Individualism had long been situated in the concept of the family, but that did not provide enough of a basis for the things government wanted to do. But sovereignty and the nation-state did not solve the riddle of effective governance, either. Foucault described the problem:
On the one hand, there was this framework of sovereignty which was too large, too abstract and too rigid; and on the other, the theory of government suffered from its reliance on a model which was too thin, too weak and too insubstantial, that of the family: an economy of enrichment still based on a model of the family was unlikely to be able to respond adequately to the importance of territorial possessions and royal finance. (Burchell et al., 1991, p. 98)