Birth of the ‘secular’ individual: medical and legal methods of identification in 19th-century Egypt

A well-known anecdote about Mehmed Ali Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Egypt throughout much of the first half of the nineteenth century, says that when he was presented with a Turkish translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince with a recommendation to publish it in the newly founded Bulaq Press, he turned down the suggestion explaining that there was nothing in the famous book that he does not already know and that there was little of value that he could learn from the Italian philosopher. This anecdote is often repeated by those who like to stress the political astuteness of the great Pasha or alternatively by those who prefer to highlight his unscrupulous and often brutal means with which he ruled Egypt for nearly half a century. I would like to suggest, however, that this anecdote shows how Mehmed Ali understood what Foucault would later argue the true purpose of the “art of government” to be, namely, that it should not be limited to the fragile link between the Prince and his principality with the purpose of maintaining his control over it, but, rather, should be directed at the ‘right way of the disposition of things’.

In this paper I hope to show two things. The first is that Foucault’s concept of governmentality—the right “disposition of things”—and, more specifically, his argument about the “emergence of the problem of population”, are complex analytical tools that can help us explain the rise of the modern state in nineteenth-century Egypt. That Mehmed Ali (or Muhammad ‘Ali, to use the more familiar pronunciation used by Egyptian and Arab nationalist writers) desired to found modernity and/or a modern state in Egypt is something that is hardly contested. My purpose in this paper is not to question whether or not modernity was indeed the Pasha’s main desire; rather, it is to ask ‘what precisely was new in how the Egyptian state understood, and governed the population it controlled?,’ ‘what were the mechanisms that allowed the state to see the population in different light?’, ‘how did these mechanisms give rise to a new notion of population at the same time as shaping the Egyptian state in new ways?’ And as indicated above, I will try to do so by using Foucault’s insights about population and, specifically, his argument that the appearance of statistics, which he called “the science of the state”, was crucial in Egypt’s transition from sovereignty to governmentality. Specifically, I will try to trace the development of the interest in population both as evinced by Mehmed Ali himself and as reflected in the administration’s massive documentation. I will also that the medical and public hygiene polices, on the one hand, and the bureaucracy of the police and courts, on the other, gave rise to a new concept of the individual. It was this new “secular” individual (in the Asadian sense) that rendered the population of Egypt legible and hence governable.

The second point I would like to make in this paper is that evidence from 19^th-century Egypt can help illustrate some vague points in Foucault’s concept of “population”. In the fourth lecture of his 1977-78 course on “Security, Territory, Population” in the Collège de France, widely known as the “Governmentality” lecture, Foucault makes his now famous argument that under liberal regimes “population will appear above all as the final end of government.” In addressing the question of what the end of government can be he says, “Certainly not just to govern, but to improve the condition of the population, to increase its wealth, its longevity.”¹ As opposed to the exaction logic of sovereignty which was indeed interested in population but only insofar as an index of the wealth of the state, the ‘art of government’ is characterized by the proper ‘disposition of things’, a calculated administration that aims at the categorization, articulation, and classification of individual members of the social body.