of government itself, and as its product (for population is to bemaximized, freed from its bad aspects), and the techniques of rationalization,or apparatuses of security that inform rationalization of everyday life(bureaucratization, management, and other administrative processes of rationalcontrol that equates rationality and freedom, and thus produces a specific typeof controlled freedom). Governmentalityis the possibility of the naturalization of these processes of rationaleconomic management of civil society by the state. The state itself is rationalized to only actin the pursuit of freedom understood as the continuity of this rationalmanagement. The state appears then in adouble bind: on the one hand, it needs to fully provide this rationalization sosubject can understand themselves to be acting freely and based on theirself-interest; on the other hand, the state needs to do this in a way thatinvisibilizes itself as acting power. This operates in a way that produces a discourse on the state as thecenter of power. Weknow the fascination that the love or horror of the state exercises today; weknow our attachment to the birth of the state, to its history, advance, power,and abuses. I think this overvaluationof the problem of state is basically found in two forms. An immediate, affective, and tragic form isthe lyricism of the cold monster confronting us. But there is a second way of overvaluing theproblem of the state that is paradoxical because apparently reductive. This analysis consists in reducing the stateto a number of functions like, for example, the development of the productiveforces and the reproduction of the relations of production. But the state, doubtless no more today thanin the past, does not have this unity, individuality, and rigorousfunctionality, nor, I would go so far as to say, this importance. After all, maybe the state is only acomposite reality and a mythicized abstraction whose importance is much lessthan we think. Maybe. What is important for our modernity, that isto say, for our present, is not then the state's takeover (etatisation) ofsociety, so much as what I would call the governmentalization of thestate. Themodern state is partially the result of a historical process calledgovernmentality. However, in no way doesFoucault reduce the state to governmentality as its only place of production. Governmentality is what has permitted themodern nation-state to rise and take shape, to construct a discourse for itselfas both natural and in continuous development or progress (depending on whichstate we are looking at). The discourseof the state's takeover of society is precisely the discourse of neoliberalgovernmentality, which posits the state as an actor that needs to act onlywhen individual actions of individuals or groups of civil society fail to actin relation to each other in ways that guarantee that the game of economics andpolitics are played with fairness. The state is that agent that civil society would like to do without, butcannot when individual self-interests collide or go against each other. Then, and only then, is the state seen as arational actor and legitimized in its interventions. Welive in the era of a governmentality discovered in the eighteenth century. Governmentalization of the state is aparticularly contorted phenomenom, since if the problems