Date: Sun, 28 Jun 1998 16:39:06 +1200
Subject: Re: 'On governmentality'


The comment on The Prince looks very interesting.
 Foucault says in 'governmentality' that a lot of the relevant works 
come from pieces written to instruct the Prince, Machievelli's among 
them, and he both examines the series for what they say, and uses them 
in themselves as evidence of an upward movement from  ? discipline? from 
the governed anyway, to the sovereign, of ideas about government. I 
wonder if he was not aware of Carl Menger's lectures to the Crown Prince 
Rudolph ( he who shot himself in a hunting lodge) which according to 
Hayek are the founding documents of the Austrian School of economics. I 
wonder if they fit into his scheme; I will have a look for them.

The other thing that interests me is the  movement from 
sovereignty/territory to governmentality/population . Although he says 
'we need to see things not in terms of the replacement  of a society of 
sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of 
a disciplinary society by a society of  government; in reality one has a 
triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary 
target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of 
scurity' in the body of the essay he seems to be establishing exactly 
that movement.  Of course there is always the vestige, and probably very 
important, active vestiges of previous forms.