Mitchell Dean, Kaspar Villadsen

State Phobia and Civil Society

The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

State Phobia draws extensively upon the work of Michel Foucault to argue for the necessity of the concept of the state in political and social analysis. In so doing, it takes on not only the dominant view in the human sciences that the concept of the state is outmoded, but also the large interpretative literature on Foucault, which claims that he displaces the state for a de-centered analytics of power. Understanding Foucault means understanding all his interlocutors?whether Marxists, Maoists, neoliberals, or social democrats. It requires turning to Foucault's colleagues, including Deleuze and Guattari, François Ewald, and Blandine Kreigel, in relation to whom he carved out a position. And it entails an examination of his legacy in Hardt and Negri, the theorists of Empire, or in Nikolas Rose, the influential English sociologist. Foucault's own view is highly ambiguous: he claims to be concerned with the exercise of political sovereignty, yet his work cannot make visible the concept of the state. Moving beyond Foucault, the authors outline new ways of conceiving the state's role in establishing social order and in mediating between an inequality-producing capitalist economy and the juridical equality and political rights of individuals. Arguing that states and their cooperation remain of vital importance to resolving contemporary crises, they demonstrate the interdependence of state and civil society and the necessity of social forms of governance.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 208
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Januar 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 151mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 308g
• ISBN-13: 9780804796972
• ISBN-10: 0804796971
• Artikelnr.: 42795773

Autorenporträt

Mitchell Dean is Professor of Public Governance at the Copenhagen Business School and Professor of Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Kaspar Villadsen is Professor of Management, Politics, and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
The Introduction argues for the importance of addressing the theme of state
and civil society in the present situation. It describes this situation as
one in which anti-statist or even state-phobic tendencies are evident in a
wide spectrum of academic and political thought, and in literatures
concerning the reorganization of public governance. It introduces the
examination of Foucault's evolving stances on this theme and asserts the
necessity of placing them in their historical and political contexts,
particularly in regard to his diagnostics of the present. It also gives an
overview of the chapters.
1State and Civil Society
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the interpretation of Foucault as rejecting the
language of state and civil society in his search for a new analysis and
diagnosis of power. It locates his political thought in its own context,
including the decline of Marxism as theoretical and practical framework,
and sketches both the context of its reception in English-speaking
countries at the end of the twentieth century and also of our present. It
introduces the nature of his governmentality lectures and his analysis of
liberalism and neoliberalism, discusses their comments on the fascist
state, and reflects upon the meaning of his key term, state phobia.
2Empire without State
chapter abstract
This chapter undertakes a critical examination of Michal Hardt and Antony
Negri's influential work, partially inspired by Foucault. Focusing on their
trilogy concerning Empire and the multitude, the chapter shows that this
work contains acute observations on globalized capitalism in a time where
modern assumptions are questioned. It also shows how Hardt and Negri, in
their grand diagnosis, occlude the nation state completely and render the
non-state and non-institutional forces of the multitude as a kind of hyper
civil society.
3Politics of Life
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the work of another influential inheritor of
Foucault, Nikolas Rose, and his approach to contemporary politics. Although
Rose's "humble" empiricism presents itself in opposition to the
metanarratives of the like of Hardt and Negri, there are some striking
similarities. There is a common fascination with the domain of the "bio"
and a politics of life, a belief in relatively unorganized sources of
political action from the grassroots and at the margins and interstices,
and a shared anti-state and anti-institutional position. Rose has produced
rich empirical work, yet the chapter argues that his "ethico-politics" (and
later, "ethopolitics") of creative self-fashioning within "communities" is
unable to address fundamental political questions and resembles a
sociological life politics grounded in a form of vitalism.
4Saint Foucault
chapter abstract
This chapter asks: was a Foucault a defender of community, differences and
political movements in civil society? It examines Foucault's enthusiasm for
grassroots, localized activism and bottom up politics. Particular attention
is given to his engagement with political militancy in the early 1970s in
the prisoners' support group, Group d'information sur les prisons (GIP).
Some explanations are given for Foucault's activities and links are
established between his political practices and his intellectual
development. An excursus counterbalances Foucault's apparent pro-civil
society stance with evidence of a much more skeptical view of the forces at
the micro-level of society, including practices of denunciation and social
exclusion among 'small people'.
5Blood-dried Codes
chapter abstract
This chapter examines Foucault's approach to key conventional political
questions such as constitutionalism, state universality and political
identity. The context is Foucault's 1976 lecture series, "Society Must Be
Defended", where he dissolves the state into a multiplicity of political
forces hereby showing that the universality of the state rests upon
silenced battles. The lectures foreground writers on "race war," who render
the social body as a battlefield between antagonistic groups and resonate
with neo-Marxist literature on "hegemony." The chapter discusses whether
Foucault's Nietzschean reading of state universality forecloses any
recognition of the state as a mediator of social conflict and confessional
war.
6The State of Immanence
chapter abstract
Foucault famously wished to "cut off the King's head in political theory"
and to produce an analysis outside the juridical-political framework of
sovereignty. This chapter explores his most sophisticated attempt to do so,
namely his work on the dispositifs. In the 1978 lectures, Security,
Territory, Population, Foucault performs what one may term a decentering of
the state into divergent technical assemblages, or the dispositfs of law,
discipline and security. The concept was reassessed by Deleuze, who gave it
a neo-vitalist cast, and enthusiastically rediscovered by later followers.
While the concept opens up a fine-grained analysis of governmental
technologies and their dynamic interplay, the chapter questions whether it
can replace the analysis of the history of the state as both concept and
institution.
7Virtual State-making
chapter abstract
This chapter extends and deepens the assessment of the dispositif,
including its implications for political analysis. It demonstrates that the
complexity of this framework is not simply due to the existence of several
dispostifs and their interplay. Each dispositif is kept in motion by
inherent contradictions and paradoxes, principally the tension between
diagrams and institutions. Diagrams are pure schematics, unattainable
ideals, around which governmental practices revolve. They represent a
virtuality that both animates and threatens the social order. The chapter
explores the diagram's analytical potentials with regard to current
political issues but also gives emphasis to the blind spots and foreclosed
alleys of this immanentist analysis.
8When Society Prevails
chapter abstract
This chapter examines Foucault's account of the emergence of the notion of
civil society as a counterpart to a liberal art of governing from the end
of the eighteenth century in relation juridical and political rights and
homo oeconomicus. While the general framework offered by Foucault is a
secularizing one of the becoming-immanent of governmental rationality, his
account cannot quite escape theological elements. His reflections on
political eschatology are introduced in relation to the idea of civil
society.
9Political and Economic Theology
chapter abstract
This chapter continues exploring Foucault's ambivalence with regard to
theology in his narrative of the movement from transcendent to immanent
forms of power and government. It situates him firstly in relationship to
the debate on secularization between Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg and Carl
Schmitt, and discovers an institutional political theology of the
pastorate. It then locates in relation to what Giorgio Agamben calls
economic theology and finds a hitherto unnoticed convergence between
Foucault's genealogy of governmentality and the political eschatology of
the twelfth century monk, Joachim di Fiore.
10Foucault's Apologia of Neoliberalism
chapter abstract
This chapter explores Foucault's relation to neoliberalism. It places his
thought on it in relation to other perspectives, including that of an
organized "thought collective", which has had considerable influence and
impact on governments and international organizations in the last
half-century. Using the case and testimony of his closest follower,
François Ewald, it interrogates Foucault's relationship by the end of the
1979 lecture series, Birth of Biopolitics, and in his engagement with the
Second Left. The analysis departs from the simple view that Foucault was an
early critic of neoliberalism.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
The conclusion summarizes and synthesizes the book's main discoveries and
claims. It argues that Foucault's political legacy still holds a wide range
of potentials for analyzing contemporary political issues and local
insights into public policies and the transformation of regimes of
governing. Nevertheless, there is an "immanentist" and anti-state
trajectory that one can follow in his political thought. The conclusion
summarizes Foucault's three de-centerings of the state into battle,
administrative technologies, and liberal arts of government. While he
ultimately refuses a political position, there are affinities between his
work and anti-statism from Maoism to neoliberalism. This is one that limits
analytical and critical possibilities in the current context in which
issues of poverty, inequality and debt are once more at the fore. The
conclusion sketches alternative ways of thinking about law, sovereignty and
the state.