August 6, 2008
Today the art of government is tightly linked to governing the economy. Good government has as its object the economy. In Foucault’s conception of the art of government, the target of power shifts away from that of the prince and the ‘juridical theory of sovereignty’, since to govern meant to govern not over territory as such, but over “things” such as the emergence of what Marx called the capitalist mode of production. It is the emergence of capitalism that enables the art of government to shift away from e prince and the ‘juridical theory of sovereignty’.
On Foucault's account of the emergence of the art of government in modernity population now appears as the end of government, in the sense that object of government will be “improving the condition of the population” increasing its wealth, and its health and wellbeing. Crucially it will do so through means and techniques that are, so to speak, immanent to the field of population itself, acting both directly, through campaigns directed at the population, and indirectly, according the internal principles, regularities and aggregate effects of population.
This territory is explored by Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979. In the first chapter Foucault explores the art of government, political economy and liberalism.
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