Perhaps the most influential aspect of Michel Foucault's work on government has been his treatment of liberalism as a distinctive form of political reason. Liberalism is commonly regarded as a nor mative political doctrine or theory that treats the maintenance of individual liberty as an end in itself and therefore views liberty as setting limits of principle both to the legitimate objectives of gov ernment and to the manner in which those objectives may be pur sued. Foucault's account of liberalism as a rationality of govern ment also accords central place to individual liberty, which is seen as giving rise to a prudential concern that one might be governing too much. The suggestion is that, rather than pursue its objectives through the detailed regulation of conduct in the manner of po lice, it might be more effective for the government of a state to work through the maintenance and promotion of certain forms of individual liberty.According to this account, underlying the liberal fear of gov erning too much are two distinct but related perceptions of the population to be governed. It is seen first as containing a number of self-regulating domains of social interaction, and secondly as consisting of individuals endowed with a capacity for autonomous, self-directing activity. In liberal political thought, Foucault ob serves, the market epitomizes both perceptions, serving, in effect, as "a locus of privileged experience where one can identify the ef fects of excessive governmentality." 1 Liberal political reason, then, sees individual liberty as a limit, not simply to the legitimate reach of government, but also to its effectiveness. More recent scholars have adapted this account of liberalism to the analysis of neoliberal at tempts to govern through the decisions of autonomous individuals.

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This paper criticizes the ways in which `power', `interests', and related notions are used in the analysis of social relations. Two broad approaches to power analysis are considered. The first involves `capacity-outcome' conceptions in which power is defined in terms of the capacity of an agent to secure particular outcomes. The second involves more general usages in which power is supposed to be effective not only as regards the outcomes of particular struggles, but also in the determination of the conditions of struggle themselves by the systematic exclusion or suppression of certain interests. I argue that both approaches operate to foreclose serious analysis of the constitution of arenas of struggle and the forces active in them by means of gross oversimplification of the conditions in which struggles take place.