government.27Weber goes on to explain thathe uses the termpolitically oriented actionin order to distinguish thiskind of action from political action as such28that is, from theaction of the state itself. There is a considerable degree of overlap

between the work of government and politically oriented action,but they must nevertheless be regarded as distinct. Political reason,in Foucaults sense, addresses the problem of how best to governthe population and territory of the state, but the calculationsinvolved in politically oriented action are concerned with a ratherdifferent problem; namely, how best to influence the manner inwhich the work of government is performed. Where the one focuseson the pursuit of the interests and the welfare of the state and thepopulation ruled by the state, the other focuses on the partisan

promotion of sectional interests and values, including disputedconceptions of the common interest itself.

There is an obvious sense in which such politically orientedaction might be said to involve a kind of political reasoning, andthe same might be said of the Machiavellian problematic of thePrince or Aquinass model of government. However, my point isnot that Foucaults discussion of political reason should beextended to include the rationality of politically oriented actionthat is, to politics, in what is perhaps the most conventional of

contemporary senses of the term. Having set itself one task, theFoucaultian analysis of government can hardly be blamed for notperforming another. Rather, it is that the consequences of parties,and of partisan politics more generally, for the governmental pur-suit of the common interest have always been among the centralconcerns of the modern art of government. Its failure to examinethe problem that politically oriented action poses for modernpolitical reason is thus one of the more striking limitations of theFoucaultian analysis of government.

This failure is especially significant for our understanding ofliberal political reason. While we might expect politically orientedaction to appear under all forms of government, we should expectit to flourish under conditions of liberal rule, where governmentitself is concerned, at least in certain respects, to promote and to

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work through the freedom of members of the subject population.The next section of this article disputes the view that liberalism isalways committed to governing through the promotion of various

kinds of free activity. For the moment, however, we should note tworather different ways in which the promotion of liberty and politi-cally oriented action may be connected. The first and most obviousis simply that free individuals will sometimes use their liberty inattempts to influence, or to resist, the actions of the stateas theywill, of course, the actions of nonstate agencies of government.Second, to promote market interaction and other forms of indi-vidual liberty is to promote not only the individual pursuit of pri-vate intereststhat is, of interests that are different from, and some-

times indifferent to, the common interest (however that might beunderstood)but also the image of the individual as one who canbe expected to pursue such interests.

Liberal rule thus encourages and anticipates the pursuit of pri-vate interests, and it provides conditions in which individuals canband together both for this purpose and to pursue their own con-ceptions of what the common interest requires, sometimes therebyputting the work of government itself at risk. The ability of mem-bers of the subject population to freely pursue their private inter-

ests or their own conception of the common interest thus poses aproblem for the government of the state, in part because it threat-ens to subvert the states own attempts to promote the commoninterest and even, in extreme cases, the institutions of the stateitself. This raises a distinctly liberal version of the problem of legit-imacy: how to govern a population of free individuals so that itsmembers accept the legitimacy of the work of government itself.

The problem here is not, at least in the first instance, how toprevent opposition to government programs or how to get these

programs through a parliament or congress; rather, it is to ensurethat expression of such opposition does not substantially interferewith the governmental work of state and nonstate agenciestoensure, in other words, that direct action among the populace iscontained within severe limits and that organizations willing to em-brace such action (like Greenpeace) have only limited support. It isthe problem of what Herbert Marcuse calls repressive tolerance,29

or, as Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth describe it in a rather dif-ferent context, of equipping citizens with the capacity to exercise

rights with some moderation.30 It is precisely this effort to com-bine freedom with constraint in its exercise that underlies theconcern in contemporary Western states with citizenship educa-tion, voter disaffection, and social exclusion. While these statesappear to have addressed such issues with some considerable de-gree of success, quite how they have managed to achieve this result




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remains poorly understood31and, we might add, remains of lit-tle concern to mainstream political science. It is tempting, never-theless, to suggest that the competitive party system of modern

democracy plays an important part here, both in providing a spacein which legitimate opposition might be expressed and in directingits energies into relatively harmless channels.

There are important and difficult questions to be addressedhere, but this article focuses on a different set of issues: those asso-ciated with the liberal problem of corruption. Where the problemof legitimacy concerns the possibility of active disaffection from thegovernmental work of the state, or even from the state itself, thatof corruption concerns attempts to recruit the governmental work

of the state to the pursuit of private purposes. The fear that parti-sanship might corrupt the government of the state has been a per-sistent feature of Western political thought. Aristotle tells us thatwhile true forms of government have regard to the common inter-est, those which regard only the interests of the rulers are alldefective and distorted forms.32 This and the more general fearthat individuals banding together for their own purposes mightcorrupt the work of government has always had a particular reso-nance for liberal reflections on government. David Hume, for

example, observes that parties

are plants which grow most plentifully in the richest soil; andthough absolute governments be not wholly free from them, itmust be confessed, that they rise more easily, and propagatethemselves faster in free governments, where they always infectthe legislature itself, which alone could be able, by the steadyapplication of rewards and punishment, to eradicate them.33

The most interesting features of this comment are its suggestionsfirst, that partisan politics is a damaging infection of government,and secondly, that government itself should be able to keep itunder control. It is for this reason that Hume describes thefounders of sects and factions [as deserving] to be detested andhated. . . . Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, andbeget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation.34

Similarly, James Madison proposes to defend government fromthe dangerous vice of faction by means of a system of represen-

tative government that promotes the limited involvement of thepeople in their government through periodic elections alongsidethe total exclusion of the people, in their collective form, fromany share in the work of government.35 The classical fear ofdemocracy reflects a concern that the common interest will bepoorly served by a government that is dominated by the poor and

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poorly educated, who constitute a clear majority of all citizens.36

Representative government addresses this concern by carefully sep-arating the work of government from the people themselves and

placing it in the hands of elected representatives and unelectedpublic servants. It seemed, in Madisons view, to promise the bestof all governmental worlds: avoiding the specific forms of corrup-tion associated with government by the one or the few while alsodefending the state from the dangers of arbitrary rule by the peo-ple themselves.

Madison and the other framers of the US constitution main-tained that the elected representatives of the people would bedrawn from among the better class of personsthat they would be

cultivated and intelligent men of clearly superior character.37 Bethat as it may, the more important point to notice here is that whilethe design of representative government addresses the traditionalfear of popular corruption, it leaves the more general problem ofthe corruption of government by faction and self-interested con-duct relatively untouched. There are moments when Madison seemsto be aware of this problem. He acknowledges, for example, thatthe people may possibly be betrayed by their representatives,38

and it is partly to address this issue that he advocates the separation

of governmental powers. His suggestion is that the risks of corrup-tion in one part of government will be minimized if it is overseenby other parts of government. This view of the role of intragovern-mental oversight and of checks and balances more generally incountering political corruption has played an important part inmodern understandings of democracy.

Western states are not what they were in Humes or Madisonsday: their military and administrative apparatuses are substantiallylarger and political parties and organized interest groups are now

regarded as necessary components of representative government.The problem their presence is now thought to pose is not, as Humesuggests, how to eradicate them, but rather how to manage theirinteractions, both with each other and with the state, without toomuch damage to the work of government itself. There is an impor-tant study to be written of liberal attempts to control the newsources of the corruption of government that have emerged withinthe framework of representative government. For our purposes,however, it is sufficient to note that liberal reflections on govern-

ment have continued to emphasize the danger that the people asa whole, smaller groups within the whole, or professional politi-cians and public servants may conduct themselves in such a way asto divert the state from its pursuit of the common interest.




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This, indeed, is one of the ways in which the Foucaultian char-acterization of liberal governmentthat is, as focusing on governingthrough the decisions of autonomous individualsmust be re-

garded as seriously incomplete. It is precisely because its promotionof individual autonomy is thought to foster conditions in whichindividuals are able to band together for their own purposes thatliberalism is so fundamentally concerned to defend the governmentof the state from the impact of partisan politics. One of the aims ofthe neoliberalism that became so influential in the latter part ofthe twentieth century was to take this defense of the work of gov-ernment further by privatizing or corporatizing important areas ofstate activity in the West and blocking their development elsewhere,

promoting market and quasi-market relations between and withingovernment agencies and deliberately insulating central banks frompolitical control by elected governments.

In practice, of course, these reforms were pursued for a host ofdifferent reasons, but two conflicting aspects of this neoliberaldevelopment are particularly worth noting here. On the one hand,they were often promoted as serving to limit the influence of polit-ical parties, pressure groups, and public officialseffectively byexcluding substantial areas of public provision from the realm of

political decision and relying instead on provision through suitablyorganized forms of market interaction. In terms of the broadunderstanding of government noted earlier, however, this shouldbe seen less as a matter of restricting the overall size of governmentor of preventing its expansion than of regulating the manner inwhich government is exercised: forms of government that workthrough the administrative apparatuses of the state are displaced infavor of those that work through the disciplines imposed by othersin market and quasi-market interactions. On the other hand, of

courseand precisely as the above analysis would suggesttheywere implemented by political parties and other agencies with clearfactional interests of their own. For this reason, those who were notpersuaded by the neoliberal case for such reformsand even manyof those who werecould see ample scope in their implementationfor the pursuit of new forms of partisan advantage.

Governing Liberty

Political theorists commonly describe liberalism as a normative polit-ical doctrine that treats the maintenance of individual liberty as anend in itself and therefore views liberty as setting limits of principle

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both to the objectives of government and to the manner in whichthose objectives might be pursued. I noted above that, while notperceiving the issue of individual liberty in normative terms, Fou-

cault nevertheless accords it a central place in his account of liber-alism as a rationality of government: the significance that liberalismattaches to individual liberty, he suggests, is intimately related bothto the aim, which it shares with political reason more generally, torecruit the government of oneself to its own larger purposes, andto a prudential concern that the state might be governing toomuch, that state regulation of certain kinds of behavior might infact be counterproductive.

In practice, however, it is clear that authoritarian rule has

always played an important part in the government of states thatdeclare themselves to be committed to the maintenance and de-fense of individual libertyas it has, of course, in the governmentof states that do not make that commitment. Nineteenth-centuryWestern states restricted the freedom of important sections of theirown populations and imposed authoritarian rule on substantialpopulations outside their own national borders. Even now, longafter the collapse of Western colonialism, coercive and oppressivepractices of government continue to play an important part, not only

in the independent states that took over the old imperial domains,but also in Western states themselves: in systems of criminal justice,the policing of Romany people, immigrant communities and theurban poor, the provision of social services, and the managementof large public and private sector organizations. Authoritarian rulehas also been invoked as a necessary instrument of economic liber-alization in much of Latin America, parts of Southeast Asia, andCentral and Eastern Europe.

How do such authoritarian practices relate to the liberal gov-

ernment of freedom? Contributors to the literature inspired by Fou-caults analysis of the modern art of government have, like manycontemporary liberals, tended to treat authoritarian rule as playingno significant part in liberal political reason.39 Nikolas Rose, forexample, acknowledges that coercive and oppressive practices areclearly still employed in the government of Western societies.40 Hegoes on to argue, however, that the significance of liberalism here isto be seen, not in these practices themselves, but rather in the factthat such practices must now be justified on the liberal grounds of

freedom.Perhaps so. Yet, even in contemporary Western states, liberal-

ism will also be concerned with the government of numerous indi-viduals and significant areas of conduct that seem not to be amenableto available techniques of governing through freedom. Indeed if, as




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Foucault suggests, the market plays the role of a test, then it is atest that surely cuts both ways, indicating not only that some peo-ple and some fields of activity can best be governed through the

promotion of suitable forms of free behavior, but also that thereare other cases in which more direct regulation by the state will berequired. In this respect, the description of liberal political reason,considered as a rationality of the government of the state as awhole,41 as being concerned with governing through the promo-tion of certain kinds of liberty must be regarded as incomplete. Itwill also be concerned with determining which individuals andwhich areas of conduct within the state can best be governed in thisway and which cannot, and with deciding what, if anything, can be

done about governing the latter.42I have made this point in relation to the Foucaultian analysis of

liberalism, but it would apply equally well to more conventionalaccounts of liberalism as a normative political theory or ideologycommitted to the maintenance and defense of individual liberty.To the extent that it is concerned with the government of actualstates and populationsto the extent, we might say, that it is seri-ous about politicsliberalism can hardly avoid the question ofwhat to do about individuals and areas of conduct that seem not

to be amenable to government through the promotion of suitableforms of individual liberty. Thus, rather than describe liberalism ascommitted to governing through freedom, it would be moreappropriate to present it as claiming only that there are importantcontexts in which free interaction might be the most appropriatemeans of regulation: that certain populations, or significant indi-viduals and groups and activities within them, can and should begoverned through the promotion of particular kinds of free activ-ity and the cultivation of suitable habits of self-regulation, and that

the rest just have to be governed in other ways.Indeed, many of the historical figures who have described

themselves as liberals or who, like John Locke, Adam Smith, DavidHume, or Immanuel Kant, have been posthumously recruited intothe liberal camp43 were clearly concerned to distinguish betweenwhat can best be governed through the promotion of liberty andwhat should really be governed in other ways.44 Liberals have drawnthe line in very different places and rationalized their decisions bymeans of correspondingly diverse arguments, but they have done so

most commonly in historicist, developmental, and gendered terms.They have argued, in other words, that the capacity to be governedas a free agent is itself a product of civilization, or improvement,to use one of John Stuart Mills favorite expressions, and thereforethat it will be developed most fully among people like themselves,

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the highly cultivated inhabitants of civilized societies, and devel-oped less fully elsewhere.

While such narcissism has provided liberal thinkers with par-

ticularly congenial foundations on which to erect their distinctionsbetween what can be governed through the promotion of libertyand what cannot, it would be misleading to suggest that liberalismis necessarily committed to a developmental view of human capac-ities.45 It is the capacity to make such distinctions that is necessaryto the liberal government of populations, not the particular his-toricist or other grounds on which they might be made.46 The gov-ernmental promotion of a sphere of religious freedom in parts ofseventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe could also be said to

represent a kind of liberalism. However, the decision in this case totolerate a limited range of religious observances did not reflect acommitment to inalienable rights of the individual: It arises, asnoted earlier, from a pressing concern to protect the state from theconsequences of religious dispute. Nor did the corresponding deci-sion to suppress observances that fell outside the range of tolerationneed to draw on any historicist view of the differential developmentof human capacities in the religious communities concerned.47 Thisexample suggests that the historicist and developmental view of

humanity that played such an important role in the era of liberalimperialism should not be seen as an indispensable feature of liberalpolitical reason.

If we treat liberalism as committed to the maintenance anddefense of individual liberty, then the active involvement of liberalpolitical theorists and administrators in the practice of imperial rulemust appear to be incomprehensible, at least in liberal terms.48

John MacMillan, for example, asserts that J. S. Mills argument infavor of authoritarian rule in India is inconsistent with his liberal-

ism. Pierre Manents discussion of Tocquevilles liberalism com-pletely ignores his defense of and practical involvement in Frenchrule in Algeria, while Jennifer Pitts and Melvin Richter insist that itcan only be regarded as an aberration, as something to be ex-plained away by reference to his nationalism and other nonliberalfactors.49 In response to such claims, it has to be said that the diffi-culties that these commentators seek to address arise not from theactual writings of Mill or Tocqueville, whose arguments in favor ofauthoritarian rule in certain cases are generally fairly clear,50 but

rather from the limited understanding of liberalism that they bringto their analysis.

Thus, if we take a broader view of liberalism, if we treat dis-tinctions of the kind noted above as necessary elements of any seri-ous liberal reflection on the government of states and populations,




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then the fact of liberal complicity in the practice of imperial ruleappears in a very different light. Tocquevilles nationalism mayhelp to account for his enthusiastic defense of the French takeover

of Algeria, but it tells us nothing about the reasons for his recom-mendations concerning how the subject population should be gov-erned. With regard to this last issue, their arguments for the neces-sity of authoritarian rule should be seen not as evidence of Mills orTocquevilles inconsistency, but rather as part and parcel of theirliberalism.

Government and the System of States

Rob Walker and others have noted that the modern system ofstates is associated with a powerful, and powerfully restrictive, divi-sion of intellectual labor, a division that places the study of rela-tions that develop between states in one category and relations thatdevelop within them in another.51 Foucaults treatment of the mod-ern art of government falls squarely within the latter category andtherefore exhibits both the strengths and the weaknesses of thedivision of labor on which it rests. He proposes to analyze the mod-

ern art of government as pursuing ends, and adopting means tothose ends, that are seen as being in some sense immanent to thepopulation of the state in question.52 While the achievements ofthis approach are undeniable, I argue that its state-centered focusrepresents a serious limitation, both of Foucaults own studies ofgovernment and of the more general governmentality school thathas taken up and developed his work in this area.

Few commentators would deny that geopolitical conditionshave played an important role in the development of modern

states. The standard view nevertheless remains that government issomething that operates essentially within states. As a result, rela-tions between states tend to be seen as largely ungoverned, as akind of anarchy that is regulated to some degree by treaties, a vari-ety of less formal accommodations, and the occasional war betweenthem. This state-centered view of government has been broughtinto question by influential figures in the disciplines of publicadministration and international relations, who have used thenotion of governance to describe the recent development in West-

ern states of forms of governing that cannot be seen as emanatingfrom a supreme authority; that is, to the emergence of governingwithout government.53 They argue that the work of governmentwithin states is increasingly being conducted by public/private part-nerships and by formal and informal networks involving state and

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nonstate agencies, while, in the international sphere, states andother actors are regulated by an expanding web of conventions,treaties, and international agencies, all of which operate without

the backing of an overarching Hobbesian power.Where Foucault understands government in the broad sense

noted earlier, the governance literature starts from the conventionalidentification of government with the state and sets out to addressthe recent development of forms of governing that, in both thedomestic and the international arenas, are not directly performedby states themselves. For all their differences, the governance andthe governmentality literatures both suggest that we are governedin ways that cannot properly be grasped by the state-centered view

of government noted above.There are, however, important respects in which both might be

regarded as incomplete. Against the governance literature, wemight note that government without the direct involvement of thegovernment is hardly a new development within Western states. Itwas, in ambition if not in practice, all-pervasive in the police statesof seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe,54 and nonstateagencies have played a major role in governing the populations oftheir successors.55

If there is anything distinctive about recent developmentswithin Western states, it lies less in the fact of governing withoutgovernment than in the novelty of some of its formsespeciallyits extensive reliance on commercial and semicommercial enter-prisesand its displacement of established, directly hierarchical,forms of state control. As for the international arena, the govern-mentality view that the ends and means of the government of astate can be seen as immanent to the states own population cer-tainly captures an influential modern understanding of govern-

ment. Yet it also raises important questions, which are rarelyaddressed in the governmentality literature itself,56 concerninghow it is that states have been able to assume a substantial role inthe government of these populations, and thus about the govern-mental character of the modern division of humanity into the pop-ulations of states.

Conventional accounts of the modern states system suggestthat it has its origins in seventeenth-century European attempts tobring destructive religious conflict under some kind of control,

and particularly in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and other agree-ments that brought the Thirty Years War to an end. They sought tocontain the political problems resulting from the existence of pow-erful religious differences between Roman Catholics, Lutherans,and Calvinists by granting territorial rulers supreme political




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authority within their domains, leaving it to rulers and their sub-jects to reach some accommodation in matters of religion. Thesepolitical arrangements, designed to pacify warring populations,

effectively transformed the condition of the Western part of Europe.Populations that had been subject to a variety of overlapping andconflicting sources of authority were assigned to rulers who werethemselves acknowledged as having the primary responsibility forthe government of the populations within their territories and whorelated to each other as independent sovereign powers.57

This view of the formation of the modern system of states hasfundamental implications for our understanding of government,both within the member states themselves and more generally.

Indeed, if government, in its most general sense, aims to structurethe possible field of action of others,58 then the modern system ofstates should itself be seen as a regime of government, albeit onethat operates, like civil society and the market, with no controllingcenter. Thus, where the classical view treats the state as the high-est of all forms of community,59 the modern system of statesreflects the emergence of a more complex form of political reason.The state clearly retains its privileged position with regard to itsown population, but there are also important governmental con-

texts in which the system of states and the population it encom-passes is now regarded as the highest of all.

The modern art of government has thus been concerned withgoverning not simply the populations of individual states but alsothe larger population encompassed by the system of states itself. Itaddresses this task first by promoting the rule of territorial statesover populations, and secondly by seeking to regulate the conductboth of states themselves and of members of the populations undertheir control. States are expected to pursue their own interests, but

to do so in a field of action that has been structured by the over-arching system of states to which they belong. Liberalism, perhapsthe most influential contemporary version of the art of govern-ment, should be seen in similar terms; that is, as focusing on gov-erning both the populations of particular states and the population(which now incorporates the whole of humanity) of the system ofstates more generally.60

Where contractarian political theory tends to present the stateas constituted internally, by real or imaginary agreements between

its members, this governmental perspective suggests that the sov-ereignty of a state is in part a function of its recognition as a stateby other members of the system.61 This, in turn, suggests that effec-tive government within the member states of the Westphalian sys-tem is thus predicated in certain respects on political conditions

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that operate above the level of the individual states themselves. Notonly is the order that obtains within the more successful statesdependent on the order that prevails in the relations between

states, but so, too, is much of the disorder that affects less success-ful states. Contrary to Foucaults account, not all of the means thatthe government of a state uses to attain its ends are immanent tothe population of the state itself. The European system of statesand the sovereignty that interactions within that system secured forparticipating states provided conditions in which the modern art ofgovernment within states could take root and develop.

However, to close the discussion at this point would be to sug-gest, like the English school,62 that the contemporary states system is

simply an expanded version of the original Westphalian system. Con-sideration of the manner in which this expansion took place suggestsa less anodyne view. The Westphalian states system was specificallyEuropean, imposing few constraints on the conduct of participatingstates toward those who inhabited territories not covered by theseagreements and who were thought to possess no sovereign states ofthe European kind. Thus, while European states were consolidatingtheir rule over their own populations, some were also engaged inimperial adventures elsewhere. Perhaps the most striking result of

these adventures was that much of humanity was brought within theremit of the modern system of states through direct imperial rule,while the remainder were brought into the system indirectly; that is,through the complementary and interdependent deployment of astandard of civilization in the dealings of member states with inde-pendent states elsewhere,63 the imposition of elaborate systems ofcapitulations that required independent states to acknowledge theextraterritorial jurisdiction of Western states,64 and also, of course,through the imperialism of free trade.65

Most discussions of Western imperialism focus on the subordi-nation of substantial non-European populations to rule by particularEuropean states. No less important, however, was the incorporationof those populations and the territories they inhabited into theEuropean system of states. Direct or indirect imperial dominationwas the form in which the European system of states first becameglobal in scope. The achievement of independence throughoutmuch of the Americas during the nineteenth century and its achieve-ment or imposition elsewhere during the twentieth dismantled one

aspect of imperial rule while leaving the other firmly in place. Polit-ical independence in the modern sense both expanded the mem-bership of the system of states and set in place a radically new wayof bringing non-Western populations within its governmentalregime.66As a result, these populations found themselves governedboth by modern states of their own and by the overarching system of




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states within which their own states had been incorporated. The sec-ond, twentieth-century wave of independence marks the point atwhich all of humanity comes to be governed through the medium of

independent states and citizenship within them.These last points are hardly new, but they do establish the lim-

its of a conception of the government of the state that sees it asrelying on means that are immanent to the population of thestate in question. I bring this article to a close by suggesting thatthis focus on the governmental character of the modern states sys-tem and its continuities with the states system of the colonial eracan help us to understand the emergence of neoliberalism in boththe domestic and the international spheres. What unites the many

late-twentieth-century projects of neoliberal reformthe corpora-tization and privatization of state agencies, the promotion of com-petition, individual choice, and autonomy in health, education,and other areas of what Western states once regarded as the propersphere of social policy, and so onis the attempt to introduce notonly market and quasi-market arrangements but also empower-ment, self-government, and responsibility into areas of social lifethat had hitherto been organized in other ways.

Related developments can be observed in the international

arena. Where liberalism could once rely on the decentralized despo-tism of indirect rule over colonial subjects,67 it now has to treat mostof those who it sees as being in need of considerable improvementas if they, too, like the citizens of Western states, were endowedwith the capacity to exercise rights with some moderation.68 Theold imperial divisions between citizens, colonial subjects, andnoncitizen others has been displaced by a postimperial globaliza-tion of citizenship, and indirect rule within imperial possessionshas been superseded by a less direct system in which the inhabi-

tants of the old imperial domains are governed through sovereignstates of their own, a system that is reminiscent of the older com-bination of capitulations and the imperialism of free trade. Indi-rect rule now operates, in effect, through national and inter-national aid programs that assist, advise, and constrain the conductof postcolonial states, through international financial institutions,and also, of course, through that fundamental liberal instrumentof civilization, the marketincluding the internal markets of multi-national corporations.

It is tempting, then, to place these domestic and internationaldevelopments together and conclude with the suggestion that theproblem of how to govern the postcolonial system of states may beone of the more important sources of liberalisms vastly increasedemphasis on the governmental uses of the market and of nonstateagencies more generally.

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Notes

1. Michel Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique ofPolitical Reason, in James D. Faubion, ed., Power: Essential Works of Fou-cault,vol. 3 (London: Allen Lane; Penguin, 2001), pp. 298325, at 325.

2. Aristotle, The Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1998), 1253a 1920; 1275b 2122.

3. Ibid., 1252a, 45.4. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, Political Power Beyond the State:

Problematics of Government, British Journal of Sociology43, no. 2 (1992):173205.

5. Some of the exceptions can be found in Wendy Larner andWilliam Walters, eds., Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces(London: Routledge, 2004).

6. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 27.7. Ibid., 1278b, 3738.8. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Faubion, note 1, pp.

326348, at 341.9. Barry Hindess,Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault(Oxford,

Eng.: Blackwell, 1995).10. Michel Foucault, Governmentality, in Faubion, note 1, pp. 201

222, at 206.11. Ibid., p. 205206.12. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 17.13. Foucault, note 10, pp. 204205.

14. Ibid., p. 213.15. Foucault, note 1, p. 315 (emphasis added).16. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy

in Early Modern Germany(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).17. Foucault, note 10, pp. 216217.18. Ibid.19. Mark Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional

Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 16991800(New Haven:Yale University Press, 1983); Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order: GermanEconomic Discourse, 17501950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995).

20. Foucault, note 10, p. 221.21. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, in Paul Rabinow, ed.,

Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 7379, at7475.

22. Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess, introduction to their GoverningAustralia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government(Melbourne:Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 119.

23. Foucault, note 21, p. 76.24. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought(Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 68.25. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1997); Stephen Holmes, Passions and Con-straints: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy(Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1995).

26. Rose, note 24, is the most ambitious elaboration of this accountof liberalism; Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Soci-ety(London: Sage, 1999) is a useful survey of the field.




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27. Max Weber,Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 54.

28. Ibid., p. 55.29. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man(London: Abacus, 1972).

30. Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth, Popular Sovereignty and CivicEducation, in Denise Meredyth and Jeffrey Minson, eds., Citizenship andCultural Policy: Statecraft, Markets, and Community(London: Sage, 2001), pp.6891, at 88.

31. Ibid.32. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 1921.33. David Hume, Of Parties in General, in hisEssays: Moral, Politi-

cal, and Literary(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 5463.34. Ibid., p. 54.35. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist

Papers(Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1987), nos. 10, 63.36. Jennifer T. Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in

Western Thought(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).37. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sover-

eignty in England and America(New York: Norton, 1988) argues that thisnave view was soon undermined by the coarse realities of US political life.Perhaps it was in some contexts, but in others it seems to have survived thechallenge of empirical refutation remarkably well.

38. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, note 35, no. 63.39. But see Dean, note 26, Christine Helliwell and Barry Hindess,

The Empire of Uniformity and the Government of Subject Peoples,

Cultural Values 6, no. 1 (2002): 137150, and Mariana Valverde, Despo-tism and Ethical Liberal Governance, Economy and Society 25, no. 3(1996): 357372.

40. Rose, note 24.41. Foucault, note 10, p. 206.42. Barr y Hindess, The Liberal Government of Unfreedom,Alterna-

tives 26, no. 2 (2001): 93111.43. The term liberalwas not used to denote political allegiance before

the early years of the nineteenth century; see Andrew Vincent, ModernPolitical Ideologies (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1995).

44. Helliwell and Hindess, note 39.

45. Nor is my point that this view of human development should beseen as merely an ideological support for Western imperialism. It providedJ. S. Mill with an important part of his argument for increased public par-ticipation in politics and, in the hands of the new liberalism of late-nine-teenth-century Britain, it served to support a powerful case for the pro-motion of liberty by the statethrough intervention in labor-marketcontracts and working conditions, as well as in housing, education, andother areas of social policy: Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Stefan Collini, Liberalismand Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in Britain, 18801915(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Liberal imperialists, of

whom there were many among the new liberals, have commonly seen suchhistoricist views as justifying what they liked to think of as a civilizing mis-sion, but many liberal opponents of imperialismfrom Adam Smith toJ. A. Hobsonhave held equally historicist views.

46. Hindess, note 42.47. Hunter, note 16.

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48. Various aspects of this involvement have been amply documented inthe British case by, for example, Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire:A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought(Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1999), Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and

Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2001), and Lynn Zastoupil,John Stuart Mill and India(Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1994).

49. John MacMillan, On Liberal Peace: Democracy, War, and the Inter-national Order(London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); Pierre Manent, An IntellectualHistory of Liberalism(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); JenniferPitts, Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question,

Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2000): 295318; Melvin Richter, Toc-queville on Algeria, Review of Politics 25 (1963): 362398.

50. Although there are obvious difficulties of interpretation presentedby the draft dispatches that Mill prepared as part of his duties in the EastIndia Company. The careful examination in Zastoupil, note 48, shows thatMills own views can often be clearly discerned.

51. See R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as PoliticalTheory(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

52. Foucault, note 10, p. 217.53. R. A. W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance (Buckingham, Eng.:

Open University Press, 1997); J. N. Rosenau and E.-O. Czempiel, eds., Gov-ernance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1992).

54. Raeff, note 19.

55. Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Lib-eral Governance(London: Routledge, 1991); Jacques Donzelot, The Policingof Families(New York: Pantheon, 1979).

56. But see note 5.57. There is an extensive literature on the emergence of the West-

phalian system and its geopolitical effects; see, for example, EdwardKeene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism, and Order in WorldPolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Carl Schmitt,Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum (NewYork, Telos Press, 2003); Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopoli-tics, and the Making of Modern International Relations(London: Verso, 2003);

Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the Inter-national Order from Grotius to Kant(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);and Walker, note 51.

58. Foucault, note 8, p. 3459. Aristotle, note 2, 1252a, 5.60. Barry Hindess, Liberalism: Whats in a Name? in Larner and

Walters, note 5, pp. 2339.61. Cf. Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and

Symbolic Exchange(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).62. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International

Society(Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1984).

63. Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of Civilization in International Soci-ety(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

64. David P. Fidler, A Kinder, Gentler System of Capitulations? Inter-national Law, Structural Adjustment Policies, and the Standard of Liberal,Globalized Civilization, Texas International Law Journal 35 (19992000):387413.




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65. This phrase derives from John Gallagher and Roland Robinson, TheImperialism of Free Trade,Economic History Review 2d ser., 6, no. 1 (1953):115, an influential (and still controversial) interpretation of nineteenth-century British policies. It has an obvious relevance for us all today.

66. Sanjay Seth, A Postcolonial World? in Greg Fry and JacintaOHagan, ed., Contending Images of World Politics (London: Macmillan,2000), pp. 214226.

67. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and theLegacy of Late Colonialism(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

68. Hunter and Meredyth, note 30, p. 88.

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Barry Hindess_Politics as Government_ Michel Foucault's Analysis of Political Reason

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