Governmentality and the Science of Territorial Management

• In Event: Zones of Sovereignty? Territoriality and Spatial Governance

Abstract

Scholars tend to think that modern territoriality, or the linear partitioning of space for the sake of political authority, developed as a side effect of sovereignty. In the attempt to define and enforce limits to sovereign space, so the conventional argument goes, states came to define their authority as increasingly territorial in nature. But this paper argues that a long-neglected source of territoriality was the science of administration that held in the German lands in early modern Europe. It was this tradition that Michel Foucault called ‘governmentality,’ but for him this signaled a move toward governing people rather than land. On the contrary, this paper examines how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German political thought prioritized the science of territorial management, which concerned legislating a single space but did not amount to a claim to sovereignty. This found expression first in the practical study of ‘good policy’ and ‘cameralism’, as well as the juridical idiom of natural law. Both strands, the economic and the political, came together in the influential state theory of the Prussian philosopher Christian Wolff. Wolff’s state theory epitomized the two halves of Foucault’s notion of governmentality: the management of population, through regulating who was included as a member; and the management of nature through agricultural science. It was by treating the land and people as a single cohesive entity to be managed and made productive that territory became the cornerstone of modern state theory.

Author

• Benjamin Mueser, Harvard College