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other such subjects by a dialectic of spontaneous multiplication and convergence (the hidden hand).

These differences pose a challenge to existing theories of the sovereign and sovereign power, namely how to reconcile the government of the economy with the absolute and all-encompassing power of the sovereign. Political economy, in the form of Adam Smith and others, represents a challenge to the power of the sovereign insofar as it denies the possibility of an economic sovereign. Either the economy must be supposed to set limits to the power of the sovereign, or as the Physiocrats suggested he must govern differently and in accordance with the inherent rules when it comes to economic processes. In fact, Foucault argues, what emerged was an entirely new concept of the object of government that was characteristic of a distinctively liberal art of government:

... for the art of governing not to have to split into two branches of an art of governing economically and an art of governing juridically, in short, to preserve the unity and generality of the art of governing over the whole sphere of sovereignty, and to keep the speciicity and autonomy of the art of governing with respect to economic science, to answer these three questions, the art of governing must be given a reference, a domain or ield of reference, a new reality on which it will be exercised, and I think this new ield of reference is civil society. (ECFBBIO, 295)

Foucault identiies four essential characteristics of civil society according to Ferguson. First, in contrast to the opposition between political society and a state of nature relied on by Locke and other social contract theorists, civil society is a “historical-natural constant” (ECF-BBIO, 298). For Ferguson, human beings are social animals, and the natural state of humanity only appears in society. There is no presocial state from which humanity passed into social existence, no moment of transition from nonsociety to society: “The nature of human nature is to be historical, because the nature of human nature is to be social” (ECF-BBIO, 299).

Second, there is no explicit contract or delegation or renunciation of rights at the origin of civil society but rather a mechanism that “assures the spontaneous synthesis of individuals” analogous to the conluence of interests that operates in the economic sphere (ECF-BBIO, 300). However, what binds individuals together in civil society is not just economic interests but a series of “disinterested interests,” including instinct, sentiments, and sympathies, both favorably and unfavorably disposed to others; in short, “a distinct set of non-egoistic interests, a distinct interplay of non-egoistic disinterested interests which is much wider than egoism itself” (ECF-BBIO, 301). Moreover, these disinterested interests imply that civil society is always bounded, whether at the level of the family, village, community, or nation.

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See Also

Biopolitics

Governmentality

Power

State

Suggested Reading

Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds. 1996. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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adversaries, ou de l’engagement de l’un à l’égard de l’autre, que de l’ordre du «gouvernement.» (FDE4, 237)

My English translation: The exercise of power consists in “the conduct of conduct,” and in building up probablility. Power, fundamentally, belongs less to the order of confrontation between two adversaries or to the order of engagement of one with the other, than to the order of “government.”

While the exact phrase does not appear in the published translation called “The Subject and Power,” this essay is a worthwhile place to begin a discussion of this important concept. According to Foucault, power relations circumscribe ields of possible knowledge and action:

[Power] operates on the ield of possibilities in which the behavior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself. It is a set of actions on possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more dificult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or less; in the extreme, it constrains or forbids absolutely, but it is always a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions. (EEW3, 341)

He proceeds to elucidate this conception of power as determining the ield of the possible in terms of conduct. “To ‘conduct’ is at the same time to lead others.” In other words, understanding the various techniques of conduct means raising the question of government and governmentality, understood as “the way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed” (EEW3, 341). Power and governmentality, essential words in Foucault’s conceptual toolkit, are linked together in this passage through this notion of conduct. It is also signiicant that, like the word “subject,” it has both passive and active dimensions. Just as one inds oneself both subject to power relations and thereby deined by them, one can render oneself a subject. Foucault explains his project in terms of this dynamic most concisely in a brief resumé of his career. In this brief text, he outlines different modalities of subjectiication, or the various ways that one might be rendered or render oneself a subject (in terms of a subject of knowledge and in terms of an object for oneself) (EEW2, 459–461). Similarly, one can be both conducted and conduct oneself. One can permit oneself to be led and contest the terms by which one is led, so one cannot understand conduct without understanding counterconduct.

Arnold Davidson has argued that the notion of conduct is essential for understanding the work of Foucault’s later period. According to Davidson, this concept provides the link between Foucault’s work on power relations in Discipline and Punish and the 1975–1976 lecture course “Society Must Be Defended” and his later work on the ancient ethics and asceticism, which comes to fruition in the 1981–1982 lecture course “Hermeneutics of the Subject” as well as the 1982–1983 course “The

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Government of Self and Others” (Davidson 2008). The key to understanding this concept as well as Davidson’s claim for its centrality in Foucault’s work during this period can be found in Foucault’s treatment of conduct and counterconduct in his 1978–1979 course “Security, Territory, Population.” Although the bulk of this article will consist of a treatment of the concept within the context of this course, I shall turn to Foucault’s treatment of this concept in other essays that he wrote during this period, in particular his dispatches on the Iranian Revolution penned for the Italian news daily Corriere della Serra and the French newspaper Le Monde.

Foucault introduced the term “conduct” during his lecture of March 1, 1978, in the context of his discussion of the pastorate and its unique technologies for governing individuals, for inculcating a state of obedience. A genealogy of techniques of governing must account for these novel techniques for governing “one and all,” above all obedience as an end in itself. As Foucault writes in “‘Omnes et Singulatim’:

Toward a Critique of Political Reason,”

In Christianity, the tie with the shepherd is an individual one. It is personal submission to him. His will is done, not because it is consistent with the law, and not just as far as it is consistent with it, but, principally, because it is his will. In Cassian’s Cenobilitical Institutions, there are many edifying anecdotes in which the monk inds salvation by carrying out the absurdest of his superior’s orders. Obedience is a virtue. This means that it is not, as for the Greeks, a provisional means to an end, but, rather, an end in itself. (EEW3, 209)

Written at the same time as the lecture course and delivered as the Tanner Lectures in October 1978, this text summarizing this genealogy of governmentality hinges on the concept of obedience. As a result of obedience, the individual empties herself of any of the passions characteristic of the individual will (ECF-STP, 178–179). The pastorate provides a ield of general obedience in which even mastery (for example, of the priest or bishop) is a function of obedience (ECF-STP, 179). Furthermore, the point is not salvation but rather “an entire economy and technique of the circulation, transfer, and reversal of merits, and this is its fundamental point” (ECF-STP, 183). The pastorate institutes a form of power that generalizes obedience and actualizes it on each individual within its economy. In other words, “the objective of the pastorate is men’s conduct” (ECF-STP, 195).

A genealogy of pastoral power is necessary if we are to make sense of governmentality, which represents the early modern profusion of these techniques of obedience into a heterogeneous variety of different spheres of knowledge and power. In his essay “What Is Critique?” Foucault writes:

This art of governing, of course, remained for a long time tied to relatively limited practices, tied ultimately, even in medieval society, to monastic existence and

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practiced above all in relatively restricted spiritual groups. But I believe that from the ifteenth century and right before the Reformation, one can say that there was a veritable explosion of the art of governing men. (EWC, 383–384)

Foucault goes on to distinguish this explosion in two senses. First is “a laicization” of these techniques into realms not traditionally those of the Church and second a “reduction” to various domains: “how to govern children, how to govern the poor and beggars, how to govern a family, a house, how to govern armies, how to govern different groups, cities, states, how to govern one’s own body, how to govern one’s own mind” (EWC, 384).

But what of conduct? What is the relationship between conduct and the profusion of these arts of governmentality? First, Foucault notes that conduct and counterconduct are co-constitutive. It is not the case that we begin with concrete forms of power that mandate obedience and then subsequently movements of counterconduct materialize to contest these mandates. Rather, the well-ordered ield of conduct is constituted in reaction to various threats of disorder in the early Christian world; Foucault cites in this regard Gnostic attempts to contest the disorderliness of matter, but various threats can be found in both Judaic and Christian antinomian movements. Foucault mentions examples of such movements of counterconduct, with Martin Luther’s movement iguring most prominently. Revolts of conduct are distinct from political or economic revolts, yet often closely related to them. What distinguishes revolts of conduct is that their object is conduct itself, and their question always concerns how one wishes to be led. In other words, they are never completely autonomous and they never question whether one ought to be led. Rather, they question why and how one must be led in a particular way (ECF-STP, 197).

There is a historical shift in these movements. Beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries and extending through the Protestant Reformation, these local constestations occurred within the religious realm. Gradually, these revolts began to contest reigning political orders. Examples provided by Foucault include insubordination in the arena of warfare, the proliferation of secret societies during the eighteenth century, and refusals in the area of medicine ranging from the refusal of particular vaccinations and treatments to the refusal of medical treatment altogether by various religious movements. (Foucault’s examples remain salient, as these revolutions in counterconduct can still be found in various attempts to voluntarily refuse child immunizations and in the widespread interest in alternative therapies.)

The sheer variety of these examples raises the issue of the dificulty in deining the terms conduct and counterconduct. Although he uses them repeatedly, words like revolt and revolution are inadequate for at least two reasons. First, the term pertains primarily to a political or an economic contestation of authority, whereas counterconduct is not primarily political (although Foucault’s examples demonstrate that it can certainly have political implications). Second, revolution connotes

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a widespread mass movement, and, although movements of counterconduct can indeed manifest themselves in this way, they need not do so. Foucault next proposes the term “disobedience,” but dismisses it as too weak and inaccurate. Disobedience is necessary, but it is insuficient for characterizing movements ranging from medieval mystics to Anabaptists and the Freemasons. Foucault reluctantly cites “dissidence” as a possibility, for its aptness to characterize religious movements that contest pastoral power as well as contemporary Soviet dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His texts and activities contest the totalizing power of the Soviet state, forms of power that certainly manifest in the political realm as well as everyday realms of conduct. However, when one uses the word “dissidence,” one thinks immediately if not of the Soviet context then of intellectuals who use various interventions in the public sphere to contest the political status quo. In addition to various Soviet dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn that Foucault discusses, dissidents today would include writers and activists such as the Nobel Laureates Vaclav Havel and Liu Xiaobo, but the point remains the same: dissidence as it’s commonly thought of today is too restrictive a notion to encompass all the aspects of counterconduct, for it would not make sense to refer to individuals who refuse to vaccinate their children as dissidents. Revolt, disobedience, and dissidence each pertain to an important feature of counterconduct, but each has its limitations. Despite its awkwardness, Foucault settles on counterconduct as the counterpart to conduct.

Foucault next turns to ive activities associated with pastoral counterconducts in particular (asceticism, community, mysticism, Scripture, and eschatology). I briely focus on asceticism because of its centrality in Foucault’s later texts and ethics understood as the care of the self. In the context of counterconduct, Foucault discusses the ascetics of late antiquity, desert anchorites such as Saint Anthony or Saint Sabbas the Sanctiied. Foucault acknowledges that it seems odd to think of these ascetics as engaging in counterconduct, for what could be more obedient than asceticism? (Certainly this was Nietzsche’s view.) Although he acknowledges this dimension of ascetic practice, he notes an important distinction between the obedience demanded by authorities of the early Church and the ascetic practices of these lone individuals in the desert. Foucault cites three important distinctions. First, this was an exercise of the self on the self, and hence recalled ancient ascetic practices (cf. EHS2). Second, these exercises were structured from easier to more dificult as one progressed, with “the ascetic’s own suffering” as the “criterion” gauging this dificulty. Finally, asceticism takes the form of a challenge among various anchorites in which individuals would try to outdo one another in fasting or various other forms of suffering, with the ultimate goal being an end to suffering, apatheia. Throughout the history of the

Church, there have been various attempts to incorporate ascetic practices, but these practices are foreign to pastoral power because of the focus on self-mastery (ELCSTP, 205–207). If asceticism has an uneasy relationship with pastoral power, so do the four other aspects of medieval counterconduct. These ive counterconducts form the borderlands of Christianity (ECF-STP, 215). The history of the medieval

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Church can be read as various attempts to incorporate these counterconducts that achieved various levels of success.

These ive aspects of counterconduct led to various “insurrections of conduct” during the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Foucault understands various modern revolutions under this rubric, including the seventeenth-century English, eighteenth-century French, the twentieth-century Russian, and, despite the fact that they are omitted here, the Iranian Revolution and the revolutionary clubs and Soviet workers’ councils are concrete manifestations of these insurrections, which pose the question of how one is to be led and how communities are to be conceived of, from the level of the family to that of the state (ECF-STP, 228). The extent and limits of sovereignty are at stake in these insurrections; counterconduct manifests an urge “not to be governed like that.” In the passage from Foucault’s 1978 essay “What Is Critique?” cited previously, he outlines the profusion in the various arts of government. He goes on to assert that the sixteenth-century question of government “cannot be dissociated from the question ‘How not to be governed? [...] How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of these principles, in view of such objectives and by the means of such methods, not like that, not for that, not by them?” (EWC, 384, Foucault’s italics). Such a refusal “to be governed like that” is part of a localized struggle against a speciic modality of government; put otherwise, this refusal is a localized struggle against a speciic way of being conducted.

The twin concepts of conduct and counterconduct, and their relationships to governmentality and power, provide a necessary context for understanding Foucault’s work during this period. I would like to conclude by briely discussing Foucault’s texts on the Iranian Revolution as a means of illustrating this; speciically, I discuss Foucault’s “Is it Useless to Revolt?” published in Le Monde in May 1979 in light of this discussion of counterconduct. Foucault begins with the observation that an individual or group’s refusal to obey stands outside history in an odd sort of way because no grip on power, no techniques of government, are ever so absolute as to render this impossible (EEW3, 449). As Foucault notes in “The Subject and Power,” power structures the ield of possibility and thereby institutes the rules whereby games of power are played. But the rules of the game are never absolute: there are various exceptions that can amount to tactical refusal. Despite the absolutism of authority, people revolt. Just as the counterconducts that deined pastoral power were liminal, revolts and insurrections of conduct are in a sense outside history if history is a discourse structured by the ield of power relations in the same manner as conduct. Just as counterconduct is at the threshold of history, it is at the threshold of religion and politics as well, and the Iranian Revolution is no exception:

This is the enigma of revolts. For anyone who did not look for the “underlying reasons” for the movement in Iran but was attentive to the way in which it was experienced, for anyone who tried to understand what was going on in the heads of these men and women when they were risking their lives, one thing was