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The Foucault Effect

Studies in Governmentality

With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault
Based on Michel Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on governmental rationalities and his 1977 interview regarding his work on imprisonment, this volume is the long-awaited sequel to Power/Knowledge. In these lectures, Foucault examines the art or activity of government both in its present form and within a historical perspective as well as the different ways governmentality has been made thinkable and practicable.

Foucault’s thoughts on political discourse and governmentality are supplemented by the essays of internationally renowned scholars. United by the common influence of Foucault’s approach, they explore the many modern manifestations of government: the reason of state, police, liberalism, security, social economy, insurance, solidarity, welfare, risk management, and more. The central theme is that the object and the activity of government are not instinctive and natural things, but things that have been invented and learned.

The Foucault Effect analyzes the thought behind practices of government and argues that criticism represents a true force for change in attitudes and actions, and that extending the limits of some practices allows the invention of others. This unique and extraordinarily useful collection of articles and primary materials will open the way for a whole new set of discussions of the work of Michel Foucault as well as the status of liberalism, social policy, and insurance.

318 pages | 6 x 9 | © 1991

Philosophy: Philosophy of Society

Political Science: Political and Social Theory

Sociology: Theory and Sociology of Knowledge

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Governmental Rationality: An Introduction
Colin Gordon
2. Politics and the Study of Discourse
Michel Foucault
3. Questions of Method
Michel Foucault
4. Governmentality
Michel Foucault
5. Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital - Police and the State of Prosperity
Pasquale Pasquino
6. Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing ’The System of Natural Liberty’
Graham Burchell
7. Social Economy and the Government of Poverty
Giovanna Procacci
8. The Mobilization of Society
Jacques Donzelot
9. How Should We Do the History of Statistics?
Ian Hacking
10. Insurance and Risk
Francois Ewald
11. ’Popular Life’ and Insurance Technology
Daniel Defert
12. Criminology: The Birth of a Special Knowledge
Pasquale Pasquino
13. Pleasure in Work
Jacques Donzelot
14. From Dangerousness to Risk
Robert Castel
Index

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