Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue by Jan Miernowski;

Author:Jan Miernowski;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Nature

Space, Population, and Conquest

In his seminar from 1977 to 1978, published in English under the title Security, Territory, Population, Foucault offers a discussion of the history of political thought in dialogue with discourses about the construction of the subject. He notes that the sixteenth century is the moment at which the problem of how to live returns to the tradition of Western philosophy. The Protestant Reformation, the rise of court societies, and the Counter-Reformation, to name only the most obvious social and institutional developments, were part of a set of what Foucault calls “insurrections of conduct” that defined the sixteenth century.4 They were accompanied by sustained reflections on the techniques and discourses of self-construction. The influence of the writings of Machiavelli was one symptom of the shift to a political world divorced from the Christian morality and from a natural order in which God sanctioned political action (“a world purged of its prodigies, marvels, and signs”).5 Yet, for Foucault, the Machiavellian tradition, with its emphasis on the craftiness and skill of the prince, is an ancillary to the most important innovation of the period. This is the logic of “reason of state,” that would make possible, much later, in the eighteenth century, the emergence of the strategic study of entire populations via the new discipline of statistics—that is, properly, the study of information vital to the state. Foucault’s grand narrative traces a shift from various kinds of what he calls “pastoral power ” (of which princely power is one form) to state power. As such, it offers an exemplary historical account of the dissolution of models of social action built upon the projection of self-present, autonomous, dynamic actors (the Burkhardtian and Machiavellian precursors to the self-sufficient Enlightenment subject), on the one hand, and their modulation into postmodern notions of subjectivities produced as effects (or residual aftereffects) of impersonal structures that limit the self even as they define the conditions of its possibility. The mediating step between these two dispensations is the moment of sixteenth-century humanism, with its “insurrections of conduct.”6

For Foucault, the key moment in the conceptualization of this new regime of political rationality—the moment, in a sense, when it attains self-consciousness—comes in 1589 when Giovanni Botero publishes his treatise Ragione di stato. Foucault bolsters the movement of his narrative from “pastoral” power to impersonal state power by quoting Botero, who defines the state as, “a firm domination over peoples.” “There is no territorial definition of the state,” adds Foucault. “It is not a territory, it is not a province or realm; it is only peoples and firm domination.” He goes on to comment on the rest of Botero’s definition: “this reason of state embraces preserving the state much more than its foundation or its expansion, and its expansion more than its foundation strictly speaking.” And then Foucault comments, “He makes reason of state the type of rationality that will allow the maintenance and preservation of the state once it has been founded, in its daily functioning, in its everyday management.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.