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Contemporary Foucauldian research assimilates the political with governance. This formulation dates to Foucault's emphasis on the significance of the anti-Machiavellians in introducing the concept of governance into political theory. Returning to Machiavelli, we argue that early modern political theory was instead characterized by the simultaneous problematization of ruler and ruled, and the co-constitution of sovereignty and governance. We then outline the relation of ruler and ruled in the political structure of the democratic sovereign. Concepts of both sovereignty and governance are necessary to theorize the political in modernity, including the dangers that arise from fusing sovereignty and governance, as occurred during the Nazi period in Germany, when the distinction between the sovereign people and the governed population was conflated.

This article seeks to examine the ‘birth of the social’ in the 18th century through an examination and comparison of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The underlying claimis that the emergence of a specifically social theory entailed a separation from political theory, as the uncovering of the limits of the ‘science of the statesman or legislator’. Emphasis is placed on the different ‘epistemological moves’, relative to the two texts, that rendered such a separation possible. In the case of Montesquieu, the terms of the social and political are separated, even opposed, but also articulated in their difference. By contrast, in Adam Smith the uncovering of a social bond tends towards a displacement of the ‘political’. The article concludes by suggesting why, in both cases, the discovery of the social remain edcuriously still-born.

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