The analysis of pastoral power in the genealogy of the governement arts in Foucault

Abstract

In the course of 1978 Security, territory, Population Foucault takes as its object of analysis the pastoral power developed and extended by the Catholic Church from the third century to the 16th century. How can we place this study in Foucault’s trajectory? We think that the analysis of power extended to the pastoral scope serves the realization of the genealogy of modern governmentality, so that the art of Christian government inserts itself in the history of rationalised political practices. We seek to demonstrate the author's thesis that the techniques undertaken by the Christian pastoral power and that produce a power at the same time individualizing and totalizing are present in current political governmentality. For that, we set the specificity of pastoral power in relation to political rationality, which confers its exteriority against the ancient Greek thought and the arts of government from the modernity. Thus, the refusal of a laicizing reading of pastorate is evident, since the techniques of pastoral government go beyond the religious sphere in which they were circumscribed, what puts the question of how to govern in different social fields.