I. Introducing Liberal "Excess" My consideration of liberal guilt and shame begins with the "The Birth of Biopolitics," where Michel Foucault initially defines liberal thought as a principle and as a method of rationalizing the activity of governing human behaviour "in the framework of, and by means of, state institutions." It is, in this emerging moment, a "rationalization that obeys--and this is its specificity--the internal rule of maximum economy" (Foucault, "Birth" 74). Foucault subsequently observes that, in the course of its history, liberal thought breaks with the rationalization of government as a reason of state, an end in itself, and "governmentality" as such:
