This book is derived from Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1977-78. In these lectures, and especially in the fourth lecture, he develops one of the central themes of this course, namely gouvernmentality. Given the popularity of this concept in the social sciences today, it is fair to say that this fourth lecture, in which Foucault attempts something like a definition of gouvernmentality, is one of his most popular and fruitful contributions. Fundamentally, Foucault revises some of his earlier work (see his update to the notion of normalisation above), in order to map the development of the dominant modes of power. First, a transformation from a society of sovereignty to a society of discipline and then to what he calls a “society of discipline by a society of government […] which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism” (p. 107f)