Bacon conceived statecraft as mastery of the passions.

Evidence

It was Francis Bacon (philosopher cum statesman) who so finely articulated why the governance of states should be conceived of as something akin to “the government within.” Both, he claimed, required knowing “how affections are kindled and incited; how pacified and refrained, … how they disclose themselves, how they work, how they vary, how they gather and fortify, how they are enwrapped one within another.” For those following Bacon, the new role of the state was increasingly clear: namely, to curtail the dangerous and combustible passions of ordinary men. Statecraft was not opposed to the affective, but about its mastery. Like Foucault’s notion of “governmentality,” statecraft joined the care and governing of the polity to the care and governing of the affective self. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 439

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s governmentality, bridging early-modern political philosophy to the book’s colonial focus.