Methodology of Governmentality

"To analyze political power through the analytics of governmentality is not to start from the apparently obvious historical question: what happened and why? It is to start by asking what authorities of various sorts wanted to happen, in relation to problems defined how, in pursuit of what objectives, through what strategies and techniques?" p20

"[Studies of this kind] investigate the ways in which debates and strategies concerning the exercise of political power have delineated the proper relations between the activities of political rule and different zones, dimensions or aspects of this general firle of conduct of conduct... They concern themselves with the kinds of knowledge, the ideas and beliefs about economy, society, authority, morality and subjectivity that have engendered these problematizations and the strategies, tactics and programmes of government." p21

"These studies do not seek to describe a field of institutions, of structures, of functional patterns of whatever. They try to diagnose an array of lines of thought, of will, of invention, of programmes and failures, of acts and counter-acts. Far from unifying all under a general theory of government, studies undertaken from this perspective draw attention to the heterogeneity of authorities that have sought to govern conduct, the heterogeneity of strategies, devices, ends sought, the conflicts between them, and the ways in which our own present has been shaped by such conflicts." p21

- Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: reframing political thought (Cambridge University Press, 1999)