Barry Hindess

Michel Foucault's studies of the political rationality of modern government have inspired a substantial body of academic work devoted to the analysis of liberal and neo-liberal government in the societies of the modern West. A curious feature of this development is that the Foucaultian study of government has been taken up largely by sociologists and historians while in departments of Government and Political Science Foucault is treated largely as a philosopher or normative theorist who has little to contribute to the substantive analysis of politics.

One reason why these studies have not been taken up in such departments is surely to be found in the intellectually conservative character of political science as a discipline. In this brief comment, however, I want to focus on a reason of a different kind: namely, that this powerful analysis of modern government has little to say about the partisanship which is central to conventional understandings of modern politics. In fact, Foucault rarely uses 'politics', 'political' and related terms to invoke matters of partisan dispute: instead they refer primarily to the work of government. Thus, 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 art of government.

As he describes it, then, the art of government is concerned not so much 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.

The Foucaultian accounts of liberalism and neo-liberalism takes this analysis further by focussing on forms of government that aim, as far as possible, to work through the promotion of 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 fundamental aspects of politics which this perspective has so far failed to address. One is the politics of resistance that Foucault himself invokes in his normative critique of political reason. For my purposes, however, the more important silence of the governmentality literature concerns the governmental significance of partisan politics.

Partisanship is intrinsic to what Weber describes as politically oriented action, action that is aimed at exerting influence on the government of a political organisation. Action may be 'politically oriented' in this sense 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.

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. In his essay 'Of parties in general', for example, David Hume notes that partisan groups 'rise more easily, and propagate themselves faster in free governments, where they always infect the legislature itself, which alone could be able, by the steady application of rewards and punishments, to eradicate them'. (Essays. pp. 55-6) The most notable feature of this passage is its view of partisan politics as a damaging infection of government that prudential leadership should aim to control. 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 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.

I began by observing that its failure to address the partisan character of modern politics may be one of the reasons why the Foucaultian analysis of government has hardly been taken up in departments of Government and Political Science and I have now suggested that this failure should also be seen as a serious limitation of the Foucaultian treatment of liberal and neo-liberal government. To make this point is not to raise an objection to the governmentality perspective. Rather, it is to show that this perspective has considerably more to offer our understanding of contemporary politics than it has yet been able to deliver.

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