Foucault on Governmentality and Liberalism

Foucault announced that his lectures of 1977—78 would be on `biopolitics'; in the end, they were on governmentality: from the pastoral of souls to the raison d'état . He announced his lectures of 1978—79 would also be on `biopolitics', but then presented lectures based on textual analysis, examining the way Smith and Ferguson invented a distinctive conception of civil society from that of Hobbes, Rousseau or Montesquieu, one that opened a site of civil society. These latter lectures continued by examining the birth of neo-liberalism in the very specific conjuncture of Germany at the end of the 1930s; it subsequently migrated, in a further mutation of `anarchocapitalism', to Chicago. Foucault adopted radically opposed methods in these two lecture courses.