In the preceding chapters I have explored some of the ways in which the analytics of government can diagnose the multitude of relations of power, knowledge, technique and ethics through which the conduct of human beings is shaped by others and by themselves. But have I not painted a monotonous picture of the successions of ideal types – liberalism, welfare, advanced liberalism …? Do these studies map a history in which it appears that programmes and frameworks dreamed up by authorities are successively imposed on a passive and recipient subject population? Do they not deny the polycentric, multi-vocal, heterogeneous and messy realities of power relations as they are enacted and resisted in a multitude of micro-locales, in favour of the illusory comfort of textual analysis? Do they not ignore the relations of struggle that are so important for political analysis, relations of struggle within rule itself as well as between those who seek to rule and those who are the actual or potential subjects of rule? Do they not exclude by fiat the human agency that must be at the heart of any radical analysis of power in our miserable, corrupt, unequal and unjust present? Have I not ignored the reality that exists ‘beyond government’?

No doubt such criticisms point to important issues.