Bezpečnost, teritorium, populace - Přednášky na College de France (1977-1978) – Foucault Michel (2023)

In these lectures, Michel Foucault contrasts the mechanisms rulers used to secure their territories up to the classical age with security technologies and their correlation with populations. “Territory” and “population” serve as opposing poles around which his thinking develops. How did the transition from sovereignty over territory to the regulation of populations occur, and what effects did this transformation have on governmental practices? The emergence of population as both an idea and a reality was important not only politically but also epistemologically. Foucault’s analysis of security apparatuses related to populations gradually led him to emphasize the concept of government. No longer limited to its traditional meaning of public power or the exercise of sovereignty, government came to designate techniques specific to the administration of populations. The problematic triangle that originally framed his research was thus replaced by the systematic sequence security–population–government, through which Foucault introduced the concept of governmentality and moved from the history of security technologies to the genealogy of the modern state.