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We are very pleased to guest edit and publish this special edition of Foucault Studies entitled Michel Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1980. Security, Territory, Population; The Birth of Biopolitics; On the Government of the Living. As pronounced in the editorial, this special edition contains three articles, each devoted to discussing one yearly series of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France in the period ranging from 1977 to 1980.

While the analysis of liberalism fills much of The Birth of Biopolitics, the focus of Foucault's discussion is on the dynamic, equivocal and enigmatic contemporary condition at the intersection of welfare governance, biopolitics and neo-liberalism of the late seventies. This article examines The Birth of Biopolitics as a prolongation of Security, Territoriality and Population by analyzing how Foucault frames liberalism in the wider historical context of governmentality. In Foucault's view, governmentality should be understood as a secular rationalization of the art of government. While the pastoral power of the Catholic Church was wielded against the backdrop of eschatology and the imminence of the end of worldly power, the early modern concept of reason of state brought with it the idea of an interminable history. Governmentality and reason of state spring from an undecided and precarious European balance of power between competing states. In order to measure up to external competition, individual states are required to develop a system of policing that collects detailed knowledge of the body politic. Insofar as the logic of the population as a collection of living beings comes to the fore as a primary target of government intervention, the imperatives of biopolitics and the politics of health arise. Liberalism forms an important modification of the double heritage of reason of state and biopolitics. This is a rationalization of government that, rather than breaking with the fundamental assumptions of governmentality, critically addresses the basic criteria for good government. Stressing the necessity for good government to acknowledge and incorporate the self-regulation of the population it governs, liberalism thus articulates a new kind of naturalness intrinsic to the population springing from the interaction between individuals motivated by self-interest. As a basic principle for its understanding of governing, liberalism embraces a natural history without any transcendental horizons, a secular and tragic natural history in which freedom can never be taken for granted insofar as its participants constantly constitute a danger for one another. It is also a mode of history in which the art of government is constantly called upon and forced to organize and secure the conditions for the exercise and development of freedom. For Foucault, thus, the liberal art of government is not a position to be affirmed or denied. Rather, the liberal art of government draws the outline of an experience of historicity that is an experience of an ongoing and unsettling, but also unending, crisis.

Montesquieu's Dismantlement of Oriental Despotism in Persian Letters.Montesquieu's epistolary novel, Persian Letters, is often presented as a satire of the mores of the French under the reign of Louis XIV, and an early example of what became a well-established literary trope: the de-familiarizing perspective of the foreign visitor. Others have emphasized that the novel's political horizon is best understood by taking into account Montesquieu's later work, the Spirit of the Laws, and that the Persian letters anticipates insights that were to be more broadly developed in the author's chef-d'oeuvre. While acknowledging the relevance and productivity of the latter perspective, the claim of the present work is that it is neither the particularities of France under the absolutist regime of Louis the XIV nor the despotism of the sultans and the shahs of the Orient that make up the novel's central concern, but rather the demonstration of how despotism, by erasing the crucial political distinction between the domestic and public spaces, not only has nefarious consequences for the freedom and liberty of the citizens, but that it, in the final analysis, has a dramatic demographic impact that undermine the wealth and the power of the very nations in which it is the dominant political form.

The Dream of the Pacific: Bio-Politics and Sexuality in Denis Diderot's Supplément au voyage de BougainvilleAn important issue in the economic debates of the eighteenth century was the concern that the advanced Europeans nations were facing a decline in population. It was assumed that this would have considerable consequences for the economic and military strength of countries like France and England. The idea that the decline was an effect of the European countries' advanced state of civilisation was widespread; accordingly, explorers like James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville were eager to examine the ways in which the societies and cultures they encountered organised sexual reproduction. Informed by the travelers' accounts, and recognising the possible insights these offered for the challenges France was facing, Denis Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville analyses and discusses the sexual mores of the inhabitants of Tahiti. Taking as its starting point the oblique and slightly idiosyncratic way in which the French philosopher addresses the issue — in the form of an apocryphal "supplement" to Bougainville's account supposedly written by the explorer himself — this essay analyses the way in which Diderot transforms an ethnographic reflection on Polynesian culture into an analysis of the pathologies of his contemporary France from the double perspective of economy and ethics.

Shortly after thepublicationin April 2021of thethemedspecial issueFoucault's History ofSexuality Vol. 4, Confessions of the Flesh, theeditors ofFoucault Studiesareinordinatelypleasedto present thisnon-themed issue containingthree original articles.Thefirstofthesearticles,"Resistance: An Arendtian Reading of Solidarity and Friend-ship in Foucault," by Liesbeth Schoonheim (KU Leuven, Belgium)compares the accountsof resistance in Arendt and Foucault.While recent scholarship has firmly established thesimilarities betweenthem, in particular with regard tothe diagnosis ofthe dangers of late-modern social processesleading to atomization,totalitarianismandbiological racism,there are alsosignificantdifferences.AlthoughFoucaulthas reflected more extensivelyand rigorously on the shapes and conditions of resistance,thepaper argues that Fou-cault'scomprehensive accountof resistanceomits the encounter with the other,whereasthis encounterwith theunique and unfathomableotherhas been putat the center of po-litical praxis andof acts of resistanceby Arendt.Developing the discussion of resistancein Arendtasshearticulatesitin response to the Shoah,the article claims thatshe providesa concept of solidarity and friendship thatcan bedrawnupon to extend Foucault's anal-ysis of the transnational solidarity among the governed in fighting for their rights vis-à-vis their governments, as well as tore-articulate andadvancehisunderstandingof friendship.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: "How to live together?": Roland Bar thes and the phantasme of idiorrhythmic life -- AKÈDIA/Akedia -- ANAKHÔRÈSIS/Anachoresis -- ANIMAUX/Animals -- ATHOS/Mount Athos -- AUTARCIE/Autarky -- BANC/School (of fish) -- BEGUINAGES/Beguinages -- BUREAUCRATIE/Bureaucracy -- CAUSE/Cause -- CHAMBRE/Room -- CHEF/Chief -- CLÔTURE/Enclosure -- COLONIE/Colony -- COUPLAGE/Pairing -- DISTANCE/Distance -- DOMESTIQUES/Servants -- ÉCOUTE/Listen -- ÉPONGE/Sponge -- ÉVÉNEMENT/Event -- FLEURS/Flowers -- IDIORRHYTHMY/Idiorrhythmy -- MARGINALITÉS/Marginalities -- MONÔSIS/Monosis -- NOMS/Names -- NOURRITURE/Food -- PROXÉMIE/Proxemics -- RECTANGLE/Rectangle -- RÈGLE/Rule -- SALETÉ/Dirtiness -- UTOPIE/Utopia -- XÉNITEIA/Xeniteia -- Vita nova versus bios philosophikos: Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault -- Contributors