Sources of governmentality

Introduction

In his famous lecture on governmentality, ¹ Michel Foucault (1926–84) takes Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) as his starting point. Or, actually, not Machiavelli tout court, but Machiavelli’s The Prince. Foucault writes that it is this single text ‘relative to which the whole literature on government establishes its standpoint’ (Foucault, 1991: 88). It is among the anti-Machiavellian treatises of Guillaume de La Perrière, François de La Mothe Le Vayer and the like, that Foucault finds the seeds of a new ‘art of government’ he is trying to chart in his lecture. Foucault’s argument is based on the observation that ‘Machiavelli’s The Prince, as profiled in all these implicitly and explicitly anti-Machiavellian treatises, is essentially a treatise about the prince’s ability to keep his principality. And it is this savoir-faire that the anti-Machiavellian literature wants to replace by something else and new, namely the ‘art of government’ (ibid.: 90). This article aims to question this origin to an extent. Although Foucault is not raising the question to what extent The Prince portrayed in the anti-Machiavellian treatises really resembles Machiavelli’s The Prince, it might have proved useful for him to raise precisely that question. What Machiavelli’s opponents offered was not a new art of government but essentially an old one, which Machiavelli had challenged.

It was precisely Machiavelli, not the epigones and the anti-Machiavellian pamphleteers of the subsequent decades and centuries, who said something really original in terms of an art of government. Therefore, Foucault is in a way searching for the seeds of an art of government from the wrong context. Foucault seems to disregard the fact that those who attacked Machiavelli’s ideas were really only returning to some older principles and took refuge in scriptural and ancient authorities because they could not attack Machiavelli in his own terms. Hence, the attacks were not really novel and what followed with the rise of the Counter-Reformation and absolutist monarchies was not a ‘new art of government’ but a return to an older idea of goverment compared with Machiavelli’s ideas.

This article raises two critical points regarding Foucault’s reading of Machiavelli. First, the article presents a critical re-evaluation of Foucault’s claim on the singularity of the prince in Machiavelli. Second, it argues that Foucault connects Machiavelli’s theories with the rather modern idea of territorial sovereignty, which is misleading. Territory was not the focal point of Machiavelli’s analysis and the term ‘sovereignty’ gained currency as the keyword of political theory only decades after him. Foucault seems to be paying attention to the conceptual change of ‘economy’ in this context, but terms like ‘sovereignty’, ‘the state’ and ‘territory’ remain in a rather anachronistic use in his lecture. This is odd, keeping in mind that he eschewed a general theory of the state and offered the study of governmentality – understood as the study of the historical constitution of different state forms and practices of government – as an alternative to those theories that treat the state as a juridico-political instance, a calculating subject, a tool of class domination, or a mere epiphenomenon of production relations (Jessop, 2007: 37). In sum, on the basis of these critical observations, the article asserts that the art of government envisioned by Foucault in the lecture is considerably older than he presents. Instead of being the archetypal example of ‘old’ politics, Machiavelli’s writings stand out as novel against this background. Governmentality was not born after Machiavelli, for Machiavelli can be seen as novel precisely because he was departing from this old path. In fact, the origins of governmentality could quite easily be found in a number of medieval texts and practices. Foucault is focusing on the monarchical administration of the 16th and 17th centuries instead of paying attention to more republican writings of earlier centuries. Thus it might be that Foucault’s analysis has a kind of selection bias. Foucault tries to establish what he calls a new art of government as specifically distinct from the use of the ruler’s sovereignty and the mere increasing of the ruler’s power and wealth, allegedly found in Machiavelli. But this was the innovation the anti-Machiavellians wanted to bring to a halt, whereas the seeds of governmentality could be quite easily found in treatises of much older dates.

A few methodological issues need to be raised before continuing. First of all, these comments are made on what is merely a single lecture by Foucault. More precisely, the critical comments only pertain to some parts of that single lecture. It is not very fruitful or fair to mount such a criticism of somebody’s lectures. Yet, in Foucault’s case, his lectures and especially his idea of ‘governmentality’ put forth in this lecture have gained so much influence that a few critical remarks might be justified. His idea of governmentality has amounted to a conglomerate of interesting approaches, if not a real ‘industry’, in social science which has gathered impetus especially through the writings of Nikolas Rose and Mitchell Dean (see Rose, 1999; Dean, 1999; see also Bröckling, Krasmann and Lemke, 2010; Lemke, 2011). Here, the article is not going to follow the subsequent developments of Foucault’s idea. Instead, it will focus on the way Foucault puts forth the idea in his lecture. Rather than malevolent and thoroughgoing critique, the aim is constructive engagement. Second, to claim that Foucault was using historical sources rather sloppily or that the facts contradict his claims is not very fruitful either. He wrote on a very large number of topics and chronologically the scope of his sources was unusually wide. It is almost inevitable that some minor distortions occur and some details are ignored in studies that extend from antiquity to the present day. We should also, perhaps, understand Foucault more as a philosopher or social scientist aiming to construct concepts and methods of analysis rather than saying something palpably ‘factual’ of every historical context and subject matter. Anyway, given the impact his analyses have had and continue to have in contemporary social sciences, it is certainly relevant to point out inconsistencies and errors in those analyses. Recently, for example, Mika Ojakangas has pointed out that Foucault is completely on the wrong track when he locates the prelude to governmentality in the Christian pastoral power: rather than a prelude, Christianity exemplifies a marked rupture in the development of governmentality (and bio-politics) which started in ancient Greece and Rome (Ojakangas, 2012). Third, Foucault’s lecture on governmentality is a kind of prelude, a presentation of a work in progress, rather than the results of a study. His work continues in lectures and texts following the ‘Governmentality’ lecture and the true historical analysis begins only in those subsequent works (Elden, 2007a: 31). Therefore, the critique here is to some extent focused on something that is perhaps merely details in Foucault’s work. But to quote a famous phrase by art historian Aby Warburg, ‘Der Liebe Gott steckt im Detail’ [God is in the detail]. What the article is really concerned with are only details as regards Foucault’s lecture, but details are of unquestionable value. And what the details reveal in this case, is perhaps a need for a reconsideration of the origins of ‘governmentality’.

As noted earlier, the article will pick up two points that Foucault makes on Machiavelli and the art of government. The first one regards the alleged singularity of the prince in Machiavelli’s thought, and the second one is related to the territoriality of the state in Machiavelli’s political theory. At face value, these points may seem a bit beside the mark when discussing Foucault’s governmentality but since they indeed form nothing less than the starting point and fulcrum of Foucault’s analysis, they merit a degree of attention. Of course, Foucault’s reading of Machiavelli is rather superficial here, and he moves from the points regarding singularity and territory to the claim that there is no art of government in Machiavelli, that Machiavelli is emblematic both of the concentration of the sovereign and the state as opposed to those who tried to devise an art of governing (Holden and Elden, 2005). But it is worth emphasizing that Foucault’s analysis of Machiavelli is not very true to Machiavelli because he is not referring to Machiavelli’s texts but to the anti-Machiavellian’s interpretations of Machiavelli. He explicitly recognizes that the anti-Machiavellians are not necessarily giving the right picture of the Florentine – that the whole politics of The Prince from which the anti-Machiavellians sought to distance themselves might indeed be fictitious (Foucault, 1991: 89) – but he still follows them anyway. Precisely because of this his analysis is a bit misguided.

Machiavelli’s novelty and the singularity of the prince

Foucault begins his analysis with Machiavelli's The Prince because according to him it served as a constant point of repulsion (point de répulsion) for the literature of government from the 16th to the 18th centuries. He advocates that the text was not at once made an object of rejection and opposition, but on the contrary was honoured by its immediate contemporaries. Foucault sees the text as a reification of the 16th-century problem of government and, according to him, the text lies at the crossroads of two processes: the one that shatters feudalism and leads to the establishment of the great territorial and administrative states, and the other that with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation raises the issue of ‘how one must be spiritually ruled and led on this earth in order to achieve eternal salvation’ (Foucault, 1991: 87–8). Foucault also notes that there was a whole ‘affair’ around Machiavelli’s work between the 1530s and 1800, between its publication and its re-emergence at the turn of the 19th century. He argues that the whole debate should be first and foremost seen in terms of the idea of an art of government that the anti-Machiavellians tried to articulate.

However, it could be argued that the reason why there was this ‘affair’ around Machiavelli’s work was precisely due to his radical ideas: almost all of Machiavelli’s reception was objecting to what were considered his novel ideas. Correspondingly, the anti-Machiavellian genre is essentially reactionary, a recourse to earlier (medieval) ideas, ideas that Machiavelli was challenging with his books. What Foucault calls the ‘new’ idea – that one ‘governs complexes composed of men and things’ towards some end, like the salvation of all – was hardly news in political theory during the late 16th century. In contrast, what was truly shocking was Machiavelli’s challenge to this idea when he claimed that political arrangements (or ‘states’) should be judged by their origins, not by their ends (Moulakis, 1993). His analysis in The Prince commences from the way principalities are acquired (Il principe, ch. I) but there is no discussion whatsoever about the correct ends of government in the whole book. There is no moral distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of government in the Aristotelian sense nor any Christian idea about the salvation of all as the all-encompassing aim of government. In lieu of these considerations Machiavelli neutrally examines how principalities are gained and how the prince can retain his power. Machiavelli’s writings caused a lot of stir all around Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries and almost everywhere the arguments against him were essentially reactionary and founded on Christian views (Panella, 1943; Bleznick, 1958; Raab, 1965; Kelley, 1970; Beame, 1982; Fernández-Santamaría, 1983; Donaldson, 1988; Arienzo and Borrelli, 2009). In the context of early English reaction to Machiavelli, Felix Raab argues that Machiavelli was rejected mainly because the authors familiar with his writings saw all too clearly the direction in which his theories were pointing, namely the secular state (Raab, 1965: 61). Some absorbed certain parts of his thoughts and managed to avoid the deeper secular implications. But as Raab notes, not many, if any, swallowed Machiavelli whole. The general tenor of the English reception was anti-Machiavellian in the sense that most men could not accept the basic assumptions of Machiavelli. Although they occasionally cited Machiavelli as a weighty author, there was a point at which his blatant secularism aroused hostility and rejection (ibid.). It is this perspective that Foucault, so to speak, dodges or omits. It was Machiavelli whose writings pointed to a new theory of the secular state and governance stripped of the typical Christian considerations, not the anti-Machiavellians and other opponents of his works. Of course, Machiavelli’s ideas were not that ’new’ either: he borrowed many things from Tacitus, Xenophon and the like and in general harks back to ancient rather than medieval ideas. His re-use of the ancient classics and return to ancient theories in political theory was truly a shock to the Christian worldviews of his day. He developed a synthesis of some ancient and some later ideas, but, in nuce, Machiavelli’s theories were a new art of government, whereas the anti-Machiavellians were defending ideas that were medieval (or ancient) in pedigree. Foucault’s lecture presents this in a totally different light, giving the anti-Machiavellians unearned credit for novelty.

According to Foucault, the anti-Machiavellian writers tried to ‘articulate a kind of rationality which was intrinsic to the art of government, without subordinating it to the problematic of the prince and of his relationship to the principality of which he is lord and master’ (Foucault, 1991: 89). Thus, they wanted to separate this allegedly new art of government from a certain capacity of the prince which some of them found expounded in Machiavelli’s writings. They wanted to separate themselves from Machiavelli’s view where ‘the prince stood in a relation of singularity and externality, and thus of transcendence, to his principality’ (ibid.: 89–90). Foucault stresses that the anti-Machiavellians actually disagree on this point (i.e. not all of them are able to find this idea in Machiavelli) and that this ‘politics of The Prince’ might indeed be fictitious. He dodges the issue whether this interpretation actually conforms to Machiavelli’s ideas purported in The Prince, and therefore the whole claim to novelty is essentially misguided.

For Foucault‘s Machiavelli, the singularity of the prince means that the ‘prince acquires his principality by inheritance or conquest, but in any case he does not form part of it, he remains external to it’ (1991: 90). Foucault claims that the link binding the prince to his principality remains purely a synthetic one and ‘there is no fundamental, essential, natural and juridical connection between the prince and his principality’ (ibid.). There are, however, very good grounds to claim that this view simply cannot be found in Machiavelli’s writings. Machiavelli’s view is precisely the opposite, i.e. that the prince and his principality are one and the same thing and, to be precise, his pre-modern vocabulary in a way limited him to this interpretation. Namely, the term lo stato, Machiavelli’s pre-modern concept of the state, is still personal whereas modern conceptions of the state are impersonal (Hexter, 1957; Mansfield, 1998: 281–94; Harding, 1994; Skinner, 2002). There is no principality without the prince, no lo stato without its holder, in Machiavelli’s vocabulary. The stato of the prince is his stato, derived from the Latin status. The modern, impersonal state, understood as a neutral bureaucracy that awaits the appointment of a new ruler, emerges only after Machiavelli and peculiar to the modern concept is the idea that when a person or a party comes to power, it is said to take over the state or the government: it cannot advance its rule except through the state, as if to make it plain that the state is delivered only temporarily to the winner of the elections or any other power struggle – the state is there when the winner arrives, and with equal impartiality it remains there for the next claimant (Mansfield, 1998: 281). This was not the case when Machiavelli’s contemporary Girolamo Savonarola ruled Florence (1494–8): he did not take over the government from somebody else. Rather, he instituted his own stato, which ended with him, and then something else followed. Thus, there is an essential link between the prince and his state, and consequently Foucault’s singularity claim cannot be supported. Whereas in the modern sense the state is not constituted by the current holders of power, in Machiavelli’s vocabulary it is. Even those instances of Machiavelli’s use of lo stato where the term seems to be standing alone without a possessive pronoun, prove upon closer examination to be personal and to indicate someone‘s state (Mansfield, 1998: 288). Although Machiavelli’s vocabulary was pre-modern, he also took some steps towards the modern state and its ‘art of government’. The decisive shift in Machiavelli’s writings might not be the change from personal to impersonal but from personal state to acquisitive personal state (ibid.: 293).

Machiavelli’s lo stato is a thoroughly personal concept, in an organic connection to the ruler’s person (or the people in his more republican-spirited writings), and it could vanish with the death of the ruler. And it is precisely this unity of the prince and his princedom that casts doubt on Machiavelli's alleged admiration of Cesare Borgia as a saviour of Italy. Princedoms instituted and ruled by one man tend to wither away with the death of the founder. According to Machiavelli, even Castruccio Castracani’s plans to subjugate only a small part of Tuscany are ruined by Fortune and the little stato he has acquired is lost after two generations (Vita di Castruccio Castracani). Thus, far from seeing Castruccio and Cesare Borgia as successful, Machiavelli sees their princedoms as too tied to their characters to be truly successful against the blows of Fortune. Although he elevates Borgia as the example to be imitated, the story told by Machiavelli asserts that Cesare’s stato is destroyed by Fortune when Cesare himself is ill (Il Principe, VII). In Machiavelli’s vocabulary stato is someone’s stato, but there could nevertheless be an ‘arte dello stato’ [art of the state]. In a letter (10 December 1513) he says he has been for 15 years studying ‘arte dello stato’ and that The Prince contains his experiences in this art. What he was referring to with the expression ‘art of the state’ is essentially an ability of the prince or a group to remain in power. Hence, in sum, Foucault’s claim to novelty as regards the anti-Machiavellians is in this respect unjustified. Machiavelli clearly considered that there was an essential link between the prince and his princedom and, given his pre-modern use of the word ‘state’, it might not have been possible for him to say what Foucault seems to think he said (i.e. that the prince remains external to his state). The prince does not stand in a position of singularity towards his princedom, but is an integral part of it. Even though there is an art of the state, it denotes only the ability to keep the acquired stato and remain in power.

On closer inspection, Machiavelli’s use of lo stato proves curious. Hexter has noted that in Il Principe the term occurs in close connection with the verbs acquistare, tenere, mantenere, togliere and perdere (Hexter, 1957: 119). These verbs (to acquire, to hold, to maintain, to take away, to lose) signify that lo stato is an object, not a subject. Whereas today we speak of the state as acquiring territory, holding prisoners, maintaining a legal position, being competitive in the globalized economy, etc., Machiavelli never employs the term with such meanings. In those very rare instances where lo stato seems to be active, Machiavelli somehow stresses its anaemic activity, since the only occurrence of the term with a violent verb like ribellarsi is when Machiavelli tells us about a stato that did not rebel (ibid.: 122). But in his usage it is perfectly relevant, for example, to pose the question that for us seems odd: whether or not a prince has enough state? For Machiavelli, a ruler’s stato meant primarily command over men, and therefore he already has the idea Foucault attributes only to those developing a ‘new’ art of government composed of ruling men and things. Given this, it is relevant to conclude that if somebody loses his control over men, he loses his stato. If he is in the process of doing so, it might be relevant to ask whether he has enough state.

Curiously, while arguing that there is no fundamental, essential, natural, or juridical connection between the prince and his principality, Foucault omits the religious connection. Every now and then Machiavelli reminds his readers that, supposing that the prince is strong enough, when the fear of God is missing it might be possible to replace it with the fear of the prince (Strauss, 1986: 226). Machiavelli’s words in Discourses (I, 11) are:

Now, perhaps Foucault means something else by this ‘fundamental’ or ‘essential’ connection that he claims is missing between Machiavelli’s prince and principality, but from Machiavelli’s point of view, this religious connection or its replacement with the fear of the prince seems to be quite an essential one, so to speak. If Machiavelli thinks this is so binding that the principality falls with the fall of the prince, does not it constitute a crucial or essential link? Although this remark is from the Discourses and not from The Prince, his view does not differ from this in The Prince. Religion is very necessary in a state (republic or princedom) but where religion is not respected or the fear of God or gods is missing, it might be possible to sustain the state with the fear of the prince alone. Thus the link between the prince and his principality is crucial, even to the point that it can compensate for the lack of religion in a state.

Foucault continues by contrasting this externality of the prince in Machiavellian parlance (which is not accurate, as we have seen) with a new art of government where there is a plurality of forms of government that are immanent to the state (Foucault, 1991: 91). Here too, Foucault’s analysis is misleading. Foucault argues that in contrast to Machiavelli’s princely management, this ‘new’ art of government tried to establish certain continuities, upward and downward, from a person through family to the state: ‘Upwards continuity means that a person who wishes to govern the state well must first learn how to govern himself, his goods and his patrimony, after which he will be successful in governing the state’ (ibid.). This was certainly a truism in the Renaissance, and even before. It was a common presupposition of the civic humanists that a person first needs to possess some virtue of his own before he can govern others. Although it was a commonplace during the Renaissance, this idea is much older. We encounter it, for example, in the Pseudo-Plutarchian letter instructing Trajan (the Institutio Traiani). In his Policraticus (from the year 1159), John of Salisbury comments on the letter, citing Plutarch’s advice: ‘Yet you administer everything most correctly if you do not desist from knowing yourself. If you first of all compose yourself, if you dispose all your affairs towards virtue, everything proceeds properly for you’ (Policraticus, book V, ch. 1). Furthermore, in the next chapter John mentions that the republic is a ‘sort of body’ which is ‘ruled by a sort of rational management’. The idea of rationally managing the state through self-sublimation is much older than Foucault suggests. The Renaissance writers had long before Machiavelli evoked the Roman idea of a ruler as a vir virtutis [virtuous man], the seeds of which are probably as old as human societies. It is a common assumption during antiquity that the ruler’s virtue emanates to his subjects and that the ruler should possess virtues of his own to accomplish that. And it is precisely in this respect that Machiavelli’s advice for the ‘bad’ ruler stands out as a ‘new art of government’. He liberated the ruler from the need to uphold classical or Christian virtues and advocated moral flexibility, thus breaking the age-old connection between statecraft and soul-craft. Machiavelli’s theory challenges the old assumption that the good man and the good prince (or citizen) are necessarily conjoined. From Machiavelli’s viewpoint the cultivation of souls and personalities is not the aim of political action, even though it might be the proper end of man (see Wolin, 1961: 237). Those who opposed Machiavelli were practically returning to older principles, not putting forth new ideas. When Machiavelli blatantly advised moral flexibility to the prince (see Korvela, 2007), this was a true innovation in Christian Europe. He also removed the aim (‘the salvation of all’) of the state and replaced it with an analysis of the beginning of states. Athanasios Moulakis has noted that Machiavelli’s position is not only anti-Christian but also anti-classical (Moulakis, 1993): in Machiavelli’s thought, the state is not the state of Aristotle – an extension of human nature, the field in which a human being as a political animal is fulfilled – but a product of human artifice. Furthermore, the meaning and value of a public order are determined by its beginnings and not by its ends (which would be those of a Christian or classical order).

It should be remembered that most of Roman Catholic Europe plunged into religious fanaticism soon after the conclusion of the Council of Trent in 1563. The era is known as the Counter-Reformation, which meant a diligent return to the Christianity advocated by the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, the ideas of Counter-Reformation governmentality were not new. On the contrary, they were aimed at inhibiting any new ideas concerning government, and should be seen as an attempt to bring to a halt the processes associated with the Renaissance. The primary adversaries of the Counter-Reformation are symbolized by Florence and Venice rather than by Wittenberg and Geneva, as Bouwsma (1968: 294) has argued, since, in the long run, the Curia was probably less interested in suppressing Protestantism, a passing challenge in its view, than to turn back the growing political particularism of the age. Most Counter-Reformation writers or anti-Machiavellians did not present new ideas on government but tried quite the opposite, to eradicate and inhibit any such attempts, like that of Machiavelli. Machiavelli was viewed as an atheist, a devil’s disciple and an enemy of the Church because his theory was a revolutionary one, subjugating religion to serve politics and liberating the ruler from Christian precepts. In this sense he paved the way for the modern secular state with its own science and art of government. The anti-Machiavellians sought to distance themselves from Machiavelli’s doctrines because those doctrines pointed to a new kind of art of government. In his lecture on governmentality, Foucault presents the development topsy-turvy which has some implications also for his more general analysis.

State, territory and the art of government

The second critical point in regard to Foucault’s lecture is related to territory. Foucault claims that ‘territory is the fundamental element both in Machiavellian principality and in juridical sovereignty as defined by the theoreticians and philosophers of right’ (Foucault, 1991: 93). In fact, territory is NOT the fundamental element for either of the two. It is hard to find any passages from any of Machiavelli’s writings, from The Prince or elsewhere, that would support Foucault’s claim, and for juridical sovereignty territory became important in a much later context.

Foucault’s general argument here is that Machiavelli’s political theory is centred on the problems posed by territory, while the new art of government has as its object not territory but rather ‘a sort of complex composed of men and things’ (1991: 93). What Foucault tries to highlight as a new idea in this context is a definition of government, as it is found in La Perrière, that does not refer to territory. But again, this is in no way a novel idea, nor does it differ from Machiavelli’s conception. Territory simply does not play an important role in his theories. The whole idea might indeed be something like an anachronism, and one searches in vain for anything like the modern concept of territory from Machiavelli’s writings. States and other political communities used to be ‘complexes composed of men and things’ without clear territorial boundaries for millennia: territorial sovereignty emerges quite tentatively only towards the end of the 17th century and does not reach full bloom until the beginning of the 19th (Holsti, 2004: 73–142). Again, Foucault seems to be totally inverting the development, giving the old idea the credit for novelty.

Today’s world is a jigsaw of territorial states, whose boundaries are accentuated with separate colours representing different states on the map. Although very familiar to us, the depiction would have been utterly unknown to Renaissance men like Machiavelli who did not have a concept of the state similar to ours, who did not imagine political realms as enclosed spaces, and whose concept of sovereignty was not singular but comprised many essentially overlapping sovereignties, full of holes like a Swiss cheese (see Biggs, 1999; Krasner, 1999). The territorial state is not born in the Renaissance, as rulership and ground are fused in the peculiarly modern territorial state only by the beginning of the 19th century. Even the lineal, surveyed borders that separate contemporary states are a practice dating back only to the 17th century. Prior to that, the borders of kingdoms, empires and city-states were floating zones of indeterminate extent. Still in the 17th century, borders are notable by their absence from maps. Maps might have ‘Tuscany’ written in northern Italy, but no borderlines were added. When technology improved and rulers could better perceive the areas they presided over through maps, territories became the standard currency of diplomacy. It was assumed that a victory in war would bring territorial gains. Territories could be given away for compensation, obtained through marriages, or simply sold or exchanged. It is only with the rise of national romanticism in the 19th century that the ‘people’ (or the ruler) and the territory are united, and any violation of the state’s territory constitutes an offence towards the people. (Holsti, 2004: 73–111)

Thus Machiavelli, living in the early 16th century, does not think that the object of the exercise of power would be solely territory, nor its aim the increase of territories. In Machiavelli’s thought what might today be called territory does not play a significant role. On the contrary, the people living on the territory form the focal point. Consequently, it is clear that Machiavelli does not have the kind of conception of territoriality Foucault attributes to him. Likewise, the concept of sovereignty was not connected to territory, although Foucault argues that ‘territory really is the fundamental element both of Machiavelli’s principality and of the juridical sovereignty of the sovereign as defined by philosophers or legal theorists’ (Foucault, 1991: 93). In Foucault’s reading, territory is ‘the very foundation of the principality or of sovereignty’. Let us contrast this with the opening words of Machiavelli’s The Prince, for they are enough to contradict Foucault’s claim. For Machiavelli, having lo stato meant primarily having command over men (not territory), as is clear from the very first sentence of The Prince:

Foucault’s claim that territory was the defining feature of Machiavelli’s analysis and that the anti-Machiavellians were novel in opposing this and replacing it with a view of government composed of men and things is simply erroneous. Machiavelli considered all political communities to be essentially dominions over men. This was also the medieval way to conceptualize a ruler’s authority and it took some time before it was connected to territory (see Sassen, 2006). During the Renaissance, territories were to some extent important for states, but they never defined the state by themselves. In Florence, the stato of the Medici could occasionally be restored or lost, the city of Pisa could occasionally be added to the Florentine stati, but Florence itself was not the state. The ‘state of the Medici’ was never defined by geographical features. When we turn our glance to the 19th century, we find that the situation has changed dramatically. Territory, or even bare geography, is one of the most important defining features of states and nations. Even national anthems reflect this close connection, and, for example, the Finnish national anthem takes the post-glacial geographic formation of the Finnish landscape as its space and is firmly attached to particular hills, vales, shores and waters, and the same organic connection to landscape holds true, for example, for the German and Austrian national anthems (Sondermann, 1997: 139).

In the pre-modern era, and for many classical theorists of politics, it was the people who created the state, not the territory. If the two were separated, i.e. if the people were forced to leave the place they inhabited, they might very well establish a new state in another location. Occasionally, they might even establish more or less the same state in another location (New England, etc.). During the Renaissance, when a prince was driven out of his city by a mutiny, he might occasionally find another city to preside over as a prince. In this period, territories were largely ambiguous and the loss and gaining of territories was a quotidian practice. There were also nomadic states, like that of the Mongols, that did no more than pause on a certain territory.

There has been a transformation in the importance and meaning of territory for the modern state. Whereas in pre-modern times the ‘people’ were predominantly defined by their leader and their fate was to some extent tied to him or her, modern nations are more defined by the territory they inhabit or have inhabited according to some real histories or ancient founding myths. In this process the concept of the state itself has changed. As Quentin Skinner (2002) among others has shown, the use of the term ‘state’ during the Renaissance was ambiguous and could refer to the ruler’s status, regime, or territory, and, finally, with the flowering of Renaissance republicanism, to an independent apparatus of government. The concept itself was nothing short of ambiguous, and, for instance, Machiavelli’s use of the term stato is on closer inspection quite indeterminate: one could take (1) territory, (2) the governed, (3) ruling power, (4) status, position, or rank, and (5) national-political territorial entity, and try substituting each of them wherever lo stato appears in Il Principe. Two meanings at the minimum will fit: surprisingly often four, sometimes all five (Hexter, 1957: 137). Although Machiavelli may occasionally use the word stato to denote what today might be called ‘territory’, this was not the decisive feature of the state, nor was its predominant meaning connected to territoriality.

Implications for Foucault’s more general argument on governmentality

Foucault emphasizes that the art of government is connected to the development of the administrative apparatus of the territorial monarchies and is also linked to the development of certain forms of knowledge about the state. Knowledge of the state, of the factors of its strength, was labelled precisely ‘statistics’, as the science of the state. In Foucault’s view, this art of government remained imprisoned within the forms of administrative monarchy and could not reach its full scope before the 18th century because the exercise of power was thought of as the exercise of sovereignty and the institutions of sovereignty blocked the development of the art of government. Mercantilism, Foucault argues, is the first rationalization of the exercise of power as a practice of government, but it was still blocked and halted because it took the sovereign’s might as its essential objective (Foucault, 1991: 97–8). The art of government had to tackle the problem and institutions of sovereignty, and consequently it developed within the framework of a theory of contract, a reciprocal commitment between sovereign and subjects. Again, it could be argued, Foucault could have started his search from earlier contexts. Foucault later implicitly admits this, when he points to the fact that Machiavelli is important because he described the intrinsic necessities of a city without any reference to theological explanations, in terms of the essential relations between the ruled and the ruling (Holden and Elden, 2005). Instead of focusing on The Prince and its reception, Foucault might have profited from perusing Machiavelli’s more republican-spirited works like the Discourses, The Art of War and The Florentine Histories. It seems intuitively apparent that the republican discourse, by and large, would prove much more fruitful in the search for an art of government if the aim is to avoid its entanglement with sovereignty that allegedly somehow inhibited its development. We should also keep in mind that Machiavelli referred to his The Prince as a collection of experiences in ‘arte dello stato’ (letter, 10 December 1513). As his art of the state was not, contrary to what Foucault argues, based on the singularity of the prince or anchored in territorial sovereignty, could it not provide one of the starting points in the search for origins of governmentality? Many of the features of an art of government attributed to anti-Machiavellians by Foucault are already present in Machiavelli and also in earlier contexts.

In general, Foucault argues that the calculative mechanisms of statistics give rise to political economy, concentrating on the relations between population, territory and wealth, and in time this transforms the art of government into political science (Elden, 2007b: 567). But one could argue that the seeds of this are not first sowed in the anti-Machiavellian treatises of the 16th century. For example, in Giovanni Villani’s chronicle of Florence the statistical form of knowledge is clearly detectable. With meticulous attention, Villani records details of streets, construction projects, the amount of grain consumed in the city weekly, the products produced by its merchants, the prices of products, etc. Villani’s chronicle provides ample evidence of what might be called statistical knowledge or a specific form of knowledge connected to the art of government. And Villani was not writing in the 16th century, but started composing his Nuova Cronica around the year 1300. There were also texts like the anonymous Oculus pastoralis from the year 1222 which touch on themes like training the urban officials, running the town’s finances, etc. In addition, the late medieval charitable organizations possessed meticulous statistical data about the population of Florence, for example (see Henderson, 1994); and, for instance, the records of the Orsanmichele poor relief reveal a huge amount of information about their clientele: the number of the poor, their occupational and marital status, the number of children, the prices of wheat, etc., and thus lay out an economic and demographic picture of that part of the population. Rising prices, famines and epidemics like the Black Death increased the interventionist role of the Florentine government vis-à-vis the population, and the ‘development of these strategies can be seen as a growing awareness of the necessity for the commune to tend to the general welfare of the population, particularly at times of shortage’ (ibid.: 243). As Henderson notes, it would be misleading to presume that this attendance to the welfare of the poor population was due only to Christian charity: more accurately, behind the policy lay a desire to minimize the spectre of popular disorder which surfaced especially during periods of shortage (ibid.). Thus, it is precisely a technique of power, where the government gathers information about the population in order to keep it in check, e.g. by alleviating famine through importing for the poor grain bought with public money. Is this not governing complexes composed of men and things? Is this not an art of government?

In general, Foucault might have profited from turning his glance more to the republican experiments of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in this respect, instead of stressing sovereignty and monarchy if he sees them as inhibiting the development of the art of the state. We may hypothesize that the genre of advice-books for city magistrates in late medieval city-states of northern Italy forms catacombs of forgotten literature for the development of ‘an art of government’. The free citystates of Regnum Italicum had to struggle with claims to sovereignty from the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, but the contractual sovereignty and territorial state Foucault sees as inhibiting the development of the art of government played no role in that context. The birth of modern diplomacy with standing embassies, in addition, was born in the Venetian practices of sending envoys to gather intelligence and was specifically connected to the ‘knowledge of the state’ and other states as well. All these developments pre-date Foucault’s ‘art of government’ – and do so by several centuries. Of course, there are also two different traditions of sovereignty: state sovereignty and popular sovereignty. Perusing the theoretical discussions related to popular sovereignty might reveal important theoretical and practical developments in terms of an art of government. The word ‘sovereignty’ is still conspicuously missing from the treaties of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), although the modern intertwining of territory and sovereignty starts with the Wars of Religion and especially with the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 and its adage ‘Cuius regio, eius religio’ [Whose rule, his religion]. But another tradition of sovereignty connects it with the people, and this tradition is much older. In this tradition, neither the prince’s sovereignty nor territory plays a decisive role. And neither of these is present in Machiavelli either, as we have seen.

In Foucault’s analysis, with the emergence of statistics and the concept of ‘population’ it produces, the family ceases to be a central model for society and instead appears as an instrument. The new art of government is no longer circular (in the sense that the end of sovereignty would be the exercise of sovereignty), but has the population as ‘the final end of government’. Almost needless to mention, that idea can be found in a number of Roman sources. ‘Salus populi suprema lex’ [The good of the people the chief law] was a famous phrase in ancient Rome, although the idea, of course, did not attain the Malthusian connotations. Nevertheless, the idea of seeing the population as a distinct phenomenon from the family, with its statistics and ‘laws’, already appears in Villani’s afore-mentioned chronicle of Florence. The interests of individuals comprising the population, and especially the interest considered as the interest of population, regardless of individual interests, will be the fundamental target of government. In Foucault’s words – this is ‘the birth of an art, or anyway, of absolutely new tactics and techniques’. This art of government, Foucault claims, transforms into political science. Once again, there is absolutely nothing new in this idea. Medieval discussions on the common good (see Kempshall, 1999) come close to the idea of treating the aggregate of individuals as something like a population. The first to employ the terminology of interests in political theory and to explore how collective and individual interest might be united, was Francesco Guicciardini, Machiavelli’s friend and younger contemporary. Most significantly, in the Aristotelian discourse that was dominant from the 1240s, politics is first and foremost a discipline with its own specific knowledge (although this is not tekhne but phronesis).

Foucault’s analysis further continues, and he argues that the governmentalization of the state is born from three roots, so to speak: from the Christian pastoral, from a new diplomatic-military technique, and from what was in the 17th and 18th centuries called ‘police’. This, however, is another story and there is no space to delve deeper into the theme here, but what is presented above should cast some doubt on Foucault’s contextualization of the development. The development he is describing took place at a varying pace in different regions but its seeds are anyway considerably older than Foucault seems to argue. More importantly, he seems to be focusing on the wrong source material, as there would evidently be more viable leads to follow in the search for an art of government as distinct from the ruler‘s sovereignty and territory, namely the traditions of popular sovereignty and republicanism. Even Machiavelli’s writings, rather than those penned by his critics, take resolute steps towards a secular art of government.

Stuart Elden (2007b) has also paid attention to the territoriality claim in Foucault’s lecture. Foucault makes a clear shift of accent from territory to population in his lecture as he says that the original title of the course, i.e. ‘Security, Territory, Population’, becomes ‘Security, Population, Government’. There is thus a change from a state of territory to a state of population. Elden points to Foucault’s change of perspective in the later lectures and works, when the emphasis on territory withers away: the state transforms from a territorial security pact (a guarantor of frontiers) into a pact concerning the security of population (a guarantor of human lives) (ibid.: 563). But this was what already Machiavelli meant by stato: it was a command over men, not frontiers. Ojakangas (2012) has convincingly argued that a similar misguided approach is present in Foucault’s treatment of pastoral power. More attention should be paid also to Foucault’s writings on the ‘diplomatic-military technique’ and ‘the police’ as well. It seems that his whole governmentality approach has feet of clay in terms of its historical accuracy, since it simply was not born in the context where Foucault claims it was.

The argument presented here also has some wider implications in terms of Foucault’s general project to canvass the development of an art of government. Foucault’s aim is basically an attempt to set up a conceptual framework to understand the birth of a distinctively modern art of government as separate from sovereignty. In a way he is offering an alternative understanding of the development of modern techniques of power, namely by separating them from sovereignty and locating them in pastoral power, disciplinary power, biopolitics, governmentality, police, etc. In some sense this project is paradoxical as it aims to deconstruct certain truths and developments without setting any truths of his own (see Bernini, 2008). Anyway, the observations made in this article should cast some doubt on the starting points and therefore on all the assets of Foucault’s project.

Foucault’s attempt to decipher modern mechanisms of power by avoiding sovereignty, territoriality and the juridical state is highly interesting, but he seems to be making the wrong conclusions. Although the origins of governmentality are old, considerably older than Foucault seems to argue in the lecture, it is precisely the secular state, founded in juridical and territorial sovereignty, that finally leads to a blossoming of an art of government. Detailed knowledge of population and economy, instead of securing territorial borders or sovereignty, was the mainstay of political power way before the age of anti-Machiavellians. What Machiavelli constructed, albeit in a tentative manner, was a theory of the secular state, with its own laws and necessities. This was not achieved by the anti-Machiavellians who spoke of reason of state, but by Machiavelli, whose analysis is not so much tied to the separation of the state and the prince as Foucault argues. The various anti-Machiavellians objected to Machiavelli’s secular approach, but because Machiavelli clearly had struck a point and it would not do to ignore his observations altogether, what they did was that they so to speak ‘baptized’ Machiavelli’s theories and turned them into discussion on ‘reason of state’, a discussion also very dear to Foucault’s project. But, essentially, reason of state was nothing but ‘Christian Machiavellianism’ and any tendency towards secular politics as such was denounced easily as Machiavellian (see Bouwsma, 2002: 220–1). Thus, what is important in terms of Foucault’s project is that Machiavelli, more than his critics discussed by Foucault, is something like a tutelary hero of governmentality. Foucault connects the birth of a science of the state to the writings of the theorists of reason of state, but these were not much more than epigones trying to make Machiavelli’s observations fit into the Christian worldview. Far from making a new contribution to a ‘science of the state’ with its own laws and exigencies, the theorists of reason of state objected to secular state and atheism looming in the writings of Machiavelli and tried to accommodate only some of its features to a Christian framework. There was also a discussion on the right and wrong reason of state, where the former was thought to conform to Christian aims and the latter to be more reminiscent of Machiavelli’s repulsive secularism and therefore to be objected.

In terms of Foucault’s endeavours this means that he is slightly displacing the origins of governmentality. Both pastoral power and reason of state are essentially Christian constructions, and the latter only a baptized version of Machiavelli’s new art of government. The techniques, exigencies and strengths of the state were there in Machiavelli already, as he does not make a separation between the prince and the state, contrary to what Foucault argues. In some sense, pastoral power, reason of state and other Christian conceptions inhibited rather than catalysed the birth of governmentality. And what Foucault refers to as the ‘police’, a governmental technique peculiar to the state, could easily be traced back to medieval treatises. The knowledge of the state and its population focusing on roads, trade, manufacturing, health, the poor, religion, etc., that Foucault attributes to ‘police’ in the 18th-century context (e.g. see Foucault, 1999: 148–51) was already there centuries earlier. One needs to look at the medieval treatises written in self-governing communes of northern Italy, for example, for a more viable lead on governmentality without sovereignty of the prince. Thus, Foucault’s project to think of governmentality without the concept of sovereignty and juridical conception of the state could have been more easily begun from another context. Although it is clear that governmentality attains full bloom with the birth of the modern state and its administrative apparatus – when the state truly becomes a double abstraction and emerges as an entity separate from the ruler and the ruled – its sources are considerably older and located in slightly different contexts than Foucault presents.