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Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the College de France)

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These are the complete course lectures in which Foucault developed his theory and history of "governmentality" as a discursive threshold of modern society.

This volume is critical to any student of Foucault or government in general. To the Foucault student, it refines his concept of power and signifies a break from power as "domination" to power as the "conduct of conduct." This is the first printing of the full lecture series, of which only two portions were available previously, and shows the full empirical range of his study of governmentality.

To the more general student of government, this work is equally valuable. It clearly situates government as a practice contingent upon durable forms of thought and action in western history. It is primarily concerned with the shift from governing territory to governing populations with the emergence of liberalism and the collapse of feudalism. More advanced students may find this work especially useful because of its contraposition to marxism, critical theory, and mainstream liberal critiques of government. In this respect, it offers a genuinely alternative voice to the problems and prospects of modern politics - a very rare achievement.

I wish I had got around to reading this much sooner. "Security, Territory, Population" is one in a series of lectures Foucault delivered at the College de France. I started here to find out more about Foucault's development of the concept of government and was so impressed that I have come back to Amazon to order the other books in the series. This series is as clear and accessible as anything I have ever read by Foucault. The lecture format is much more conversational in style than his books but still as wide ranging and impressive in examples. The lectures are intriguing as you see Foucault's ideas literally develop and fill out week to week.

This text is as close as you will get to hearing Foucault's voice (unless of course you listen to bootlegs of his lectures or the cassette tapes at the Centre Michel Foucault in Paris). The pauses and silences are evident through the text and the sentences - sometimes convoluted and incomplete - give a real sense of Foucault thinking, especially as he makes the shift towards governmentality. Along with the extensive notes these lectures provide a useful springboard to Foucault's fully edited works and to the main sources he draws on to mount his various arguments. Unlike other published works however they are uneven. Obviously some days Foucault was in worse form than others - like in the lecture presented on February 8 1978 when he was suffering from the flue - and like a lecture, listener/reader concentration lags after 20 or so minutes as the intensity drops. Foucault's thoughts are not always clear and coherent and he sometimes dives off at a tangent, inducing a sense of vertigo. This is useful when the focus is on the process of learning and researching, but it can be distracting and tiring. Foucault was at pains to destroy incomplete works and notes and it would be interesting to hear what he would say about this publication and the reasons behind it, given his dislike of the herd learning on offer in this forum and the lack of space and time for in-depth discussion and debate.

These lectures -- more so than many in this excellent series -- contain novel ideas and formulations ripe for further research. From a new conceptualization of the state, to a unique account of the Protestant Reformation, and lineages of absolutist monarchy, Machiavelli criticism, and the birth of the Police state, if his approach seems fragmentary and incomplete, it is because we are reading the raw thought materials of a masterful scholar at the top of his game.

After the premature death of Michel Foucault in 1984, those interested in his work were limited to the books he had written over his 20-year career. Since 1990, however, we have witnessed an everlasting interest in Foucault after the publication of his interviews, essays and other aspects of his work. But perhaps none are as significant as the publication of his annual lectures at the College de France.

"Security, Territory, Population" is a stark reminder that Foucault's thought was even more transformative than was already considered at the time. Here, he introduces the widely-influential concepts of "biopolitics" and "governmentality," now concepts that have sprung careers of scholarship for political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and researchers in other disciplines. Although his lectures are by far more lucid and accessible than his earlier books, I wouldn't recommend reading this for anyone who hasn't read Foucault yet. Though if you've read classics like "Discipline and Punish" and "The History of Sexuality," these lectures are simply indispensable.

They're a reminder of the specter of Foucault that still haunts theorists everywhere.

A must for understanding the notions of biopower, biopolitics, and governmentality in Foucault's corpus.