Abstract
Foucault developed the concept of governmentality to understand the emergence and changes in the forms of political reason, as part of a critique of liberalism. For Foucault, both liberalism and neo-liberalism represent arts of government and forms of political reason. A political rationality is not simply an ideology but a worked-out discourse containing theories and ideas that emerge in response to concrete problems within a determinate historical period. Foucault's concept of governmentality is relevant to how governmental technologies insert themselves into practical policy development and implementation at a particular historical juncture. In this article I will seek to demonstrate the applicability of Foucault concept of governmentality to theorising the emergence of neoliberal forms of state reason which have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century and which have underpinned the application of free market economics to restructuring the public sectors of advanced western capitalist societies. The paper concludes by briefly examining recent developments in higher education policy as they have developed in Britain since the 1980s, with specific reference to the Research Excellence Framework, Political Studies, and the fate of Political Theory. as they have been affected over the last decade.