State

For most of his career, Foucault said nothing in particular about the state. He did not begin to reflect on it until the mid-1970s. His interest in the concept intensified in the late 1970s before again disappearing from view in the 1980s. In the short period of time that he wrote and spoke about the state, primarily in three courses at the Collège de France between 1976 and 1979, however, his reflections developed significantly around his invention of the new concept of “governmentality”; that is, of variable “governmental rationalities,” discourses that shape the state.