To ask the question 'how do things happen?', Michel Foucault insists, is also 'to suggest that power as such does not exist' (1982, p. 217). The point of his comment is not to deny the reality of situations in which one individual or group exercises power over others but rather to caution against reification: that is, against the treatment of power as a capacity to impose one's will that some people (the powerful) possess in greater quantities than others. He goes on to claim that power over others should be seen as a matter of 'the total structure of actions brought to bear' (p. 220) on their behaviour. Thus, to adapt a well-known expression of the reified view of power, what happens when A gets 'B to do something that B would not otherwise do' (Dahl 1957, p. 204) is that A brings various actions to bear on B's conduct. To say, as Robert Dahl does, that 'A has power over B' is simply to claim that there is some connection between A's actions and B's response. The reference to A's power is not an explanation of the change in B's conduct; rather it serves as a convenient kind of short-hand, an alternative to describing what interactions take place between them.

Since social interaction is always a matter of acting on the actions of others, this nominalistic view of power suggests that power relations will often be relatively unproblematic. It also suggests that power is an ubiquitous component of social life and that there is therefore little of value to be said about the nature of power as such and in general. Nevertheless, in spite of this last point, there are some relatively stable configurations of power that Foucault chooses to write about at length: domination and the government of a state. Domination is a hierarchical relationship in which the margin of liberty of the subordinated parties is severely restricted. This is 'what we ordinarily call power' (1988, p. 12) and, in Foucault's view, it should be resisted: the problem, he suggests, is to establish conditions in which games of power can be played 'with a minimum of domination' (1988, p. 18). There are passages in his discussion of government in which he proposes a closely related politics of resistance, this time directed against the state. When he insists, in the closing section of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, that liberation 'can only come from attacking ... political rationality's very roots' (1981, p. 254) his argument is clearly directed against the political rationality that, in his view, underlies the modern government of the state.

There are striking parallels, and equally striking contrasts, between Foucault's normative critiques of domination and government and the arguments of critical theory. Of more interest to the substantive analysis of politics, however, are his accounts of the emergence of the political rationality of government in the early modern period and the subsequent development of liberalism as a specific form of governmental reason. These accounts have inspired a substantial body of academic work, sometimes called the governmentality school, devoted to the study of government in the modern West.

This chapter begins by outlining the Foucaultian treatment of government, and of liberalism as a specific rationality of government, and considers its implications for the study of politics. It then moves on to show how this treatment must be adapted to take account, first, of the significance for government of what Max Weber calls 'politically oriented action', and, secondly, of authoritarian aspects of liberal political reason.

As he describes it, then, the art of government is not concerned primarily with the business of taking over the state, keeping it in one's possession or subordinating it to some external principle of legitimacy but rather with the work of conducting the affairs of the population in the interests of the whole. Government, in this sense, is not restricted to the work of the government and the agencies it controls. Much of it will also be performed by agencies of other kinds, by elements of what is now called civil society: churches, employers, financial institutions, legal and medical professionals, voluntary associations. The work of governing the state as a whole, then, extends far beyond the institutions of the state itself.

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Foucault's work on government has been his treatment of liberalism as a rationality of government. Liberalism is commonly regarded as a normative political theory that regards the maintenance of individual liberty as an end in itself and therefore as setting limits of principle to the objectives and means of action of government. Individual liberty is central to Foucault's account of liberalism too, but it is seen in a very different light. The crucial issue here concerns the governmental significance of the belief that members of the population to be governed are endowed with a capacity for autonomous, self-directing activity: what does that belief entail for the practical work of government? Foucault's account of liberalism focuses on the implication that government should aim to make use of this capacity, that the maintenance and promotion of suitable forms of individual liberty may be advantageous to the state itself.

Thus, the Foucaultian analysis of government is itself a contribution to the understanding of an important kind of politics: one that aims to govern the population of a state in the interests of the whole. Similarly, the Foucaultian accounts of liberal and neo-liberal government contribute to the understanding of influential contemporary versions of this politics: versions that aim to govern as far as possible by promoting certain forms of freedom and arranging conditions so that the resulting activity furthers the common good. Perhaps the most significant contribution of this literature has been its careful exploration of the ways in which this governmental politics extends beyond state agencies to make use of practices of individual self-government and of diverse elements of civil society.

Nevertheless, there are many aspects of politics which this powerful analysis of government simply fails to address. One is the politics of resistance that Foucault invokes in his normative critiques of domination and political reason. For our purposes, however, the more important silences of the governmentality literature concern, first, the politically oriented activity that Max Weber describes in the first section of Economy and Society and, secondly, authoritarian aspects of liberal government.

Weber describes action as being politically oriented if:

Action may be 'politically oriented' without participating in the work of government itself. Where the focus of Foucault's 'political reason' is on the overall pursuit of the interests and the welfare of the state and the population ruled by the state, that of Weber's 'politically oriented action' is on the partisan activities of parties, pressure groups and social movements and, of course, of individuals or factions within them. Politically oriented action could well be motivated by religious doctrine or the problematic of the Prince, both of which Foucault distinguishes from the political concerns of the art of government.

While the conduct of partisan dispute in such terms will be present under any form of government, we should expect it to flourish where the freedom of members of the subject population is promoted by the predominant rationality of government. David Hume notes, for example, that partisan groups are

The most notable feature of this passage is its view of partisan politics as a damaging infection. This fear of what partisanship might do to government has been a long-standing feature of governmental reason but, as Hume's comment indicates, it is has a particular resonance for liberal and neo-liberal rationalities of government.

This point suggests that the characterisation of liberal and related rationalities of government in terms of their emphasis on governing through the decisions of autonomous individuals is seriously incomplete: they are also substantially concerned to defend the proper purposes of government from the impact of partisan politics. It is partly for this reason that secrecy and deliberate misdirection are so commonly employed by even the most liberal of governments. The neo-liberal push of recent decades has taken this defence further by corporatising and privatising various kinds of state activity, insulating central banks from political control and promoting the use of market or contractual relationships between and within government agencies and between those agencies and citizens.

Authoritarian rule has always played a significant part of the government of states, even where liberal political reason has been influential. Nineteenth century Western states restricted the freedom of important sections of their own populations and some forcibly imposed their rule on substantial populations outside their own national borders. Even now, coercive and oppressive practices continue to play an important part in the government of Western societies: in the criminal justice system, the policing of inner-city areas and the urban poor, the provision of social services and, of course, the management of large public and private organisations. Elsewhere, in much of Latin America, parts of South-East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, authoritarian rule has been used as an instrument of economic liberalisation.

What do these practices have to do with the liberal government of freedom? With few exceptions (notably Valverde 1996) contributors to the governmentality literature have seen the relationship between them as largely external. Thus, while Nikolas Rose (1999) observes that coercive and oppressive practices must now be justified on the liberal grounds of freedom, these practices play little part in his account of liberal government itself. Or again, Mitchell Dean (1999) insists that any attempt to govern through freedom will have to acknowledge that some people may just have to be governed in other ways. These accounts capture important aspects of liberal political reason, but the government of unfreedom is more central to its concerns than either would suggest.

We can see what is at issue here by returning to the significance for government of the belief that members of the population are naturally endowed with a capacity for autonomous, self-directing activity. One obvious implication seems to be that government should make use of this capacity, and the Foucaultian account of liberal and neo-liberal government has therefore focused on its deployment of individual liberty. In fact, the implications are rather more complex: individuals may be naturally endowed with a capacity for autonomous action but this does not mean that the capacity will always be fully realised. Modern political thought has generally taken the contrary view: that there are indeed contexts in which suitable habits of self-government have taken root, but many more in which they have not. Liberals have usually seen the realisation of this capacity for autonomous action in historical and developmental terms, suggesting that it will be well established amongst numerous adults only in relatively civilised communities; that extended periods of education and training are required if individuals are to develop the necessary habits of self-regulation; and that, even under favourable conditions, there will be those who cannot be relied on to conduct their affairs in a reasonable manner. They have argued that, where this capacity is not well developed, government simply cannot afford to work through the free decisions of individuals: children must be constrained by parental authority and uncivilised adults subjected to authoritarian rule. John Stuart Mill's comments on the people of India and other colonial dependencies provides a well-known example of this liberal perspective. Since they are not, in his view, 'sufficiently advanced ... to be fitted for representative government', they must be governed by the dominant country or its agents:

Liberal political reason has been concerned with the subject peoples of imperial possessions as much as with the free inhabitants of Western states, with minors and adults judged to be incompetent as much as with autonomous individuals. Western colonial rule has now been displaced but its devlopmental perspective remains influential in the programs of economic and political development promoted by independent, post-colonial states and by international agencies.

Authoritarian government in these cases has a paternalistic rationale: its aim is to move towards its own eventual abolition. A rationale of a different kind rests on the point, noted earlier, that liberalism is substantially concerned to defend the work of government from the impact of partisan politics. The corporatisation and privatisation of state agencies might seem to reduce the threat of certain kinds of partisanship, but there will also be cases in which more direct measures seem to be required. These range from limitations on parliamentary and intra-party debate to the direct suppression of political opposition. In societies where paternalistic attitudes towards the bulk of the population are already well-entrenched, the supposed imperatives of economic reform have often provided governments and their international supporters with powerful liberal grounds for the restriction of political freedom.

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Dahl, R. (1957). The Concept of Power. Behavioural Scientist, 2(July, 1957)

Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: power and rule in modern society . London: Sage.

Hume, David