The police state merges government entirely with administration, making governmentality unlimited

Evidence

Now let’s consider the second question, the second point on which I would like to refine a little what I said to you last week. I said, you recall, that governmentality in the regime of pure raison d’Etat, or at least its tendency, was interminable, without an end. In a sense, governmentality was unlimited. This was precisely the main characteristic of what was called at the time police and which at the end of the eighteenth century will be called, already with a backward glance, the police state. The police state is a government that merges with administration, that is entirely administrative, and an administration which possesses, which has behind it, all the weight of a governmentality. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 341

Categorization

• DEFINE: Pins down ‘police state’ as a technical term of the genealogy: the fusion of government with administration that has no internal limit.
• XREF: This is the apparatus that liberal governmentality later replaces, so this chapter traces the new limitation mechanism built to counter the police state’s openness.