Pre-modern rule harvested aggregate goods while modern politics targets individuals

Evidence

In earlier periods, as I suggested in chapter 2, the government of the country had been practised as the aggregating of certain goods – bodies, crops, monies – required by ruling households for their treasury and their armed forces. The political process was intermittent, irregular, obliged generally to expand as the only means of increasing its revenues, and concerned always with aggregates. … As Foucault argues, modern politics was born with the concern not for aggregates but individuals – individuals who could be separately cared for, schooled, disciplined, and kept clean in an economy of individual order and well-being. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 339

Categorization

• XREF: Directly mirrors Foucault’s sovereignty-to-governmentality shift; the reader works with Foucault on power. — connects to: The 1980s shifted politicians from representing sectors to selling to publics — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 145