Another thesis I would like to put forward-and this is, in short, the other side of what I have just been saying-is that what is presently at issue in our reality, what we see emerging in our twentieth century societies, is not so much the growth of the state and of raison d'Etat, but much more its reduction, and in two forms. One of these is precisely the reduction of state govemmentality through the growth of party govemmentality, and the other form of reduction is the kind we can observe in regimes like our own in which there is an attempt to find a liberal govemmentality.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 1018