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The article offers an essay which reflects on the statement of Michel Foucault that modern societies have a demonic character in relation to liberalism, sovereignty and biopolitics. The author asserted that the general schema of Foucault's statement on the arts of governing is not philological for it has limitations in interpreting political rationality. It is stated that Foucault's analyses of the arts of government is internalists which neglect the issues of international government.

This article focuses on the works of Michel Foucault. The variety and sheer volume of commentary on Foucault's work suggests that there is no single way of understanding or encapsulating his theoretical contribution. That continuity resides, not in Foucault's general theoretical pronouncements concerning power but in an analytics of the regulation or as he would have it, government of human beings according to forms of truth in what might be loosely described as modern societies. Foucault is centrally concerned, in much more concrete terms, with the question of what he occasionally calls the society of normalization with the regulation of human individuals and populations according to practices that divide and group them according to certain norms, and the identities they assume or are furnished with in relation to such norms. Foucault removes an assumption which is present in much of the conventional literature on power, that power and liberty exist in an inverse and, in a sense, quantitative relationship.