Foucault, Rousseau, and Oakeshott on the art and science of government (and some Adam Smith and Bentham)
In the lecture of 1 February, 1978 (the fourth of the series published as Security, Territory, Population—I’ll be quoting the translation by Graham Burchell), Foucault introduces to his audience the genre of writing known as the “Art of Government.” This has inspired a huge literature on Foucault’s related notion of ‘governmentality.’' But there has been less interest in Foucault’s treatment of this art of government as such. As regular readers know, in the subsequent lecture series, Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault primarily focuses on liberal art(s) of government (which is also my motivation to study this issue).
Foucault suggests that the genre is a fiercely critical reaction to Machiavelli’s Prince (p. 89; see also p. 242ff on 8 March, 1978 with some qualifications*). And, in fact, when the genre starts “disappearing, Machiavelli’s The Prince reappears at the beginning of the nineteenth century.” (pp. 89-90) Foucault understands The Prince as teaching the art of maintaining power (while being beleaguered by both inter-state rivals and ambitious, local Grandi). By contrast, “The anti-Machiavellian literature wanted to replace this ability, this know-how, with something different and new: an art of government. Being able to hold on to one’s principality is not the same as possessing the art of governing; the art of government is something else.” (92) This something else is described as follows:
The art of government essentially appears in this literature as having to answer the question of how to introduce economy—that is to say, the proper way of managing individuals, goods, and wealth, like the management of a family by a father who knows how to direct his wife, his children, and his servants, who knows how to make his family’s fortune prosper, and how to arrange suitable alliances for it—how to introduce this meticulous attention, this type of relationship between father and the family, into the management of the state? The essential issue of government will be the introduction of economy into political practice. (pp. 94-5; emphasis added)+
In particular, this is triggered by the development of the “great apparatus of the administrative monarchy and its correlative forms of knowledge were being organized.” (p. 101) These are (in the context of cameralism and mercantilism) essentially “efforts to rationalize the exercise of power, precisely in terms of the knowledge acquired through statistics, and also, at the same time, a doctrine, or rather a set of doctrinal principles concerning how to increase the power and wealth of the state.” (p. 101; see also, in the context of Botero’s and Palazzo’’ raison d’État, the art of government is “a sort of skill, at any rate a rationality in the means employed to govern.” p. 289)
That the genre of the art of government is meant to be an alternative to The Prince does not yet explain why it exists. Foucault offers two considerations: first, the fall of feudalism and state centralization; second, religious dispersion and contestation in light of the Reformation and Counter-reformation (pp. 88-9)
Twice during the lecture of 1 February, 1978, Foucault appeals to Rousseau’s (1755) Discourse on Political Economy to bolster his argument (see p. 95 & pp. 106-107). In particular, he calls attention to the fact that in this article Rousseau “takes on the task of defining an art of government.” (p. 107) This essay is quite critical of Machiavelli so that fits Foucault’s more general claim.
Even so, Foucault’s claim is a bit odd because it is not obvious that Rosseau is defining the art of government in that piece. (Rousseau is much more interested in exploring the duties and legitimacy of government.) However, it’s not obscure what Foucault has in mind. Rousseau distinguishes sharply between sovereignty (constituted by the general will) and government. The latter has “the right of execution.” (‘Execution’ is here in the sense of ‘executive power’ that executes the laws legislated by the sovereign.) So, it is pretty clear that the art of government involves, on Rousseau’s conception, the skilled deployment of executive power.
In fact there is a rather important passage very early in Rousseau’s text:
Crucially, then, the skilled deployment of executive power is constrained by the extensive and advanced division of labor such that the chief government officers are always and necessarily reliant on intermediaries. That is to say, meticulous attention is not sufficient (perhaps counter-intuitive) to properly execute and oversee the laws (and bureaucracy, tax raising, and defense, etc.). So, for Rousseau the development of the art of government is a response to the vulnerabilities caused by the advanced division of labor.
I do not mean to suggest Rousseau’s analysis is wholly at odds with Foucault’s. But it would be natural to think, if one reads Foucault’s lectures that the reason why the “great apparatus of the administrative monarchy” generates a demand for an art of government is because there is a desire to manage (say) populations and it requires a new kind of knowledge (which this apparatus serves to generate and organize). And again, that’s not intrinsically opposed to Rousseau’s account, but Rousseau emphasizes that the division of labor that constitutes such a great apparatus (regardless of its aims) itself is the source of the demand for an art of government.
Interestingly enough (recall), in his famous (1947) essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” Michael Oakeshott suggested that Machiavelli’s Prince is itself responding to the breakdown in the conditions that allow for an art of government to flourish. And the reason for this is that politics becomes the area for new man, who lack the time and background (and perhaps temper) to cultivate a skilled practice, and that the cognitive division of labor generates huge challenges to improvise their way through governance. So, according to Oakeshott, Machiavelli teaches a second-best set of techniques or maxims of government (a genre that flourished through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). (Oakeshott is rather critical of this Machiavellian project.) This genre becomes the foundation for a modern political science.
Foucault himself recognizes that in addition to an art of government that is developed in different stages through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there is also a development of an accompanying science: “You have a science which is, as it were, tête-à-tête with the art of government, a science that is external to the art of government and that one may perfectly well found, establish, develop, and prove throughout, even though one is not governing or taking part in this art of government.” (p. 351, 5 April 1978.)
What’s neat about putting the narrative of Oakeshott together with that of Foucault, is that in Foucault the origin of the science of government that is external to the art of government is a kind of deus-ex-machina. But there is a further point lurking here: both the science and art of government are themselves responding to the growing division of (cognitive) labor.
The division of labor is, of course, the central theme of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. (There is good reason to believe Smith was a careful reader of Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy.) And in fact, the first three books of the Wealth of Nations are on the science of legislation; the last two books on its art as (recall) Halévy has correctly noted. Somewhat amusingly, Smith only cites Machiavelli in the books devoted to the art!
That’s all I wanted to say today. But, for those interested in how this all relates to (recall) Foucault’s treatment of Bentham and political epistemology in the Birth of Biopolitics, it is worth quoting Bentham on this matter. This is the first paragraph of Manual of Political Economy:
Political Economy is at once a science and an art. The value of the science has for its efficient cause and measure, its subserviency to the art
He then adds in a footnote note: “To Adam Smith the science alone has been the direct and constant object in view: the art the collateral and occasional one.”
+”Only in the eighteenth century (with Quesnay) do we find the “notion of economic government, which is basically tautological since the art of government is precisely to exercise power in the form, and according to the model, of economy.” (p. 95)
*For the qualification see (inter alia) the following:
[Machiavelli] is not at the center of debate insofar as it takes place because of what he said, but insofar as the debate is conducted through him. The debate does not take place because of what he said, and an art of government will not be found through or in him. He did not define an art of government, but an art of government will be looked for in what he said. p. 243, 8 March 1978