Analysis and summary of the Birth of Biopolitics

Act quick, he’ll take it down in a couple of days:

The genealogy that Foucault sketches out in his important February 1978 lecture is by now well known in the English-speaking world . Here, following on from his earlier lectures’ outline of an approach to the questions of security and population, the course now turns to “an inventory of the problem of government”, focused explicitly on the entry of the notion of economy into political discourse, and in this sense, on the birth of political economy.

Foucault’s begins this inventory by focusing on what he calls an ‘explosion’ of treatises on the “arts of government” in the 16th century (Foucault, 2007: 89). In the outline that follows, the significance of this work is given precisely in the ways it pushes away from the “juridical paradigm of sovereignty” that had developed in part through the long tradition of treatise which “presented themselves as advice to the prince” (Foucault, 2007: p87), common through the Greco-roman antiquity and the middle ages. Figured around a set of problems described as “typical of the 16th century” – of ‘how to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to be the best possible governor’ – this literature is said to emerge at the “intersection” of the two processes  that have made the 16th century such and important theatre for understanding our own ‘modernity’. On the one side, the dissolution of the old feudal state structures with the concomitant establishment of “territorial administrative states”. On the other, the radical transformation of the sacred paradigm set off by the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. In Foucault’s account, it is precisely at this moment – in which the transformations of the profane and sacred paradigms converge in the reorientation of the socio-political landscape of the 16th century – that the problem of government comes to be posed with an original urgency:

On the one hand there is the movement of state centralisation and, on the other, one of religious dispersion and dissidence…[I]t is at the meeting point of these two movements that the problem arises, with particular intensity in the 16th century of ‘how to be governed by whom to what extent, to what end, and by what methods’ (Foucault, 2007: p88?)

Cont’d.

New paper: Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the state: the primacy of politics?

New paper just released in History of the Human Sciences.

Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the state: the primacy of politics?

Ryan Walter

Murdoch University, Australia, walter.ryan.d@gmail.com

Foucault and Skinner have each offered influential accounts of the emergence of the state as a defining element of modern political thought. Yet the two accounts have never been brought into dialogue; this non-encounter is made more interesting by the fact that Foucault’s and Skinner’s accounts are at odds with one another. There is therefore much to be gained by examining this divergence. In this article I attempt this task by first setting out the two accounts of the state, and then some of the methodological strictures each thinker has suggested. I argue that the divergence between Foucault’s and Skinner’s accounts of the state is indeed driven by differences in method, as we might expect; but I also argue that these differences in method can themselves be well explained by the differing political motivations each thinker has at times articulated. Thus it is possible to make politics, and not method, the privileged point of this reconciliation.

Key Words: Cambridge School • Michel Foucault • governmentality • politics • Quentin Skinner

Should academic organizations take stances?

Should academic organizations such as the AAAS, AAG and RGS/IBG take public stances and engage in and contribute to public debate?

In the case of organizations to which I belong (eg the AAG) the answer has consistently been “no.” But why is this? Do other organizations take part in public debate, or even debate contemporary issues internally?

This question has arisen in the past with regard to the use of race-based data (data sets employing racial categories). The American Anthropological Association (AAA), the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) and the American Sociological Association have issued statements on race-based data (the anthropologists generally urging its lack of explanatory power, the sociologists generally encouraging its reasonable use).

Geographers, who are also heavy consumers of these data, have not issued similar statements, have no plans to do so and do not even have internal debates about it.

This general lack of public debate among official geographical societies is all the more worrying not only because geographical and geospatial research often makes policy recommendations, but also because it represents a refusal to engage in important issues and problems.

This failure was pointedly underlined recently when the AAA issued an official letter on behalf of its membership condemning the recent “laptop searches” carried out by the US customs. The letter was written by Setha Low, the AAA president, to Michael Chertoff, Director of Homeland Security. It notes that these searches are unconstitutional and impede research:

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution requires that federal authorities have a warrant to conduct a search and seizure of personal property and all US citizens and legal residents have these rights. Current practices have grave implications for anthropologists, social scientists and their research participants, as informants allow researchers into their lives precisely because they believe they have the ability to protect them and obscure their identities. The ability of scholars to honor their commitments to these individuals and communities could be compromised if a search were to take place.

Unlawful searches not only violate the rights of the scholar, but they unlawfully infringe upon the lives of our research participants. We urge you to revisit this policy, and allow the critical work of social scientists to continue unencumbered and uninterrupted.

This is a very simple point to make. The Savage Minds blog which discusses cultural anthropology is a good example of another kind of activism (blogs as activism was recently discussed on the crit-geog forum but not for long).

The AAG/IBG seem incapable of taking these stances. I think as a fees paying member of the AAG for over 20 years I’d like a bit more action or at least an explanation as to why my organization is not politically active.