 Foucault shows that while government historically referred to a wide range of practices, from religious guidance of the soul to ruling over a territory and its inhabitants, in the context of the modern state it has come to mean governing a population. Population as the object of modern forms of government both required and encouraged the development of specific forms of knowledge such as statistical analysis as well as macro-economic and bio-scientific knowledge. The modern state had to take care of the life and the wellbeing of its population, and Foucault therefore calls the politics of the modern state biopolitics.