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cally or mutually exclude each other, but co-exist and are articulated with one
another in such a way that, nevertheless, one of them constitutes at each turn
the dominant political technology. The birth of the state of population and the
primacy of the apparatuses of security thus coincide with the relative decline of
the sovereign function and with the coming to light of a governmentality that
defines the essential political problem of our time, and for the characterization
of which Foucault uses the formula that we have already encountered in Schmitt
and Peterson:
While I have been speaking about population a word has constantly recurred
[ . . . ] and this is the word “government.” The more I have spoken about pop-
ulation, the more I have stopped saying “sovereign.” I was led to designate or
aim at something that again I think is relatively new, not in the word, and not
at a certain level of reality, but as a technique. Or rather, the modern political
problem, the privilege that government begins to exercise in relation to rules, to
the extent that, to limit the king’s power, it will be possible one day to say, “the
king reigns, but he does not govern,” this inversion of government and the reign
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471
or rule and the fact that government is basically much more than sovereignty,
much more than reigning or ruling, much more than the imperium, is, I think,
absolutely linked to the population. (Foucault, p. 76)
Foucault identifies the origins of governmental techniques in the Christian pas-
torate, that “government of souls” ( regimen animarum) that, as a “technique of
techniques,” defines the activity of the Church until the eighteenth century,
when it becomes the “model” and “matrix” (ibid., p. 147) of political govern-
ment. One of the essential characters of the pastorate is that it refers to both
individuals and the entirety of mankind; it looks after men omnes et singulatim;
it is this double articulation that is transmitted to the activity of government in
the modern State, which is, for this reason, both an individualizing and a total-
izing activity. Another essential trait shared by the pastorate and the government
of men is, according to Foucault, the idea of an “economy,” that is, an adminis-
tration of individuals, things, and wealth ordered according to the model of the
family. If the pastorate presents itself as an oikonomia psychōn, an “economy of
the souls,” “the essential issue of government will be the introduction of econ-
omy into political practice” (ibid., p. 95). Government is actually nothing other
than “the art of exercising power in the form [ . . . ] of economy” (ibid., p. 95),
and the ecclesiastic pastorate and political government are both located within
an essentially economical paradigm.
Although, in his “economic” definition of the pastorate, Foucault quotes
Gregory of Nazianzus (ibid., p. 192)—an author who, as we have seen, plays
an important role in the elaboration of the Trinitarian economy—he seems to
ignore completely the theological implications of the term oikonomia, to which
our research is devoted. But the fact that, in this perspective, the Foucauldian
genealogy of governmentality can be extended and moved back in time, right up
to the point at which we are able to identify in God himself, through the elab-
oration of the Trinitarian paradigm, the origin of the notion of an economical
government of men and the world, does not discredit his hypotheses, but rather
confirms their theoretical core to the very extent to which it details and corrects
their historico-chronological exposition. Thus, the lesson of March 8, 1978, is
devoted, among other things, to an analysis of Thomas Aquinas’s De regno and
aims to show that, in medieval thought, and especially in Scholasticism, there is
still a substantial continuity between sovereignty and government: “If the sov-
ereign can and must govern in the extension and uninterrupted continuity of
exercise of his sovereignty, it is insofar as he is part of this great continuum ex-
tending from God to the father of the family by way of nature and pastors [ . . . ]
This great continuum from sovereignty to government is nothing else but the
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translation of the continuum from God to men in the—in inverted commas—
‘political’ order” (ibid., p. 234). According to Foucault, this continuity is broken
for the first time in the sixteenth century, when a series of new paradigms, from
Copernicus’s and Kepler’s astronomy to Galileo’s physics, from John Ray’s natu-
ral history to the Grammar of Port-Royal, show that God “only rules the world
through general, immutable, universal, simple, and intelligible laws,” which is to
say that God “does not govern it in the pastoral sense [but] reigns over the world
in a sovereign manner through principles” (ibid., p. 235).
On the contrary, we have shown that the first seed of the division between
the Kingdom and the Government is to be found in the Trinitarian oikonomia,
which introduces a fracture between being and praxis in the deity himself. The
notion of ordo in medieval thought—and especially in Thomas Aquinas—is only
able to suture this division by reproducing it inside itself as a fracture between a
transcendent and an immanent order (and between ordinatio and executio). But it is even more surprising that, in his genealogy of governmentality, Foucault
mentions Thomas’s booklet De regno while leaving aside the treatise De gubernatione mundi, in which he could have found the basic elements of a theory of the government as distinct from the kingdom. Besides, the term gubernatio—
beginning from a certain moment in time and certainly already in Salvian’s book
De gubernatione Dei—is synonymous with providence, and the treatises on the
divine government of the world are nothing else but treatises on the way in which
God articulates and carries out his providential action. Providence is the name of
the “oikonomia,” insofar as the latter presents itself as the government of the world.
If the doctrine of oikonomia—and that of providence that depends on it—can
be seen, in this sense, as machines that found and explain the government of the
world, and become fully intelligible only in this way, it is equally the case that,
conversely, the birth of the governmental paradigm becomes comprehensible
only if it is set against the “economic-theological” background of providence
with which it is in agreement.
It is all the more surprising that, in the 1977–1978 course, the notion of prov-
idence is never referred to. And yet the theories of Kepler, Galileo, Ray, and the
Port-Royal circle that Foucault refers to do nothing other than to radicalize, as
we shall see, the distinction between general and special providence into which
the theologians had transposed, in their own way, the opposition between the
Kingdom and the Government. The passage from ecclesiastical pastorate to po-
litical government, which Foucault tries to explain—in all truth, in not terribly
convincing a way—by means of the emergence of a whole series of counter-
practices that resist the pastorate, is far more comprehensible if it is seen as a
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secularization of the detailed phenomenology of first and second, proximate and
distant, occasional and efficient causes, general and particular wills, mediated
and immediate concourses, ordinatio and executio, by means of which the theoreticians of providence had tried to make the divine government of the world
intelligible.
א When we undertake an archaeological research it is necessary to take into account
that the genealogy of a political concept or institution may be found in a field that is different from the one in which we initially assumed we would find it (for instance, it may be found in theology and not in political science). If we limit our analysis to strictly speaking
“political” medieval treatises, such as Thomas’s De regno or John of Viterbo’s De regimine civitatum, we are faced with what, to the modern eye, appears to be an inconsistency, and with a terminological confusion that, at times, makes it impossible to establish
a convincing connection between modern political categories and medieval concepts.
However, if we take into consideration the hypothesis, which we have followed, that the
genealogy of modern political concepts is to be sought in the treatises De gubernatione Dei and in the writings on providence, then the above-mentioned connection becomes clear. Once again, archaeology is a science of signatures [ segnature], and we need to be able to follow the signatures that displace the concepts and orient their interpretation
toward different fields.
It is the failure to attend to this methodological warning that not only prevented
Foucault from articulating his genealogy of governmentality all the way to the end and
in a convincing way, but also compromised Michel Senellart’s valuable researches on the
Arts de gouverner. Du “regimen” médiéval au concept de gouvernement. The modern concept of government does not continue the history of the medieval regimen, which represents a kind of dead end, so to speak, of Western medieval thought, but that, far wider and
more articulated, of the treatises on providence, which, in turn, originates from the
Trinitarian oikonomia.
5.2. An exhaustive reconstruction of the immense debate on providence that,
in pagan, Christian, and Judaic cultures, began with the Stoics and reached al-
most without interruption the threshold of modernity is out of the question.
Rather, this debate interests us only to the extent to which it constitutes the
place in which the theologico-economical paradigm and the fracture between
being and praxis that it entails take the form of a government of the world and,
vice versa, the government presents itself as an activity that can be thought only
if ontology and praxis are divided and coordinated “economically.” In this sense,
we can say that the doctrine of providence is the privileged theoretical field in
which the classical vision of the world, with its primacy of being over praxis, be-
gins to crack, and the deus otiosus gives way to a deus actuosus. Here, we need to analyze the meaning and the implications of this divine activity of government.
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It has often been noted that one of the crucial points of the dispute on prov-
idence concerned, from the very beginning, the distinction between general and
particular (or special) providence. At its base lies the stoic distinction between
that which can be found in a primary way ( proēgoumenōs) in the plans of prov-
idence and that which is rather produced as a concomitant or secondary effect
( kat’ epakolouthēsin or parakolouthēsin) of it.
The history of the concept of providence coincides with the long and fierce
debate between those who claimed that God provides for the world only by
means of general or universal principles ( providentia generalis) and those who
argued that the divine providence extends to particular things—according to
the image in Matthew 10:29, down to the lowliest sparrow ( providentia specialis
and specialissima). If we accept general providence and reject, entirely or in part, particular providence, we have the position of Aristotelian and late classical philosophy, and, in the end, deism (which, in Wolff ’s words, “concedes that God
exists, but denies that he takes care of human things”: Wolff, 11, 2, p. 191). If,
on the other hand, we accept at the same time the two forms of providence, we
have the position of the Stoics, theism, and the dominant trend of Christian
theology, for which the problem of how to reconcile special providence with
man’s free will arises.
However, what is really at stake in the debate is not man’s freedom (which
the proponents of the second thesis attempt to preserve through the distinction
between remote and proximate causes), but the possibility of a divine govern-
ment of the world. If the Kingdom and the Government are separated in God
by a clear opposition, then no government of the world is actually possible: we
would have, on the one hand, an impotent sovereignty and, on the other, the
infinite and chaotic series of particular (and violent) acts of providence. The gov-
ernment is possible only if the Kingdom and the Government are correlated in a
bipolar machine: the government is precisely what results from the coordination
and articulation of special and general providence—or, in Foucault’s words, of
the omnes and the singulatim.
5.3. The providential machine appears for the first time in a passage from
Chrysippus’s Peri pronoias ( On Providence) ( SVF, II, 336), where it already displays the essential character that will define its functioning up to the thresholds
of modernity, that is, the strategic conjunction of two apparently different prob-
lems: that of the origin and justification of evil, and that of the government of
the world. The link Chrysippus establishes between these two problems is so
strong that it can still be recovered at the heart of the hair-splitting postmortem
THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY
475
debate with Bayle that Leibniz stages in his Theodicy. In order to prove his the-
ory that the existing world is la meilleure des républiques, Leibniz claims that the evil that can be found in it does not follow from an immediate will of God, but
is the unavoidable consequence that is concomitant with the choice that God
made of the best possible world:
It follows that the evil that is in rational creatures happens only by concomi-
tance, not by antecedent will but by a consequent will, as being involved in the
best possible plan; and the metaphysical good which includes everything makes
it necessary sometimes to admit physical evil and moral evil, as I have already
explained more than once. It so happens that the ancient Stoics were not far
removed from this system. (Leibniz, p. 258)
At this stage, in order to both substantiate his theory and reduce his opponent to
contradiction, Leibniz retrieves the—as a matter of fact, quite faithful— paraphrase
that Bayle had made of the passage from Chrysippus:
“Chrysippus,” he says, “in his work on Providence examined among other ques-
tions this one: ei ai tōn anthrōpōn nosoi kata physin gignontai [whether diseases
happen according to nature]. Did the nature of things, or the providence that
made the world
and the human kind, make also the diseases to which men
are subject? He answers that the chief design of Nature was not to make them
sickly, that would not be in keeping with the cause of all good; but Nature, in
preparing and producing many great things excellently ordered and of great
usefulness, found that some drawbacks came as a result, and thus these were
not in conformity with the original design and purpose; they came about as
a sequel to the work, they existed only as consequences which were somehow
necessary, and which Chrysippus defined as kata parakolouthēsin [according to
concomitance]. For the formation of the human body, Chrysippus said, the
finest idea as well as the very utility of the work demanded that the head should
be composed of a tissue of thin, fine bones; but because of that it was bound to
have the disadvantage of not being able to resist blows. Nature made health, and
at the same time it was necessary by a kind of concomitance that the source of
diseases should open up.” (Ibid.)
It is this connection, which is not to be taken for granted, between the problems
of evil and of providence that Chrysippus bequeaths to Christian philosophy
and theology.
5.4. The treatise and questions on providence attributed to Alexander of Aph-
rodisias—a commentator of Aristotle active around the second century ad—
constitute a perfect example of how, precisely in this problematic context, the
different philosophical schools tend to converge with and differentiate them-
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selves from each other according to certain constant orientations. Alexander
was facing opponents—the Stoics—who argued that “nothing of what happens
in the world happens without the intervention of providence” and that the
gods—in this similar to scrupulous masters who control all that happens in their
house—look after both the world in general and particular things (Alexander of
Aphrodisias, La provvidenza, pp. 102–103). Against this idea of providence, Alex-
ander does not cease to repeat that a god who was constantly engaged in paying
attention to every single individual and every particular thing would show itself
thereby to be of a lower rank than the things he provides for. He thus opposes