My paper ‘How should we do the history of territory?’ is now online – forthcoming in the inaugural issue of the RSA journal Territory, Politics, Governance. The journal requires subscription, so if you can’t easily get hold of it, please let me know. The paper is a reflection on The Birth of Territory, and explores some methodological issues, but it is mainly a critique of Foucault’s discussion of territory in Security, Territory, Population.
This article approaches the question of territory, and its relation to politics and governance, from a historical perspective. The approach here is to interrogate the claims made by Foucault concerning territory in his work on governmentality. Foucault sees territory as crucial to the Middle Ages through to Machiavelli, but as displaced as the object of government by the emerging concept of population. In distinction, this piece argues that territory is not crucial to medieval determinations of rule, but actually emerges around the same time as Foucault’s notion of population, making use of similar techniques of rule. The historical examples relate to the broader book The Birth of Territory. While what he says about territory directly is misleading, Foucault is, however, extremely helpful in thinking about these questions more generally, especially in terms of his historical approach. Thinking more deeply about the history of the emergence of the concept and practice of territory is helpful in understanding contemporary concerns, transformations and disputes.
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I just had a read of this paper. When reading what you wrote about Leibniz and the introduction of calculation to political theory as governmentality it reminded of Isaac Newton, who was in contact with Leibniz and fell out with him significantly over calculus. To go back to governmentality, Newton was also very influential as Master of the Royal Mint in combatting counterfeiting and improving the legitimacy of the official currency. One of those multiple governmentalities.
I’m not sure if anyone has pointed out these relationships in the subject (my knowledge of it all is pretty sketchy and incidental) but I thought that element of dialogue between the ‘movers and shakers’ as well as the movement of thinkers from mathematics to political projects and back again across Europe (well, at least two anyway) was interesting.
Newton’s story also speaks to the violence of these ‘command’ processes (various gruesome executions) as well as the fact that none of it was a smooth transition – chunks of the ruling class more drawn to the money making schemes of forgery than the monolithic sovereign project.
Thanks for this. I’ve written more about Leibniz in a currently unpublished paper which looks at this in more detail. There is a little about the Leibniz-Newton relation in that, and more in The Birth of Territory, where I talk about Newton in relation to what I call ‘the geometry of the political’. It’s mainly about how his views on space were influential and I don’t go into detail on Newton’s politics or at all into his role in what you describe here – fascinating and perhaps a topic to be explored further.