Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

JOHANNA OKSALA
The market had been a site of jurisdiction, both in the Middle Ages and
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the sense that it was invested
with strict regulations ensuring that prices were fair, and that there was no
fraud, theft or crime. It was also a site of distributive justice: the rules of the
market ensured that the poorest could also buy things. Entry into a new
regime of truth in the middle of the eighteenth century meant that the
market no longer appeared, or had to be, a site of jurisdiction. It now
appeared as something that obeyed and had to obey “natural,” spontaneous
mechanisms. The spontaneity was such that attempts to modify the mechanisms
would only impair and distort them. The market thus became a site
of truth—it allowed natural mechanisms to appear, and these permitted the
formation of the right conditions for its proper functioning (BB, 30-31).
The market also essentially constituted the site of the veridiction of
governmental practice: a good government now functioned according to
truth rather than justice. This meant that limiting its reach also became
increasingly a question not of rights, but of utility. Limiting the exercise of
power by public authorities was no longer formulated in terms of the
traditional problems of law or revolutionary questions concerning original
rights and how the individual could assert them over and against any
sovereign. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the key questions
addressed to government were: Is it useful? For what purpose is it useful?
Foucault claims that what fundamentally characterizes liberal governmentality
is the idea that “governmental power is limited by evidence, not by the
freedom of the individual” (BB, 62). 11
The possibility of limitation and the question of truth are thus both
importantly introduced into governmental reason through political
economy. This is an extremely important moment in the history of govern-
11 In addition to the two characteristics of the liberal art of government—the market as
the site of truth and the limitation of governmentality by the calculus of utility—
Foucault takes up a third feature: the globalization of the market as an objective. Until
the middle of the eighteenth century economic activity was seen as competition over
limited resources: there was only a certain amount of gold in the world, so as one state
became enriched its wealth had to be deducted from the wealth of others. According to
the new liberal art of government expressed by Adam Smith and the Physiocrats,
competition under conditions of freedom could only mean that everybody profited.
Competition in a free market would lead to maximum profit for the seller and, simultaneously,
minimum expense for the buyer. For the first time Europe appeared as an
economic unit and the whole world gathered around it to exchange its own and Europe’s
products in the European market. This was not the start of colonization or imperialism,
but heralded a new type of global calculation in European governmental practice: a new
form of global rationality (BB, 56-57). A global market was thus set as an objective, even
in this period.
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