Politics as government: Michel Foucault's analysis of political reason

Alternatives

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 389-413

  Hindess, Barry ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

Governmental; Liberalism; Partisan politics; Political; States system

Indexed keywords

EID: 32244447563     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540503000401     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. Michel Foucault, "'Omnes et Singulatim': Toward a Critique of Political Reason," in James D. Faubion, ed., Power: Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3 (London: Allen Lane; Penguin, 2001), pp. 298-325, at 325.
2. Aristotle, The Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1253a 19-20; 1275b 21-22.
3. The Politics Ibid., 1998 1252a, 4-5.
4. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, "Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government," British Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2 (1992): 173-205.
5. Some of the exceptions can be found in Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds., Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004).
6. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 27.
7. Ibid., 1278b, 37-38.
8. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Faubion, note 1, pp. 326-348, at 341.
9. Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1995).
10. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in Faubion, note 1, pp. 201-222, at 206.
11. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality Ibid., p. 205-206.
12. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 17.
13. Foucault, note 10, pp. 204-205.
14. Ibid., p. 213.
15. Foucault, note 1, p. 315 (emphasis added).
16. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
17. Foucault, note 10, pp. 216-217.
18. Ibid.
19. Mark Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1699-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983);
20. Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 1750-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
21. Foucault, note 10, p. 221.
22. Michel Foucault, "The Birth of Biopolitics," in Paul Rabinow, ed., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 73-79, at 74-75.
23. Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess, introduction to their Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1-19.
24. Foucault, note 21, p. 76.
25. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 68.
26. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)
27. Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraints: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
28. Rose, note 24, is the most ambitious elaboration of this account of liberalism; Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999) is a useful survey of the field.
29. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 54.
30. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology 1978 Ibid., p. 55.
31. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Abacus, 1972).
32. Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth, "Popular Sovereignty and Civic Education," in Denise Meredyth and Jeffrey Minson, eds., Citizenship and Cultural Policy: Statecraft, Markets, and Community (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 68-91, at 88.
33. Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth, "Popular Sovereignty and Civic Education Citizenship and Cultural Policy: Statecraft, Markets, and Community 2001, pp. 68-91Ibid.
34. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 19-21.
35. David Hume, "Of Parties in General," in his Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 54-63.
36. David Hume, "Of Parties in General," in his Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary 1987 Ibid., p. 54.
37. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1987), nos. 10, 63.
38. Jennifer T. Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
39. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988) argues that this naïve view was soon undermined by the coarse realities of US political life. Perhaps it was in some contexts, but in others it seems to have survived the challenge of empirical refutation remarkably well.
40. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, note 35, no. 63.
41. But see Dean, note 26, Christine Helliwell and Barry Hindess, "The 'Empire of Uniformity' and the Government of Subject Peoples," Cultural Values 6, no. 1 (2002): 137-150,
42. and Mariana Valverde, "'Despotism' and 'Ethical Liberal Governance,'" Economy and Society 25, no. 3 (1996): 357-372.
43. Rose, note 24.
44. Foucault, note 10, p. 206.
45. Barry Hindess, "The Liberal Government of Unfreedom," Alternatives 26, no. 2 (2001): 93-111.
46. The term liberal was not used to denote political allegiance before the early years of the nineteenth century; see Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1995).
47. Helliwell and Hindess, note 39.
48. Nor is my point that this view of human development should be seen as merely an ideological support for Western imperialism. It provided J. S. Mill with an important part of his argument for increased public participation in politics and, in the hands of the new liberalism of late-nineteenth-century Britain, it served to support a powerful case for the promotion of liberty by the state - through intervention in labor-market contracts and working conditions, as well as in housing, education, and other areas of social policy: Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978);
49. Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in Britain, 1880-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Liberal imperialists, of whom there were many among the new liberals, have commonly seen such historicist views as justifying what they liked to think of as a civilizing mission, but many liberal opponents of imperialism - from Adam Smith to J. A. Hobson - have held equally historicist views.
50. Hindess, note 42.
51. Hunter, note 16.
52. Various aspects of this involvement have been amply documented in the British case by, for example, Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
53. Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001),
54. and Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
55. John MacMillan, On Liberal Peace: Democracy, War, and the International Order (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998);
56. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994);
57. Jennifer Pitts, "Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question," Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2000): 295-318
58. Melvin Richter, "Tocqueville on Algeria," Review of Politics 25 (1963): 362-398.
59. Although there are obvious difficulties of interpretation presented by the draft dispatches that Mill prepared as part of his duties in the East India Company. The careful examination in Zastoupil, note 48, shows that Mill's own views can often be clearly discerned.
60. See R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
61. Foucault, note 10, p. 217.
62. R. A. W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance (Buckingham, Eng.: Open University Press, 1997)
63. J. N. Rosenau and E.-O. Czempiel, eds., Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
64. Raeff, note 19.
65. Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London: Routledge, 1991);
66. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
67. But see note 5.
68. There is an extensive literature on the emergence of the Westphalian system and its geopolitical effects; see, for example, Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism, and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
69. Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York, Telos Press, 2003);
70. Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003);
71. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Walker, note 51.
72. Foucault, note 8, p. 34
73. Aristotle, note 2, 1252a, 5.
74. Barry Hindess, "Liberalism: What's in a Name?" in Lamer and Walters, note 5, pp. 23-39.
75. Cf. Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
76. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1984).
77. Gerrit W. Gong, "The Standard of Civilization" in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
78. David P. Fidler, "A Kinder, Gentler System of Capitulations? International Law, Structural Adjustment Policies, and the Standard of Liberal, Globalized Civilization," Texas International Law Journal 35 (1999-2000): 387-413.
79. This phrase derives from John Gallagher and Roland Robinson, "The Imperialism of Free Trade," Economic History Review 2d ser., 6, no. 1 (1953): 1-15, an influential (and still controversial) interpretation of nineteenth-century British policies. It has an obvious relevance for us all today.
80. Sanjay Seth, "A 'Postcolonial World?" in Greg Fry and Jacinta O'Hagan, ed., Contending Images of World Politics (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 214-226.
81. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
82. Hunter and Meredyth, note 30, p. 88.