Razão de Estado e liberalismo em Michel Foucault

uma breve incursão na história da governamentalidade

Abstract

Abstract: The object of this article is Michel Foucault’s project of a history of the governmentalities as exposed in two of his Collège de France lectures: Security, territory, population (1978) and The birth of biopolitics (1979). It is about following Foucault’s genealogy of two governmental rationalities – reason of state and liberalism – under a prism that, on one side, focuses on the criticism of the centrality of the state in Political Philosophy’s discourse and, on the other, highlights the way in which the different techniques of government tend to phagocytize, answering to specific problems, the resistances which oppose them, continually reconfiguring themselves in this process. For this are analyzed the central axes of these two arts of government, as well as the reasons which conditioned the passage from one to another.

Keywords: Foucault, history, governmentality, reason of state, liberalism, power.