Interstate competition justifies unlimited domestic regulation of subjects’ lives.

Evidence

The object of police is almost infinite. That is to say, when it is a question of an independent power facing other powers, government according to raison d’Etat has limited objectives. But there is no limit to the objectives of government when it is a question of managing.-3. public’:power that has to regulate the behavior of subjects. Competition between states is precisely the hinge. connecting these limited and unlimited objectives, because it is precisely so as to be able to enter into competition with other states, that is to say, maintain an always uneven, competitive equilibrium with other states, that government [has to regulate the life of] its subjects, to regulate their economic activity, their production, the price [at which] they sell goods and the price at which they buy them, and so on [ … ]. The correlative of this limitation of the international objective of government according to raison d’Etat, of this limitatioll-in internationalrdatiQlls, is the absence ofa limit in the exercise of government in the police state. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 147

Categorization

• XREF: This limited-unlimited hinge anticipates the ‘external self-limitation / internal totalization’ structure Foucault later develops for liberal governmentality — core to the book’s arc.