Foucault contended that the emergence of the early modern liberal state depended upon the institution of more diffuse, but ultimately more pervasive, forms of government that slowly replaced the authoritarian and repressive power of the feudal sovereign. In the premodern era—prior to the development of the modern state—power was largely localized in the corporeal body of the sovereign monarch, who exercised his or her will absolutely on those within his or her scope of execution, or territory, in the form of the power of life and death (Foucault, 2003b). Foucault observed: ‘it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life’ (2003b, p. 240). However, sovereign power was subtly transformed across time with the development of the modern state through three important developments. First, state and sectional interests motivated by security and wealth extended ‘governable spaces,’ beginning in the sixteenth century but particularly in the late eighteenth century. Second, the development of new ways of thinking about government—principally in relation to juridical administration, the state’s appropriation of pastoral power over the administration of population, and curtailment of sovereignty over political economy—altered the nature and operations of societal control and power leading ultimately to more diffuse, but simultaneously permeating, technologies of government. Third, these changes realigned sovereignty around the power and the right ‘to make live and let die’ (2003b, p. 241) as sovereignty became entwined with biopower.
