Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality and its relationship to neoliberalism remains among the most influential and widely debated contributions to contemporary political theory and social science. Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s introduced a radically new framework for understanding power, governance, and the relationship between the state, the economy, and the individual. This article provides a comprehensive overview of Foucault’s key concepts — governmentality, biopower, and neoliberal rationality — and examines their enduring relevance to understanding contemporary governance.
Michel Foucault and the Question of Power
To understand Foucault’s concept of governmentality, it is first necessary to appreciate his broader reconceptualisation of power. Throughout his career, Foucault challenged the traditional understanding of power as something possessed by sovereign authorities and exercised over passive subjects. Instead, he proposed that power is relational, diffuse, and productive — it operates through networks of relationships, institutions, and discourses rather than flowing from a single source.
In his earlier works, Foucault analysed power through the lens of discipline — the techniques by which institutions such as prisons, schools, hospitals, and factories regulate individual behaviour through surveillance, normalisation, and examination. The concept of the Panopticon, borrowed from Jeremy Bentham, served as a powerful metaphor for disciplinary power: a form of governance in which individuals internalise the gaze of authority and regulate their own behaviour accordingly.
For a detailed analysis of how these concepts intersect, see our article on Foucault, neoliberalism, and governmentality.
What Is Governmentality?
Foucault introduced the concept of governmentality (gouvernementalité) in his 1978 lectures at the Collège de France, later published as “Security, Territory, Population.” The term — a neologism combining “government” and “mentality” or “rationality” — refers to the organised practices, techniques, and rationalities through which subjects are governed.
Governmentality encompasses three interrelated dimensions. First, it refers to the ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections that allow the exercise of a specific and complex form of power targeting the population. Second, it describes the tendency towards the pre-eminence of this type of power — which Foucault calls “government” — over other forms of power such as sovereignty and discipline. Third, it refers to the process by which the state of justice of the Middle Ages became the administrative state and was gradually “governmentalised.”
The Art of Government
Central to Foucault’s concept of governmentality is the notion of government as the “conduct of conduct” — the attempt to shape, guide, and direct the behaviour of individuals and populations. This understanding extends far beyond the activities of the state. Government, in Foucault’s expanded sense, encompasses the governance of a household, the guidance of souls by a pastor, the management of a community, and the regulation of oneself. It is, in essence, any form of calculated direction of human conduct.
Foucault traces the genealogy of modern governmental rationality through several historical phases. The pastoral power of the Christian church — with its concern for the salvation, obedience, and self-knowledge of each individual member of the flock — provided a model for the individualising dimension of governance. The raison d’état of the 16th and 17th centuries introduced the idea that the state has its own rationality, distinct from divine or natural law, and that the art of governing consists in strengthening the state itself.
Population as the Object of Government
A crucial shift in Foucault’s account of governmentality is the emergence of “population” as a distinct object of governance. Before the 18th century, the territory and its inhabitants were governed primarily through juridical sovereignty — the enforcement of laws and the exercise of sovereign authority. With the development of statistics, demography, and political economy, the population came to be understood as a phenomenon with its own regularities, patterns, and dynamics — birth rates, death rates, epidemics, economic cycles — that could be known, measured, and managed.
This shift gave rise to new governmental technologies: public health measures, demographic policies, economic regulations, and educational systems designed not to command obedience but to optimise the health, productivity, and welfare of the population. Security mechanisms — operating through probabilities, statistical norms, and environmental interventions — complemented and partly displaced disciplinary techniques.
Biopower and Biopolitics
Closely related to governmentality is Foucault’s concept of biopower — the regulation of life processes at the level of the population. While disciplinary power targets individual bodies, biopower operates on the species body: the body of the population, understood in terms of biological processes such as birth, death, health, reproduction, and longevity.
Biopolitics — the politics of life itself — encompasses the governmental strategies and interventions that target these biological processes. Public health campaigns, demographic policies, reproductive regulations, genetic screening programmes, and environmental management all represent forms of biopolitical governance. Foucault argued that the emergence of biopower marked a fundamental transformation in the nature of political power — from a sovereign power that could “take life or let live” to a biopower that “makes live and lets die.”
Foucault and Neoliberalism
In his 1979 lectures, published as “The Birth of Biopolitics,” Foucault turned his attention to neoliberalism as a form of governmental rationality. His analysis distinguished between two strands of neoliberal thought: German ordoliberalism and American neoliberalism associated with the Chicago School of economics.
German Ordoliberalism
The German ordoliberals — including Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow, and Franz Böhm — developed their economic philosophy in response to the failures of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and the challenge of post-war reconstruction. Unlike classical liberals who advocated minimal state intervention, the ordoliberals argued that the market order does not emerge spontaneously but must be actively constructed and maintained by the state.
The ordoliberal state does not intervene in the market but intervenes for the market — creating the legal, institutional, and social conditions under which competition can function effectively. This includes anti-monopoly regulation, social policy to support market participation, and what Rüstow called Vitalpolitik — policies that cultivate the cultural and ethical dispositions necessary for a competitive market order.
American Neoliberalism and Human Capital
The American strand of neoliberalism, associated with economists such as Gary Becker, Theodore Schultz, and Milton Friedman, extended the economic analysis of market behaviour to domains previously considered non-economic. Foucault was particularly interested in the concept of human capital — the idea that individuals can be understood as entrepreneurs of themselves, investing in their own education, health, and skills to maximise their future returns.
The theory of human capital, Foucault argued, represents a fundamental shift in the understanding of the relationship between the individual and the economy. Labour is no longer understood as an abstract factor of production but as the activity of subjects who make rational choices about how to invest their time, energy, and resources. Every individual becomes, in effect, an enterprise — homo economicus — governed by the calculus of costs and benefits.
Neoliberal Governmentality
Foucault’s most original contribution to the study of neoliberalism lies in his analysis of neoliberalism not as an ideology or economic policy but as a form of governmentality — a rationality of governance that extends market logic to all areas of social life. Neoliberal governmentality does not simply advocate less government; rather, it reconfigures the relationship between government and governed by reshaping individuals as self-governing, entrepreneurial subjects who are responsible for managing their own risks, opportunities, and life trajectories.
Under neoliberal governmentality, the role of government shifts from direct provision and regulation to the creation of frameworks within which individuals exercise choice and compete. Social policy becomes less about protecting citizens from market risks and more about equipping them to participate effectively in market competition. Education, healthcare, welfare, and even personal relationships are increasingly framed in terms of investment, returns, and individual responsibility.
Technologies of the Self
Foucault’s late work on technologies of the self — the practices by which individuals constitute and transform themselves — adds an important dimension to the analysis of neoliberal governmentality. Neoliberal governance operates not only through external regulations and incentives but through the cultivation of particular forms of subjectivity. Individuals are encouraged to understand themselves as autonomous, rational, self-interested agents responsible for their own success or failure.
Self-help literature, life coaching, performance management systems, credit scoring, and social media self-presentation all represent contemporary technologies of the self that align individual subjectivity with neoliberal rationality. The governed subject of neoliberalism is not coerced but governed through freedom — through the cultivation of particular capacities, dispositions, and desires that align individual conduct with governmental objectives.
Critiques and Extensions
Foucault’s analysis of governmentality and neoliberalism has generated extensive debate and criticism. Some scholars argue that Foucault was insufficiently critical of neoliberalism, noting that his lectures seem more analytical than normative. Others contend that his framework neglects the role of class, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation in shaping neoliberal governance.
Marxist critics have argued that Foucault’s focus on rationalities and techniques of governance obscures the structural dynamics of capitalism that drive neoliberal policy. David Harvey, for example, views neoliberalism primarily as a project of class power — a strategy for restoring the wealth and influence of economic elites — rather than as a form of governmental rationality.
Despite these critiques, Foucault’s concept of governmentality has proven remarkably productive. Scholars have applied it to analyse governance in domains ranging from international development and environmental policy to digital surveillance and platform capitalism. The concept continues to generate new insights into the subtle, pervasive, and productive dimensions of contemporary power.
Relevance to Contemporary Governance
The concepts of governmentality and neoliberal rationality remain highly relevant to understanding contemporary governance challenges. The ongoing debates about the role of the state in managing public health crises, addressing climate change, regulating digital technologies, and responding to economic inequality all engage with the tensions between different governmental rationalities that Foucault’s work illuminates.
The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, revealed tensions between biopolitical imperatives to protect population health and neoliberal rationalities that prioritise individual freedom and economic activity. The rise of digital surveillance technologies raises questions about new forms of governmentality that operate through algorithmic management and data-driven decision-making.
Frequently Asked Questions
Governmentality is a concept developed by Michel Foucault to describe the organised practices, mentalities, and rationalities through which subjects are governed. It encompasses not only the activities of the state but all forms of calculated direction of human conduct — from state policy to institutional management to self-governance. The concept emphasises that governance operates through the shaping of conduct rather than through direct coercion.
Foucault rejected the traditional view of power as something possessed by sovereign authorities and exercised over passive subjects. Instead, he argued that power is relational, productive, and diffuse — it operates through networks of relationships, institutions, and discourses. Power produces knowledge, shapes subjectivities, and constitutes social reality. It is not simply repressive but productive, creating the conditions of possibility for particular forms of thought, action, and identity.
Neoliberal governmentality refers to a form of governance that extends market logic and economic rationality to all areas of social life. Rather than simply advocating less government, it reconfigures the relationship between government and individuals by promoting entrepreneurial, self-governing subjectivity. Under neoliberal governmentality, individuals are understood as rational economic actors responsible for managing their own risks, investments, and life outcomes.
Foucault analysed neoliberalism in his 1979 Collège de France lectures as a form of governmental rationality rather than merely an ideology or economic policy. He examined both German ordoliberalism and American Chicago School neoliberalism, showing how each proposed a distinctive relationship between the state, the market, and the individual. His approach has been both praised for its analytical sophistication and criticised for its apparent lack of normative critique.
Biopower is Foucault’s term for a form of political power that targets life processes at the level of the population. While disciplinary power focuses on individual bodies, biopower operates on biological processes such as birth, death, health, reproduction, and disease across entire populations. Biopower is exercised through public health policies, demographic regulation, environmental management, and other interventions that aim to optimise the health and productivity of the population as a whole.