Economy and People

So far two issues concerning security intrigue me the most.

First of all is the model of security as a system that aims at allowing fluctuation and compensation play out by itself. Of course this is very much an economic model as Foucault's example demonstrates. But there are two sense where we can view it as an economic model - firstly, and more specifically, as the capitalist economy, and secondly economy in a more general sense, namely the mechanics of any circulation and equilibrium. Concerning the capitalist economy, one wonders whether we can say, in the voice of a vulgar Marxist, that a higher development of capitalist economy gave primacy to the technologies of securty in the 19th century. For example, in the discussion of scarcity, the liberalist argument works with the important aspect of an expanded market - one that includes other country in the region, but also, at this time, an emerging global market in sight. Concerning the general model of circulation, on the other, it ties in well with Foucault's argument that the object of the power mechanism (population here) is viewed for the first time as something natural. The idea that energy and material eventually balance out seem to cohere with our knowledge about biological and physical realities. It thus seems a response to a more mechanical view of the world which in turn somehow dehumanizes the human subject into yet another natural phenomena.

The question about the human as natural phenomena leads me to my second interest, which concerns Foucaults statement that the population is different from the people. Of course we can surmise different meanings to the formulation, but what is really interesting to me is that the people seem to be those who are resistent or disruptive to the systematic calculation of the population. It reminds me how revolts or revolutions so frequently have to assume the name of the people, and to reassert that the people should be the real actors in the political scenes. At the same time, however, the revolutionary ideas are very frequently coded in rational calculations for the greater good (I am thinking of William Godwin here), and for example the public policy after the French Revolution seems to carry out exactly the abstract management of the population. Can I try to explain this by just saying that the French Revolution (and William Godwin for that matter) are after all a middle-class movement, in which the values are inevitably bound up with the capitalist economy that I discussed earlier?