Antitrust solutions to proliferation of barrier risks in the market conceal dispersed sovereignty and disciplines, enforcing the torture and starvation the sovereign enacts upon its populations through states of exception granting sovereigns the capacity to kill. Exigencies of security warrant abnegating liberal rights of personhood, yet their expert authors play into this regime as a necessary supplement of governance which legitimizes suffering.

The biopolitics of population and the reassertion of the sovereign right to kill and to execute exceptions to the liberal rights of citizenship suggest neoliberal governmentalities are increasingly rent with contradictions. On the one hand, neoliberal government operates from afar through individualized technologies of the self and through dispersed expert/bureaucratic/ managerial decision making. Market models of government increasingly replace state-directed ones in the public sphere as social welfare and education are either privatized or operated in accord with “free-market” strategies and technologies. These reforms are viewed as disciplining and/or transforming the inefficient apparatuses of the welfare state. Moreover, contemporary market mechanisms extend neoliberal technologies of government globally through contracts (e.g., international trade agreements and organizations), transnational corporations, and through international finance, securities, and related derivatives. Although market mechanisms involve dispersed sovereignty and disciplines, these tend to be viewed as impersonal and necessary for secure and expansive market operations.

On the other hand, the proliferation of risks associated with barriers to market penetration and derived from the uncertainties surrounding market contingencies seem to require centralized and often state-controlled intervention and government. Risks to market security are posed by energy disruptions or limitations, geopolitical conflict, resistance by nation-states such as Venezuela to neoliberal market operations, and, most recently, terrorism. In the context of these problematics, security exigencies are represented as warranting the reassertion of the sovereign capacity to kill and as legitimizing abnegation of liberal “rights” of personhood.

Consequently, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, public acceptance grows for forms of sovereignty and discipline that might otherwise be viewed as impinging against liberal self-government and liberal notions of privacy. In effect, the ethos of government through freedom is increasingly characterized by “exceptions” whereupon populations are deemed incapable of self-government, warranting the withholding of life, forceful discipline, and/or sovereign repression. Whereas preceding chapters stressed biopower’s more pastoral operations and emphasized technologies of the self, Chapter 6 addresses how sovereignty and discipline have been used recently to reduce the risks associated with, or perceived as threatening to, neoliberal and neoconservative principles of government.

Sovereignty is the “underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence” (Foucault, 2004, p. 80). As explained previously, sovereignty is a relatively undertheorized dimension of Foucault’s triangular structure of power within the secondary governmentality scholarship. Foucault’s relatively infrequent references to modern expressions of sovereignty no doubt resulted from his contention that power in the modern period is caught up with living beings and applied at “the level of life itself” (2004, p. 82). For Foucault, the productive capacities of biopower are more pervasive and insidious than the capacity to “disallow” life expressed as sovereignty (p. 80).

Yet, the sovereign capacity to disallow life, either through death or its gradients in incarceration, torture, starvation, enforced marginalization, and scientific stigmatization, continues to operate upon populations. Moreover, sovereignty is increasingly implicated in (coerced) implementation of neoliberal and neoconservative biopolitical principles of government, particularly in relation to the disciplining of markets. Finally, in the context of everyday life, expert authority and popular sentiment may support authoritarian measures and strategies of government as necessary supplements to government through freedom (see Dean, 2002a). The events delineating the turn of the twenty-first century have generated increased academic interest in sovereign power as the supplement or underside of biopower, as have the complex relations among and across discipline, government, and sovereignty.