Foucault and The Politics of Population
When governments talk about us, they rarely speak in the language of individuals. They speak in rates, curves, and averages. Birth rates. Life expectancy. Unemployment figures. Infection curves. In these abstractions, the mess of everyday life is translated into a single object: the population.
For Michel Foucault, this shift was decisive. Power in the modern world is not only about commanding soldiers or punishing criminals, it is about counting, managing, and shaping populations. The way we are governed depends less on laws that forbid and more on statistics that predict, less on orders shouted from above and more on subtle strategies to secure life itself.
During his seminar years at the Collège de France, Foucault delivered his 1977 course Security, Territory, Population. By then he was already famous for reshaping how we think about prisons, medicine, and sexuality. In those earlier works from the 1960s, he had shown how power does not come only from sovereign rulers or explicit laws, but from the countless ways institutions discipline bodies - regimenting space, time, and behavior. But in this new series of lectures, something shifted. Foucault’s gaze turned toward a different object: not the prisoner, the patient, or the schoolchild, but the population.
This shift is crucial. Discipline works on individuals - teaching them how to sit, march, confess, or obey. But modern states also had to grapple with masses of people: the sick, the poor, the unemployed, the fertile, the dying. These weren’t just collections of individuals but statistical realities, populations with rates, averages, and risks. For Foucault, the eighteenth century marked the emergence of a new form of power that did not just punish or reform, but managed life itself.
From Sovereignty to Security
Traditional sovereignty was about territory. The king’s power extended as far as his borders, and he ruled by issuing laws or waging war. Discipline, which Foucault had explored in his book Discipline and Punish, worked inside institutions - factories, schools, barracks - training individuals to be useful and obedient. But security introduced another logic altogether. It didn’t focus on individuals in isolation, nor only on territory, but on the circulation of people, goods, and risks across a whole society.
Think of a city facing smallpox. A sovereign response might be to cordon off the sick and punish anyone breaking quarantine. A disciplinary response would be to drill doctors, nurses, and patients into strict routines. A security response, however, looks at the population: calculating rates of infection, developing vaccination campaigns, weighing risks and costs. It doesn’t aim to eradicate illness completely (an impossible task) but to manage it statistically, keeping mortality at “acceptable” levels. Power here becomes less about prohibition than about regulation.
The Invention of “Population”
This is why Foucault insists that the “population” is not a natural fact waiting to be discovered. It is an invention of modern forms of governance. Only once statistics, demography, and political economy emerged could populations be grasped as entities to be studied and managed. Birth rates, fertility curves, death registers, epidemics, food shortages - all of these became data points in a new science of governance.
Population here is both object and subject. As object, it is measured, surveyed, optimized: governments seek to increase longevity, boost productivity, and prevent famine. As subject, the population is also active: its behavior shapes how it is governed. Health campaigns, for instance, only work if people adopt the practices they promote. The population resists, adapts, and negotiates, forcing governments to adjust. Power, in this sense, is not a one-way street but a feedback loop.
Governmentality
Out of this analysis, Foucault coined the term “governmentality.” By this he meant the ensemble of techniques, discourses, and institutions through which conduct is directed - not only the conduct of others, but the conduct of oneself. Governmentality expands the scope of politics beyond the state and its laws, showing how governing happens through schools, medicine, economics, urban planning, and even personal habits.
A striking example is public health. Governments don’t simply order people to be healthy. Instead, they circulate norms and knowledge: eat more vegetables, exercise three times a week, avoid smoking. These norms don’t operate like police commands. They shape how individuals understand themselves - what it means to be responsible, productive, or good citizens. People then govern themselves in light of these expectations, turning external norms into internal guidelines.
This is where Foucault’s analysis is most radical: power does not just tell us what to do, it shapes how we see ourselves, our bodies, and our choices.
Scarcity as a Mode of Governance
A key theme in Security, Territory, Population is scarcity. Scarcity seems at first like a natural fact - there is only so much food, land, or energy to go around. But Foucault, and later scholars building on his work, show that scarcity is also a political construction. To say “resources are scarce” is not just descriptive; it frames a whole set of policies and behaviors.
Foucault gives an example from the eighteenth century, when famine was still a sovereign’s nightmare. Kings tried to prevent scarcity by hoarding grain, fixing prices, or banning exports. The goal was simple: stop shortage before it spread. But as the idea of population took hold, the logic changed. Scarcity was no longer something to prevent at all costs, but something to regulate. Better to let grain circulate, markets stabilize, and supply and demand “naturally” adjust, even if that meant the poor went hungry.
Scarcity, then, becomes a way of governing populations. In contemporary times, we see the same logic at work: water scarcity justifies restrictions, energy scarcity fuels entire policies, healthcare scarcity organizes priorities about who receives treatment first. In each case, scarcity is both a real material condition and a discursive frame that shapes political choices.
The Ethics of Population
To think about population is to think about freedom and responsibility. Once power operates by shaping how we live - what we eat, how we raise children, how we think about risk - the question of politics becomes inseparable from the question of ethics.
For Foucault, the struggle for new forms of subjectivity is a struggle against the “types of individuality” imposed on us: the responsible taxpayer, the obedient patient, the self-optimizing worker. Resistance does not mean rejecting governmentality altogether (an impossible task), but finding ways to fold its norms differently - to reimagine health, work, and community outside the narrow frames imposed by scarcity and security.
Governments manage pandemics by calculating infection rates, hospital capacities, and acceptable risks. Climate policy is framed around managing scarce resources and balancing costs. Digital platforms track populations not only as numbers but as constantly updated data points, nudging us toward certain behaviors.
Here too, the population is both object and subject. We are measured, categorized, and targeted by algorithms. But we also participate - by sharing data, adopting health apps, embracing lifestyles of optimization. Governance today is not something that happens to us from outside; it is woven into our daily practices.
Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population marks a turning point in political thought. It reminds us that modern power is not defined only by sovereign commands or institutional discipline, but by the subtle regulation of populations. Population is not simply “us, together”; it is a field where life itself becomes the object of management.
But it is also where freedom can be rethought. If we are shaped as populations, we can also reshape the ways we live together. Scarcity does not have to be only a tool of control; it can open questions of justice and redistribution. Health doesn’t have to be just about self-responsibility; it can be solidarity. Security doesn’t have to be just surveillance; it can be care.
For Foucault, the point is not to escape governmentality, but to recognize it, so that we might practice life differently within its folds. To think population is to think the most intimate of questions - birth, death, health, sexuality, survival - on the largest possible scale. It is to confront how deeply politics and life intertwine, and how urgent it is to ask: what other ways of being a population might we invent?
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