Security, Territory, Population
Security, Territory, Population is Michel Foucault’s 1977–78 Collège de France lecture course in which he redefines political power in terms of ‘governmentality’: the ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses, and tactics that aim to conduct the conduct of individuals and populations. Moving beyond his earlier focus on discipline, Foucault analyzes how modern states govern through security mechanisms that manage circulations (of people, goods, and risks) rather than simply imposing law or discipline. He traces a genealogy from Christian pastoral power and raison d’État to liberal and neoliberal governmental rationalities, showing how the emergence of ‘population’ as a statistical and biological reality gives rise to biopolitics. The course thus reframes modern political philosophy by emphasizing techniques of government, the role of economic knowledge, and the specific rationalities that shape liberal and security-oriented states.
At a Glance
- Author
- Michel Foucault
- Composed
- 1977–1978 (lectures delivered from 11 January to 5 April 1978)
- Language
- French
- Status
- reconstructed
- •Governmentality as a new analytic of power: Foucault proposes ‘governmentality’ as the key to understanding modern power, shifting focus from juridical sovereignty and disciplinary institutions to the heterogeneous techniques and rationalities that aim to conduct the conduct of individuals and populations.
- •Emergence of ‘population’ and biopolitics: The concept of population appears as a distinct object of knowledge in the eighteenth century, defined statistically and biologically. It becomes the target of biopolitics—techniques that regulate birth rates, health, mortality, and circulation—distinct from both sovereign punishment and disciplinary normalization.
- •From pastoral power to the modern state: Modern government develops by secularizing and transforming Christian pastoral power, which was centered on individualized, caring guidance of souls. This pastoral form migrates into political institutions, fusing with raison d’État and creating governmental practices that both individualize and totalize.
- •Security mechanisms versus law and discipline: Foucault distinguishes mechanisms of security, which operate by calculating probabilities, managing acceptable levels of risk, and acting on circulations over large domains, from law (which prohibits) and discipline (which normalizes individual bodies). Modern societies increasingly rely on security dispositifs to regulate space, economy, and health.
- •Liberalism as a governmental rationality: Liberalism is interpreted not as a doctrine of limiting power from the outside, but as an internal governmental technique that reflects continuously on the ‘too much’ and ‘too little’ of governing. It treats the market and civil society as sites of veridiction—domains that tell the truth about whether governmental interventions are appropriate or excessive.
Since its critical publication in 2004 (and English translation in 2007), Security, Territory, Population has become a central reference for political philosophy, political theory, and social sciences. It is foundational for the now widespread concepts of ‘governmentality’ and ‘biopolitics’ and has profoundly influenced analyses of liberalism, neoliberalism, security regimes, public health, and state rationality. The course is often read together with The Birth of Biopolitics and earlier works like Discipline and Punish to trace Foucault’s evolving account of modern power. It has also reshaped historiography of the state by shifting attention from institutions and constitutions to practices, techniques, and forms of knowledge.
1. Introduction
Security, Territory, Population is a lecture course in which Michel Foucault reworks his analysis of modern power by focusing on the notion of governmentality. Delivered at the Collège de France in 1977–78 and published posthumously, it occupies a pivotal position between Discipline and Punish (1975) and the later course The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79).
Rather than treating the state as a unified legal or institutional subject, the course examines the practices, techniques, and forms of reasoning through which conduct is directed. Foucault’s discussions range from Christian pastoral care and early modern “police” to population statistics and liberal political economy, but they are organized around a consistent set of problems: how security is organized, how territory is governed, and how populations are made knowable and manageable.
The lectures are now widely read as a key source for the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, which have become central in political theory, sociology, and critical security studies. Commentators disagree on whether this course marks a radical break with Foucault’s earlier emphasis on disciplinary institutions or an extension and re-specification of his prior analyses; the lectures themselves are frequently used to support both interpretations.
| Feature | Characterization in this Course |
|---|---|
| State | Complex of practices and rationalities, not a unitary subject |
| Power | Governing conduct via security, territory, population |
| Main analytic tool | Governmentality |
2. Historical Context and the Collège de France Lectures
2.1 Intellectual and Political Context (1970s)
The 1977–78 course was delivered amid intense French debates about Marxism, structuralism, and the crisis of traditional revolutionary politics after 1968. Foucault had recently published Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), both of which foregrounded power relations outside formal state institutions. At the same time, economic crises, the rise of technocratic governance, and discussions of “advanced liberal” societies formed a backdrop to his turn toward security and government as central problems.
Scholars often situate Security, Territory, Population within broader 1970s shifts from class-centered to governance-centered analyses of power. Some interpreters stress its proximity to contemporaneous work on the welfare state and social policy; others see it as part of Foucault’s engagement with German ordoliberalism and American neoliberalism, which he would address explicitly in the subsequent year’s course.
2.2 The Collège de France Setting
As a professor at the Collège de France, Foucault was required to present a new course each year, publicly accessible and research-oriented. Security, Territory, Population thus functioned both as a report on ongoing inquiry and as an exploratory workshop.
| Aspect | Description |
|---|---|
| Audience | Mixed: students, academics, activists, general public |
| Format | Weekly lectures, recorded and partially transcribed |
| Institutional constraint | Annual obligation to present new research |
Listeners’ notes and circulating tapes helped disseminate the themes of governmentality and biopolitics within French and later international discussions well before official publication.
3. Author, Composition, and Textual History
3.1 Foucault as Author of the Course
Michel Foucault (1926–1984), holding the Chair of History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France, composed Security, Territory, Population as part of his annual teaching duties. The lectures reflect his late-1970s shift toward political rationalities, governance, and population, while reworking earlier concerns with discipline, normalization, and knowledge.
3.2 Composition and Delivery (1977–78)
The course was delivered between 11 January and 5 April 1978. Foucault prepared manuscript notes and outlines, but the oral delivery was relatively free, with digressions and adjustments from week to week. Scholars note that the trajectory of the course changed partway through, as Foucault increasingly foregrounded governmentality and liberalism, themes that would dominate his 1978–79 lectures.
| Phase of Composition | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| Preparatory notes | Schemes, quotations, thematic plans |
| Oral lectures | Improvisation around prepared sequences |
| Subsequent impact | Direct lead-in to The Birth of Biopolitics |
3.3 Reconstruction and Editions
Because Foucault did not publish the course, the text is a reconstructed document. The standard French edition (Seuil/Gallimard, 2004), edited by Michel Senellart under François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, combines:
- Tape recordings of the lectures
- Foucault’s manuscripts and summary notes
- Student transcriptions of varying reliability
Editors indicate uncertainties in dating, gaps where recordings failed, and places where manuscripts and audio diverge. Some commentators emphasize that the published text is an approximation of the oral event rather than a finished book.
The authorized English translation by Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) follows the French critical apparatus, and discussions of key terms (such as gouvernementalité) often attend closely to translation choices and their interpretive implications.
4. Structure and Organization of the Course
4.1 Chronological Organization
The course consists of twelve lectures, organized roughly along a historical and conceptual arc from early modern sovereignty to modern governmental rationalities. While the lectures are sequential, Foucault frequently revisits themes and temporally overlaps different periods.
| Approx. Lectures | Main Focus |
|---|---|
| 1–3 | From territory–sovereign–subjects to security–territory–population |
| 4–6 | Christian pastoral power and its transformation |
| 7–9 | Raison d’État, police, and cameralism |
| 10–12 | Liberalism, governmentality, and the question of limits |
The editor’s division into sections is retrospective; Foucault did not present formal “parts,” but shifts in emphasis are discernible.
4.2 Thematic Axes
Two intersecting axes organize the material:
- A historical axis, moving from Christian pastorate to early modern police and then to liberalism.
- An analytic axis, differentiating forms of power: sovereignty, discipline, and security, and articulating the concept of governmentality.
These axes intersect in recurring problem-fields—urban planning, epidemics, grain markets, and population statistics—used as cases to demonstrate how techniques of power change over time.
4.3 Relation to Adjacent Courses
Although Security, Territory, Population is self-contained, it is structured as part of a multi-year research project. It explicitly connects back to Society Must Be Defended (1975–76) and forward to The Birth of Biopolitics. Some readers therefore treat its organization as that of a middle chapter within a broader investigation of biopolitics and governmental reason, rather than a fully independent treatise.
5. Central Arguments and Key Concepts
5.1 From Sovereignty and Discipline to Security
Foucault elaborates a tripartite schema—sovereignty, discipline, security—as different logics of power. Sovereignty centers on law and the territory of the prince; discipline targets individual bodies and their normalization; security operates on circulations and probabilities, seeking to manage risk at the level of populations.
“Security is not a matter of preventing everything, but of arranging things so that these phenomena occur within acceptable limits.”
— Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population (paraphrased from the lectures)
Proponents of this reading emphasize that Foucault is not proposing a chronological replacement but a complex coexistence and re-weighting of these logics.
5.2 Governmentality
The course introduces governmentality as a key analytic. Foucault defines it as both:
- A type of power concerned with “the conduct of conduct” of individuals and populations
- A historical process through which the modern state emerges from techniques of governing
Commentators note variations in how strictly this notion is defined. Some interpret governmentality as a broad framework subsuming sovereignty and discipline; others treat it as one modality among several.
5.3 Population and Biopolitics
A central argument traces the emergence of population as a distinct object of knowledge—statistical, biological, and economic. Population appears as a “natural” reality with its own regularities (birth, mortality, disease, migration), prompting techniques Foucault calls biopolitical, which aim at managing life processes rather than issuing commands to legal subjects.
This analysis links security mechanisms (e.g., epidemic management, grain supply regulation) to the broader problematic of biopolitics, though the term itself is more fully developed in adjacent courses.
5.4 Pastoral Power, Raison d’État, and Liberalism
Foucault argues that modern governmental power inherits features from Christian pastoral power (individualizing care and totalizing responsibility), fuses them with raison d’État and police (state-strengthening management), and is later reconfigured by liberalism, which reflects on how much the state should govern.
Scholars debate whether this yields a coherent “genealogy of the state” or primarily a series of problem-focused case studies; interpretations differ on how systematic the resulting conception of governmentality is meant to be.
6. Legacy and Historical Significance
Since its publication, Security, Territory, Population has acquired a central place in Foucault’s corpus and in contemporary political and social thought.
6.1 Impact on Political Theory and Social Sciences
The course is widely credited with consolidating the concepts of governmentality and biopolitics, which have been adopted and reworked in political theory, sociology, geography, anthropology, and critical security studies. Researchers use Foucault’s schema to analyze welfare states, development policies, public health regimes, migration control, and risk management.
| Field | Use of the Course |
|---|---|
| Political theory | Analyses of liberalism, neoliberalism, state reason |
| Sociology / anthropology | Studies of governance, expertise, social policy |
| Security studies | Investigations of risk, surveillance, and policing |
| Urban / spatial studies | Work on planning, circulation, and spatial control |
Some commentators treat the course as foundational for the “governmentality studies” tradition, exemplified by works such as The Foucault Effect.
6.2 Reframing Histories of the State
Historians and theorists have used Security, Territory, Population to shift attention from constitutional forms and institutions to techniques of rule, such as statistics, police ordinances, and economic regulation. Proponents argue that this has opened new ways of understanding early modern and modern state formation.
Critics, however, contend that the course’s reliance on specific textual traditions (e.g., German cameralism, French police theory) risks overgeneralization, and that it foregrounds European developments at the expense of colonial and global dimensions of security and population management. These debates have spurred efforts to extend or revise Foucault’s framework in postcolonial, feminist, and critical race perspectives.
6.3 Position within Foucault’s Work
Many readers now see Security, Territory, Population as a hinge between Foucault’s earlier studies of discipline and his later analyses of neoliberalism and practices of the self. Its posthumous publication has led to retrospective reinterpretations of his entire oeuvre, with some scholars placing governmentality—not discipline or knowledge—as the central organizing theme of his late thought, while others view it as one important, but not exclusive, strand in a more heterogeneous project.
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@online{philopedia_security_territory_population,
title = {security-territory-population},
author = {Philopedia},
year = {2025},
url = {https://philopedia.com/works/security-territory-population/},
urldate = {December 11, 2025}
}