Politic / Police [Foucault]
I’d like to take this opportunity to write about the expanding role of the police in relation to the emergence of the modern state. I think it’s interesting that ‘police’ and ‘politics’ share a common root, “polis.” I suppose this isn’t surprising, since they both pertain to the administration of a city. But apparently, and perhaps surprising, the institution of the police, as we now know it, is quite new. Traditionally the functions of the police were carried out in an informal fashion by the community, in order to preserve order and trade deals. According to Louis Turquet de Mayerne, the overarching task was to foster civil respect and public morality. (Power 411)
This began to change around the 18th century, when the police saw an expansion of their function to include the domain of health. In this exercise I’ll show why the inclusion of health into the activities of the police signifies the emergence of a governmentality that acts according to a biopolitics.
The idea of health is tricky, for the word itself seems ambiguous. It can perhaps be described in the negative: health is the absence of disease. This still does not offer much by way of definition. It is perhaps more useful to think of health as a process by which one becomes healthier. And perhaps such an increase in health can be understood as an increase in capability. Accordingly, when the police took over the function of health, it took on a role in which it was to administer the lives of individuals, to direct them towards health for the productive purpose of the state.
But what is the purpose of the state? I’ll begin with the traditional and general idea of “reason of state,” which is the aim of government is to strengthen the state itself. This idea developed during the 16 and 17 centuries as a way of theorizing government. Under this rationale, individuals were pertinent to the state insofar as they could affect the strength of the state. Since most could offer very little, many suffered political marginalism. Although individuals were marginalized politically, it was still in the interest of the state to administer individuals as significantly useful to the state, and in this manner, the police saw to the marginal integration of individuals in the state’s utility. “When people spoke about police at this moment, they spoke about the specific techniques by which a government in the framework of the state was able to govern people as individuals significantly useful for the world.” (Power 410)
At that particular moment, the police was presented as an administration heading the state together with the judiciary, the army, and the revenue collectors, insofar as these were the fields in which individuals and the police met. But the police as a state apparatus was also informally linked to justice, finance, and the army. In essence, the police existed as a technique of the state to administer the state. The way such administration took place was according to the political rationality of the time, one of “reason of state”.
In the essay The Political Technology of Individuals, Foucault writes of a kind of manual for the students of a disciplinized police, Polizeiwissenschaft, written by von Justi, with the title Elements of Police. In this book, the purpose of the police is characterized as “taking care of individuals living in society,” (Power 414) and present a permanent and positive intervention in the behavior of individuals. (Power 415) This paternal approach to the population for the strength of the state seems ethically problematic, for it discounts the individual vis-à-vis the state, but at least it was overtly and candidly understood as such. Further, it remained a technology that operated on individuals, although von Justi also introduced the notion of speaking of individuals as a population. The shift to a state apparatus that functions of individuals as a population was to come with a liberal governmentality introduced in the 18th century.
In “The politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century” Foucault claims that during the eighteenth century the police was reinvented to serve not only its traditional role of maintaining law and order and for assisting governments in their struggle against their enemies, but also the new functions of assuring urban supplies, hygiene, health and standards considered necessary for handicrafts and commerce. (Power 334) The formal associated of three crucial functions – order, enrichment and health - was assured though an ensemble of multiple regulations and institutions under the generic name ‘police’. The police did not exclusively signify the institution of police in the contemporary sense, but rather an “ensemble of mechanisms serving to ensure order, the properly channeled growth of wealth and the conditions of preservation of health in general” (Power/Knowledge 170). The significance is the police became more than a limiting apparatus, but one of production.
This period can be characterized as one of transition, in which the idea of political economics was working its way into notions of governance. Stats were a way of surveying the state, in the broad sense of a population within a territory. It was at the point when sickness among the poor was identified “in its economic specificity” that the health and the well-being of populations came to figure as a “political objective which the ‘police’ of the social body must ensure along with those of economic regulation and the needs of order.” (Power/Knowledge 170) The police therefore became concerned with man’s relationships to property, “what they produce, what is exchanged in the market…how they live, the diseases and accidents that can befall them… In a word, what the police see to is a live, active and productive man.” (Power 412)
The basis for the transformation was not only one concerned with the preservations and conservation of the ‘labor force,’ but one that was becoming increasingly interested in surveying, analyzing, and controlling the numerical variables of a population along a territory encompassed by the state. Von Justi’s articulation of the population and environment as a “perpetual living interrelation” was one to be managed by the state. “The true object of the police becomes, at the end of the eighteenth century, the population; or, in other words, the state has essentially to take care of men as a population.” (Power 416) In this sense, the “project of a technology of population” was becoming understood as (what Foucault refers to as) biopolitics.
