The general purpose of this work is to show how the legal juridical conception of power in the eighteenth century enabled the wide understanding of the term governmentality as the political strategies were directed to the population control as exposed in the Security, Territory, Population course, taught by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France in 1977-1978. To accomplish such aim, we will start from the critical confrontation that Foucault establishes with the idea of sovereign power within the called Modern State in Jean Jacques Rousseau. From this focus we intend to indicate, initially, that the Genevan philosopher when wrote the entry Political Economy in the Encyclopedia (1755), aims to present the need for an economic and administrative management about people’s possessions and lives, then registers the Social Contract (1762) as a logical extension of his two essays (1749 and 1755). This way, Rousseau seeks to legitimize the members of the society behavior, for this, the citizen need to delegate his individual and particular power towards a general will. In the course mentioned above, Foucault criticizes precisely this notion of sovereignty, because the Frenchman identifies that there is an intermediate body [government] equipped with a legal apparatus that becomes in practice a camouflaged government management, whose main tools are security devices to regulate the population. This idea of a government as a population government uses techniques of power, that is, technological devices to regulate the members of this state, in developing a controlling method under the guise of a discourse for the welfare of the population.
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