Mitchell Dean

Governing the unemployed self in an active society

This paper falls into two parts. The first contributes to the development of concepts necessary to understand questions of ‘self-formation’, particularly in relation to domains of government. The second seeksto work these concepts within a casestudy of what it calls ‘governmental-ethical practices’. The case-study consists of an examination of the recent reform of social security and income support practices concerning the unemployed in Australia and the utilization of the language, rationality and techniques that have been elaborated under the rubric of the ‘active society’ by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It offers an analysis of these governmental-ethical practices of the unemployed in terms of what they seek to govern, the means by which they propose to do so, their forms of subjectification, and the mode of existence they envision. It suggests that the analysis of these practices challenges and forces us to refine our approach to the formulae of neoliberal or advanced lib...

Putting the technological into government

This paper explores a series of themes raised by a certain use of the term ’technology’, particularly in expressions such as ’technology of power’ or, more particularly, ’technology of government’. Under the influence of Michel Foucault, these terms have entered both the history of the human sciences and the study of ’government’ conceived as the ’conduct of conduct’, that is, the study of the practices, techniques and rationalities involved in the calculated shaping of human capabilities and structuring the field of possible actions. Indeed the concept of technology of government might be said to provide the crucial linchpin that links the development of the human sciences to the ways in which various authorities and agencies have sought to govern the conduct of

A genealogy of the government of poverty

This paper contributes to a genealogy of the discourses and government of poverty. It offers a statement of what might be understood bya genealogical perspective and method, and then focuses on the emergence of a ‘liberal mode of government’ of poverty in the early nineteenth century, of which the reformed poor law in England is emblematic but not exhaustive. The emergence of this mode of government is followed through a series of related transformations of the older systems of the relief and administration of ‘the Poor’, best understood as a dimension of ‘police’ in its archaic sense. The conditions of the problematization of this older system of government in matters of population, economy, police, and so on. This emergence has implications for the formation of a national labour market, notions of self-governance and responsibility, forms of patriarchy and household, and issues of morality, philanthropy, admkinistration, and the state. Above all, it is within this liberal mode of government that we can ...

Powers of Life and Death Beyond Governmentality

The work of Foucault on liberal government, and that of his followers, is subject to two dangers. The first is to regard the critical character of liberalism (as governing through freedom) as providing safeguards against the despotic potentials of biopower and sovereignty. The second is to regard these heterogenous powers of life and death as somehow simply relocated or reinscribed within the field of liberal governmentality. The latter point is a major methodological error; the former closes the gap between the analytics of government and the normativity of liberalism itself. By working through these dangers, our understanding of the ethos of liberal government is transformed. That ethos today requires us to link governing through freedom to the powers of life and death, the exercise of choice to the sovereign decision, the contract to violence, economic citizenship to moral discipline and obligation, and rights and liberties to enforcement.

Perspectives on Neoliberalism for Human Service Professionals

This article provides an overview of recent perspectives on neoliberalism, which serve as a foundation for the assessment of neoliberalism’s influence on human services practice. Conventionally, neoliberalism has been conceived of as an ideology, but more recent perspectives regard neoliberalism as an art of government, a thought collective, and an uneven but path-dependent process of regulatory development. We argue that these new perspectives have the potential to contribute to our critical capacity and open avenues for the analysis of contemporary transformations of public policy and its delivery.

The signature of power

This concept of power keeps referring its users to a domain of apparent antinomies, which from a formal theoretical perspective are in turn construed as unities in opposition to further terms. Three such sequences are ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, power as capacity and as right, and juridical conceptions of sovereignty and ‘economic’ conceptions of government. This movement of opposition, unity and renewed opposition is however the signature of the concept of power, which, instead of being transcended or neutralised, must be kept in play in its analysis. As a consequence of the view that there is no essence of power, the paper further argues for a substantive rather than formal approach to power in which the analysis of power proceeds by paradigmatic cases, analogies and exemplars. The work of Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Michel Foucault, Max Weber and Giorgio Agamben helps to elucidate this approach.

Power at the heart of the present: Exception, risk and sovereignty

This article argues that the notion of power is less important as a theoretical concept that can guide research than as an orientation towards the present. As such, it foregoes a focus on agencies of power for an engagement with relations and mechanisms of power and what Foucault terms a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’. It notes that the first decade of the 21st century has witnessed different series of catastrophic events, such as 9/11 or the financial meltdown of September 2008. These events appear as markers of a crisis of neoliberalism as both governmentality and metaphysics. The elements of an emerging set of relations of power include the security complex characterized by the language of the exception, the rationality of precautionary risk, new techniques of security, and recharged and often militant forms of sovereignty capable of delegation by and derogation from the state. It is the understanding of this ‘dispositif ’, its ambiguities and consequences, captured by a broad range of cultural, political and social studies, which locates the relations of power that lie at the heart of many current contestations. Given the fecundity and creativity of these analyses, such studies would appear to call into question the project of a theory of power.

A political mythology of world order: Carl Schmitt's nomos

World order is once again a matter of broad discussion and has entered influential critical theory with Hardt and Negri and Giorgio Agamben. A key reference has been Carl Schmitts international thought, particularly his concept of nomos. Rather than address Schmitts historical jurisprudence of international law, which has been done elsewhere, the present article examines the role of philology and mythology in his international thought. Such an approach reveals the considerable power of the concept of nomos and the intelligibility afforded by his striking account of it in terms of the elements of land, sea and air. Schmitts jurisprudence proves to be inseparable from his approaches to language and mythology. This mythology also indicates significant ethical as well as intellectual problems in Schmitts work, not least stemming from his association with Nazism and his anti-Jewish statements during the 1930s. This article argues that mythology and philology are both necessary to the intellectual task of making world order thinkable and map-able, and form conditions of global political action and decisive authority. It recommends, however, an ethos of modesty and plurality that remains aware of the dangers of drawing political consequences from the mythological inscriptions upon the earth.

The Malthus Effect: population and the liberal government of life

Abstract This paper identifies and elucidates what it calls the Malthus Effect from two perspectives: a genealogical-theoretical one and an empirical-diagnostic one. The first concerns its implications for Michel Foucaults genealogy and conceptions of modern governmentality. The second suggests that Malthusian concerns have an enduring presence in recent and contemporary politics. In them we find a government of life that tethers the question of poverty to that of population, as both a national and international concern, links biopolitics to questions of national security and is a key source of the modern environmental movement. It remains present in areas such as welfare reform and immigration policy, notions of sustainability and in the global public health and environmental movements. It takes the form of a genopolitics, a politics of the reproductive capacity of human populations and the human species.

Michel Foucault’s ‘apology’ for neoliberalism

This lecture evaluates the claim made by one of his closest followers, François Ewald, that Foucault offered an apology for neoliberalism, particularly of the American school represented by Gary Becker. It draws on exchanges between Ewald and Becker in 2012 and 2013 at the University of Chicago shortly before the latter’s death. It places Foucault in relation to the then emergent Second Left in France, the critique of the welfare state, and, more broadly, the late-twentieth-century social-democratic take-up of neoliberal thought. It indicates three limitations of his thought: the problem of state ‘veridiction’; the question of inequality; and the concept of the economy. It also indicates how these might be addressed within a general appreciation of his thought.