Nikolas Rose

Governing economic life

This paper proposes some new ways of analysing the exercise of political power in advanced liberal democratic societies. These are developed from Michel Foucaults conception of ‘governmentality’ and addresses political power in terms of ‘political rationalities’ and ‘technologies of government’. It draws attention to the diversity of regulatory mechanisms which seek to give effect to government, and to the particular importance of indirect mechanisms that link the conduct of individuals and organizations to political objectives through ‘action at a distance’. The paper argues for the importance of an analysis of language in understanding the constitution of the objects of politics, not simply in terms of meaning or rhetoric, but as ‘intellectual technologies’ that render aspects of existence amenable to inscription and calculation. It suggests that governmentality has a characteristically ‘programmatic’ form, and that it is inextricably bound to the invention and evaluation of technologies that seek to g...

The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government

The social, as a plane of thought and action, has been central to political thought and political programmes since the mid-nineteenth century. This paper argues that, while themes of society and concerns with social cohesion and social justice are still significant in political argument, the social is no longer a key zone, traget and objective of strategies of government. The rise of the language of globalization indicates that economic relations are no longer easily understood as organized across a single bounded national economy. Community has become a new spatialization of government: heterogeneous, plural, linking individuals, families and others into contesting cultrual assemblies of identities and allegiances. Divisions among the subjects of government are coded in new ways; neither included nor excluded are governed as social citizens. Non-political strategies are deployed for the management of expert authority. Anti-political motifs such as associationism and communitarianism which do not seek to ...

Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism

This paper outlines Foucaults concept of governmentality and argues for its contemporary significance. It focuses upon the role that liberal modes of government accord to the exercise of authority over individual and collective conduct by expertise. The paper argues that nineteenth-century liberalism as a mode of rule produced a series of problems about the governability of individuals, families and markets and populations. Expertise provided a formula for resolving these problems instantiated in a range of complex and heterogenous ‘machines’ for the government of individual and collective conduct. Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one sees the rise of a new formula for the exercise of rule, which one can call ‘the welfare state’ - within which expertise becomes linked to the formal political apparatus in new ways. the strategies of rule generated under this formula of ‘the welfare state’ have changed fundamentally over the last fifty years. A new formula of rule is taking shape, one...

Community, Citizenship, and the third Way

This article analyses recent debates about the Third Way in politics in Britain and the United States. It suggests that what is most significant is the emergence of a new politics of conduct that seeks to reconstruct citizens as moral subjects of responsible communities. The author considers the presuppositions of such a politics and its implications for technologies of government.

Governing by numbers: Figuring out democracy☆

Abstract This review essay considers the relations between quantification and democratic government. Previous studies have demonstrated that the relation between numbers and politics is mutually constitutive: the exercise of politics depends upon numbers; acts of social quantification are politicized; our images of political life are shaped by the realities that statistics appear to disclose. The essay explores the specific links between democracy , as a mentality of government and a technology of rule, and quantification, numeracy and statistics. It argues that democratic power is calculated power, calculating power and requiring citizens who calculate about power. The essay considers the links between the promulgation of numeracy in eighteenth-century U.S. and programmes to produce a certain type of disciplined subjectivity in citizens. Some aspects of the history of the census are examined to demonstrate the ways in which the exercise of democratic government in the nineteenth century came to be seen as dependent upon statistical knowledge and the role that the census had in “making up” the polity of a democratic nation. It examines the case of National Income Accounting in the context of an argument that there is an intrinsic relation between political problematizations and attempts to make them calculate through numerical technologies. And it considers the ways in which neo-liberal mentalities of government depend upon the existence of a public habitat of numbers, upon a population of actors who calculate and upon an expertise of number. Democracy, in its modern mass liberal forms, requires numerate and calculating citizens, numericized civic discourse and a numericized programmatics of government.

Biomarkers in psychiatry

The use of biomarkers to predict human behaviour and psychiatric disorders raises social and ethical issues, which must be resolved by collaborative efforts.

Governing risky individuals: The role of psychiatry in new regimes of control

Risk thinking has become central to the practice of contemporary psychiatry. In forensic psychiatry there has been a widespread shift away from notions of dangerousness towards the assessment and management of risk. In psychiatric practice more generally the assessment prediction, management of risk has become central to the new logics of ‘community psychiatry’. New statistical techniques for making risk quantifiable and calculable are being devised, in particular in North America. On the. one hand, risk thinking seeks to bring the future to the present and make it manageable. On the other, ideas of the unmanageable and incorrigible riskiness of certain monstrous individuals transfixes much public debate on psychiatry in a ‘post‐carceral’ era, and leads to new demands for preventative detention. Risk thinking thus transforms the role of mental hearth professionals, the nature of their work, and their place in regimes of control. Psychiatric prefessionals now collaborate with a range of other mental health...

The Human Sciences in a Biological Age

We live, according to some, in the century of biology, where we now understand ourselves in radically new ways as the insights of genomics and neuroscience have opened up the workings of our bodies and our minds to new kinds of knowledge and intervention. Is a new figure of the human, and of the social, taking shape in the 21st century? With what consequences for the politics of life today? And with what implications, if any, for the social, cultural and human sciences? These are the issues that are discussed in this article, which argues that a new relation is requred with the life sciences, beyond commentary and critique, if the social and human sciences are to revitalize themselves for the 21st century.

Governing Cities: Notes on the Spatialisation of Virtue

This paper represents a series of speculations concerning the imagination of the city as a space of government, authority, and ‘the conduct of conduct’ . The authors argue that it is possible to understand the myriad ways in which various authorities have sought to govern the city through an interrogation of the series of means through which the city has been ‘diagrammed’ as a space of power, regulation, ethics, and citizenship. These speculations take a historical but not a historically ‘periodised’ form; the authors consider in turn the diagramming of the city in the ancient Greek world, the nineteenth-century liberal diagramming of the city, eugenic models of the city, and latter-day neoliberal modes of visualising, programming, and governing urban spaces. The aim is neither to found yet another theory of spatialisation nor to advance a Foucauldian urban sociology but to gauge the parameters which have bequeathed us the contemporary city as a governed and ethically saturated space.

Governed By Law

Another consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law... I do not mean to say that the law fades into the back ground or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, adminis trative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A nor malizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life. (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 1979: 144)