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Excavating Categories: Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics

Shannon Winnubst

in Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics

Through a close reading of Foucault's 1979 lectures on neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics, I explore the implications of a non-ideological approach to neoliberalism. More specifically, I ... More

Through a close reading of Foucault's 1979 lectures on neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics, I explore the implications of a non-ideological approach to neoliberalism. More specifically, I excavate the central categorical and epistemological transformations that Foucault argues occur in the shifts from classical liberalism to neoliberalism: the sites and mechanisms of truth (from the contract to the market; from the protection of ownership to the expansion of maximizing interests); dominant social values (from utility to human capital); concepts of freedom (from Rights of Man to subjects of interests); concepts of subjectivity (from “citizen” to “entrepreneur”); and modes of rationality (from juridical to calculative).Less

Challenges and Opportunities in EU-China Relations

Roland Vogt (ed.)

in Europe and China: Strategic Partners or Rivals?

EU-China ties have evolved from the early tentative contacts in the late 1970s to a full-blown 'strategic partnership.' But doubt needs to be cast on the foundations of this relationship: what are ... More

EU-China ties have evolved from the early tentative contacts in the late 1970s to a full-blown 'strategic partnership.' But doubt needs to be cast on the foundations of this relationship: what are the mutual interests and how strategic are they? In fact, EU-China ties are in a transitional period. Gone is the early ignorance and exuberance and now a more pragmatic tone has set in. Europe and China have struggled to define their growing global roles and their positions vis-�is each other. The outcome has been that China has tended to overestimate the EU and what it can deliver for a future multipolar order.Less

Populism and Socialism

Tracy B. Strong

in Learning One's Native Tongue: Citizenship, Contestation, and Conflict in America

The various movements that resisted the economics and the politics of the “Gilded Age” consolidate themselves first into the Populist movement. Had the Peoples Party merged with the Republican Party ... More

The various movements that resisted the economics and the politics of the “Gilded Age” consolidate themselves first into the Populist movement. Had the Peoples Party merged with the Republican Party in the 1892 election they might well have defeated Cleveland. In 1896 William Jennings Bryan, running for President on the Democratic and Populist tickets has the most successful showing of a Third Party in US history. Bryan’s central focus on the silver issue cuts into his appeal, especially in the working-class Northwest. Race relations, however, remain an unresolved matter with the Populists and with the newly dominant Southern Democrats. Bryan remains the most progressive White politician until the rise of Debs. Debs responds to the increasing control of local industry by moving to a conception of a unified Party, one he comes to call ‘socialist’. He gets 6% of the national vote in 1912, though the Party has a much more considerable success on the state and local levels. Debs resists World War I and is sentenced to jail (still runs for President from jail).Less

Dangerously Unstable

William J. Rust

in Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos, 1954-1961

Divisions among the non-communist Lao politicians, a disciplined slate of Pathet Lao and leftist candidates, and the failure of Booster Shot to achieve its objectives lead to a May 1958 election ... More

Divisions among the non-communist Lao politicians, a disciplined slate of Pathet Lao and leftist candidates, and the failure of Booster Shot to achieve its objectives lead to a May 1958 election debacle for conservatives in the kingdom. Eisenhower administration officials, convinced of the need for a new generation of anti-communist leaders in the RLG, provided covert support for the Committtee for the Defense of National Interests (CDNI). Comprising younger, better-educated civilian elites and backed by elements of the Lao army, the CDNI became a powerful political force that helped depose Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma and his successor, Phoui Sananikone. The leading CDNI figure is Phoumi Nosavan, a CIA protégé and ardent anti-communist. This chapter includes biographic sketches of American Ambassador Horace Smith and Henry Hecksher, the CIA chief of station in Vientiane.Less

The Social Work Science Community: Controversies and Cooperation

Ian Shaw

in Social Work Science

I have bracketed a major question that can no longer be ignored. In what sense is social work a community in relation to its science work? How is social work science socially organized? Does it make ... More

I have bracketed a major question that can no longer be ignored. In what sense is social work a community in relation to its science work? How is social work science socially organized? Does it make sense to see social work nationally or even internationally as, in this regard, a shared collective enterprise? In the first part of the chapter I explore how far it makes good sense to see social work as engaged in science work collaboration. In addition, how far can we detect networks or perhaps schools? At the instrumental level, what mechanisms seem to exist for ordering the community? Having explored this territory, the question arises whether this places undue weight on the collective rather than the individual within social work science. I will look at the idea of “inventions” in this connection, taking taskcentered practice as my main example. Despite the implicit diversity in such arguments, it may seem that it is all rather too consensual. To get inside this question we will consider two related questions. First, how far does it make sense to see social work as fissured by interests? Second, is social work and its science activity marked by controversies? The key words interest and controversy are given strong meanings in this discussion. Finally, accepting that at some level there are differences and disagreements in social work on science issues, are there beneficial ways in which disagreements reciprocally should be explored and perhaps resolved or at least taken forward?Less

Engaging Interests

Marilyn Strathern

in Subversion, Conversion, Development: Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange and the Politics of Design

This chapter begins by raising the question of what is compelling about the repurposing or reuse of technologies. The unique way in which specific interests are aligned in these innovations, exposing ... More

This chapter begins by raising the question of what is compelling about the repurposing or reuse of technologies. The unique way in which specific interests are aligned in these innovations, exposing assumptions and contesting domination, offers an insight about the social capacity for engagement in general. People are engaged because they see that they themselves, and others, have an interest in collaboration or exchange, or whatever. What might be useful to consider then is how relations themselves can be kept open enough for the potential of engaging interests that cannot be specified in advance. Turning first to exogamy in Highlands Papua New Guinean marriage organisation, we find a set of protocols that have as their purpose the engagement of people's interests while maintaining those interests as both different and yet conjoined. These protocols, put to new work in contemporary marriage, are remarkably able to accommodate innovation. Taking a lesson from this material in a turn to technologies, we might suggest that as technique and sociality enfolded inseparably together, technical objects have relations at once interior and exterior within them. Their reuse or reappearance in new contexts demonstrates a renewal of energy, a capacity to work in new ways based on that engagement of interest. ‘Interest’ might usefully be seen as a social counterpart to ‘technology’.Less

From Wagner to Taft-Hartley: From Rights to Interests

James A. Gross

in Rights, Not Interests: Resolving Value Clashes under the National Labor Relations Act

This chapter explains how a workers’ rights law with values most consistent with human rights values was subordinated to pragmatic “give and take” and “balancing” of interests.

Making Space for Learning in the Home

Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green

in Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age

What opportunities for learning outside school were made available, pursued, and rejected by members of the class? Here we particularly focus on the ways that families from different kinds of social ... More

What opportunities for learning outside school were made available, pursued, and rejected by members of the class? Here we particularly focus on the ways that families from different kinds of social backgrounds—traditional middle-class, more bohemian, and highly educated families, along with desperately aspirational parents, especially those who had experienced some of the tragedies of enforced migration, as well as those who live their lives far more involved in community practices far away from the classrooms of London—provided for, encouraged, and defined learning for their offspring. We pay particular attention to forms of cultural capital, which is the kind of knowledge and expectations that stem from parental education and, of course, wealth. We describe how different homes construct opportunities for learning physically (how they arrange rooms and resources, especially technology), socially (how they establish habits and rhythms), and conceptually (how they see the purpose and nature of learning). The chapter concludes by setting these descriptions in the context of debates about whether and how digital media can be expected to overcome the more fundamental challenges faced by education in the risk society and by problematizing what connections between home and school mean in practice.Less

The Problems of Collective Action

Frederick W. Mayer

in Narrative Politics: Stories and Collective Action

The problem of collective action is ubiquitous: it is in many ways the central problem of social life. Free riding is commonly identified as the obstacle to collective action, but there are many ... More

The problem of collective action is ubiquitous: it is in many ways the central problem of social life. Free riding is commonly identified as the obstacle to collective action, but there are many impediment to collective action. In addition to free riding, communities face problems of coordination and assurance. And even more fundamentally, before there can be any collective action a community needs to convergence on a common conception of its interests.Less

A Good Enough Upbringing

Liam Shields

in Just Enough: Sufficiency As a Demand of Justice

This chapter defends a sufficientarian approach to parental rights, arguing for a particular account of the good enough upbringing, which should be a condition of holding parental rights that takes ... More

This chapter defends a sufficientarian approach to parental rights, arguing for a particular account of the good enough upbringing, which should be a condition of holding parental rights that takes into account both the interests of the child and the parent. The chapter discusses views abuse or neglect the child’s best interests as conditions attached to parental rights concluding that neither are satisfactory. The chapter argues that parental rights are conditional on not being excessively worse than the best available parent, where excess is determine by the importance of a better upbringing to the child. The chapter discusses this view in relation to practical guidelines used to determine parental rights.Less

The Antispeculative View: Habermas as an Example

Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel

in The Death of Philosophy: Reference and Self-reference in Contemporary Thought

This chapter offers a critique of Jürgen Habermas’s contemporary philosophy, with particular emphasis on its “antispeculative” habitus. This “antispeculative” habitus is entirely structured around a ... More

This chapter offers a critique of Jürgen Habermas’s contemporary philosophy, with particular emphasis on its “antispeculative” habitus. This “antispeculative” habitus is entirely structured around a critique of classical metaphysics, generally characterized as a symbol of the hubris of a human thought that desires to subjugate the entirety of what there is under its almighty power. Habermas has illustrated this vast genre, the veritable backbone of contemporary philosophy in three periods (or movements), each in turn embraced and then abandoned: a therapeutic approach, a critical approach (that is, the idea of philosophy as bringing out a phenomenon’s conditions of possibility), and finally, his most recent approach, which adopts a certain form of naturalism. This chapter examines three periods of Habermas’s evolution that embody the movement of contemporary philosophy to show how the symptoms of the current crisis of the death of philosophy persist. The first period of Habermas’s philosophy is marked by Knowledge and Human Interests, the second by “universal pragmatics”, and the third by fallibilist pragmatism. The chapter concludes by analyzing the theory of argumentation.Less

The individual and the collective

Paul Spicker

in Thinking Collectively: Social Policy, Collective Action and the Common Good

The main individualist objection to collectivism is that group interests, and group action, are incompatible with the recognition of individual interests. The interests of individuals will always ... More

The main individualist objection to collectivism is that group interests, and group action, are incompatible with the recognition of individual interests. The interests of individuals will always diverge from the interests of the group, and consequently groups can only subsist by repressing individual interests. The formal 'proofs' of this are questionable; people's behaviour is socialised, and people can and do collaborate for mutual benefit. Cooperation is both a means to common ends and an end in itself. Asserting the rights of individuals may lead to circumstances where majorities have to accede to minorities, but the converse may also be true: sometimes minorities have to respect the rights of majorities.Less

The House of Lords and reluctant reform

David Hine and Gillian Peele

in The regulation of standards in British public life: Doing the right thing?

This chapter shows how the House of Lords was initially reluctant to follow the House of Commons in strengthening its regulatory machinery. One constraint was the absence of sanctions for misconduct ... More

This chapter shows how the House of Lords was initially reluctant to follow the House of Commons in strengthening its regulatory machinery. One constraint was the absence of sanctions for misconduct but peers generally preferred to rely on an honour system. Gradually opinion shifted and more formal machinery was introduced. The chapter assesses the reforms and analyses the extent to which the House of Lords remains vulnerable to abuse.Less

Regulation at the centre of government: the Ministerial Code

David Hine and Gillian Peele

in The regulation of standards in British public life: Doing the right thing?

The chapter examines the Ministerial Code and its antecedents, and explores recent efforts to shift aspects of the Code away from the Prime Minister’s exclusive hands: towards Parliament for content, ... More

The chapter examines the Ministerial Code and its antecedents, and explores recent efforts to shift aspects of the Code away from the Prime Minister’s exclusive hands: towards Parliament for content, and towards an independent adviser, for cases of alleged Ministerial impropriety. The role of the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Ministerial Interests has not, in practice, developed significantly towards meaningful independence, and clearly - given majority discipline in a parliamentary legislature - it suits governments to retain accountability on these matters under Parliament’s usually supportive majority. The chapter concludes, from the cases which have arisen to date, that the political implications of more independent regulation of all but the most serious cases of alleged Ministerial impropriety would probably make independent regulation unworkable, however desirable it might be.Less

Where Keynes Went Wrong

Hunter Lewis

in The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis

Part historical narrative and part a critique Keynesianism, this chapter argues that the bi-partisan consensus on Keynsian responses to the financial crisis is mistaken. Hunter Lewis illuminates some ... More

Part historical narrative and part a critique Keynesianism, this chapter argues that the bi-partisan consensus on Keynsian responses to the financial crisis is mistaken. Hunter Lewis illuminates some of the apparent contradictions in Keynes’ writings and highlights current policy-makers who echo these logical mistakes. Lewis contends Keynesian policies, especially through low interest rates, may be fostering greater inequality and setting the stage for the next bubble. The focus on near-zero interest rates has done nothing to address the causes of the last crisis. The author concluded that without immediately embarking on saving and investing, rather than borrowing and spending, we will repeat the Victorian vice of debt and face an inevitable crash.Less

Diversity, difference and division in later life

Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs

in Social Divisions and Later Life: Difference, Diversity and Inequality

In the concluding chapter of the book, we summarise some of the main issues concerning social divisions and social differences in later life. First we stress the transformation of later life in ... More

In the concluding chapter of the book, we summarise some of the main issues concerning social divisions and social differences in later life. First we stress the transformation of later life in second modernity, from its categorisation as a residuum, a role-less role, a residuum of a life once lived to a richer and more diverse set of social locations. It is not simply that older people have shifted from being a category of the poor to a subset of the rich. Such representations are both false and misleading. Still they constitute a partial fact, namely that older people have become more diverse and no longer capable of being categorised as a distinct class or community. This transition can be explored in terms both of classical social divisions, like class, gender, disability or ethnicity, as well as through social differences and distinctions realised through the lens of citizenship, consumption and community. We conclude by arguing that examining both divisions and differences, inequalities and identities, in later life enables both a greater understanding of the changing nature of later life and of the changing constitution of division in contemporary society.Less

Appraisal and Review

Mike McConville and Luke Marsh

in The Myth of Judicial Independence

The concluding Chapter scrutinises the validity and relevance of the book’s hitherto unseen archival files, from which its account stems. In pulling together its main themes concerning the role of ... More

The concluding Chapter scrutinises the validity and relevance of the book’s hitherto unseen archival files, from which its account stems. In pulling together its main themes concerning the role of civil servants, the Executive and the Judiciary in administering criminal justice, it retraces the trajectory of suspects’ rights in the late nineteenth century, from their seemingly ‘bedrock’ foundation within the common law to their rough distillation (at home and abroad) through various iterations of Judges’ ‘Rules’, themselves of dubious pedigree. In documenting this journey, this Chapter underscores how Senior Judges, confronted by Executive power impinging upon the future direction of system protections, enfeebled themselves, allowing ‘police interests’ to prevail. With Parliament kept in the dark as to the ongoing subterfuge; and the integrity of the Home Office, as an institution, long dissolved, ‘Executive interests’ took the reins of a system within which much mileage for ‘culture change’ lay ahead. This Chapter helps chart their final destination; ultimately, one where new Rules (the CrimPR) replace those exposed as failures, leading to governmental success of a distinct kind: traditional understandings of ‘rights’ belonging to suspects and defendants subverted into ‘obligations’ owing to the Court and an adversarial process underpinning determinations of guilt long-disbanded in the quest for so-called ‘efficiency’. In explaining the implications of the events discussed in this book for the issue of ‘Judicial Independence’ and the ‘Separation of Powers’, this Chapter offers a theoretical framework that illuminates the role and practices of the Senior Judiciary in criminal justice policy today.Less