Pat O'Malley

Risk, Uncertainty and Government

Risk, Uncertainty and Government. From Independence to Social Security. Enterprising Liberalism. Uncertainty, Liberalism and Contract. Risky Contracts: Gambling, Speculation and Insurance. Insurance, Actuarialism and Thrift. Risk, Crime Control and Criminal Justice. Risking Drug Use. Risk, Uncertainty and Freedom

Governmentality, criticism, politics

The growth of the governmentality literature represents a significant development in current social theory. However, certain prominent and interlinked tendencies, which are associated with the place of politics as a subject and object of theoretical work, are queried. Most especially the concerns are with: the rejection of critique as part of the work of social theory; the rendering of government programmes as univocal and as overly coherent and systematic; and the focus on politics as “mentalities of rule” to the virtual exclusion of understanding politics as social relations. The paper explores some of these difficulties which are here seen as presenting problems for the future development of governmentality research and theory. Without aiming to systematize the literature, nevertheless the paper suggests that the time is overdue for central issues in the literature of governmentality to become the subject of more open and vigorous debate.

Pleasure, Freedom and Drugs: The Uses of ‘Pleasure’ in Liberal Governance of Drug and Alcohol Consumption

The article explores the ways in which discourses of pleasure are deployed strategically in official commentaries on drug and alcohol consumption. Pleasure as a warrantable motive for, or descriptor of, drug and alcohol consumption appears to be silenced the more that consumption appears problematic for liberal government. Tracing examples of this from the 18th century to the present, it is argued that discourses of ‘pleasure’ are linked to discourses of reason and freedom, so that problematic drug consumption appears both without reason (for example ‘bestial’) and unfree (for example ‘compulsive’), and thus not as ‘pleasant’. In turn, changes in this articulation of pleasure, drugs and freedom can be linked with shifts in the major forms taken by liberal governance in the past two centuries, as these constitute freedom differently.

Resilient Subjects: Uncertainty, Warfare and Liberalism

Abstract While resilience has been recognized as a new strand in the government of security, little attention is paid its associated subjectivities and technologies of the self. One of the key sites for such development has been the military. A principal attribute of traditional military subjects has been fortitude, an assemblage of moral strength, will-power and courage deeply inscribed in the soul. In the new military, fortitude is now seen as of only conditional value to the latest configuration of the ‘liberal way of war’. Instead, resilience is centred as appropriate to ‘warriors’, and resonates with an advanced liberal political environment. Resilience appears as a set of cognitive skills that anyone can develop with correct training. Founded in cognitive behavioural therapy, resilience centres innovativeness, enterprise, responsibility and flexibility. It now takes its place as part of a complex of scientifically grounded techniques of the self necessary to optimize autonomous subjects in an age of high uncertainty.

The Uncertain Promise of Risk

Abstract Conventional debates over risk in criminal justice (and more generally) tend to fall into several traps. These include the assumption that diverse configurations of risk can be collapsed into a single category, to be contrasted en bloc with other approaches to government. However, by attending to the diversity of forms of risk we can begin to develop certain principles that could be put forward as tools for thinking about the promise and limitations of ways of governing by risk. Through contrasting actuarial justice with a number of other configurations of risk-centred government, such relevant issues emerge as whether specific techniques of risk are inclusive or exclusionary, whether they set up a zero-sum game between victims and offenders, and whether they polarise risk and uncertainty. While this is promising, the paper also concludes that a democratic politics of security may provide more promise than a politics of risk per se.

Governmental Conditions for the Economization of Uncertainty

The central place occupied by actuarial calculation in insurance is usually understood as resulting from the process of bringing the laws of large numbers to bear on archival data in terms of an ‘insurance imaginary’. However, little attention is paid to the political and broader governmental conditions upon which actuarialism rests. Analysis of fire insurance in Australia indicates that despite urgings from other branches of insurance, the industry did not go down this ‘scientific’ track until well into the twentieth century. Instead, it relied on detailed individual inspection by insurance agents and a process of ‘cumulative dangerousness’ – adding up the multiple hazards discovered in each case and using this as a guide to setting premiums. The result was slow, expensive and cumbersome. But the industry was forced to adopt this approach because the built environment in Australian cities was so underregulated that nothing could be taken for granted. Only when adequately designed and enforced government regulations began to appear after the mid-1920s could fire insurance adopt actuarial techniques for economising uncertainty.

Revisiting the Classics: ‘Policing the Risk Society’ in the Twenty-first Century

As a field of social science research, policing has been fortunate to have a number of influential academic researchers and a rich history of significant writing. This is something to be celebrated...

THE DISCIPLINE OF VIOLENCE: STATE, CAPITAL AND THE REGULATION OF NAVAL WARFARE

This paper provides an analysis of certain aspects of the regulation of warfare during the 19th century in order to cast light on the contradictory process of monopolising control of the means of violence in the modern world. Resort to privateering - private naval auxiliaries mobilised by the search for profit - was a major feature of maritime warfare until the middle of the 19th century, when it was abolished by The Declaration of Paris. Analysis suggests that shifting patterns of global military, economic and political hegemony were responsible for the emergence of this treaty, which increased both (a) the general level of discipline and control over naval violence that was exercised by states, and (b) the global naval domination of the core capitalist nations.

Sustainable Buildings and Contemporary Fire Protection Regimes in Australia

There is a long-term politics of regulating fire protection for the built environment in which the principal adversaries have been building developers - and often their government supporters- on one side, and the insurance industry and fire brigades on the other. Underlying such politics have been questions about the short-term versus long-term costs and benefits of fire protection with an emphasis on safety and security if life and property. In this struggle ‘green’ issues were regarded as merely a matter of customer preference rather than regulation. Over the past decade or so, environmental questions have emerged as a focal issue in fire protection. Ostensibly, general agreement has been reached promoting the idea of environmentally sustainable buildings with respect to fire prevention, albeit with disputes over the best means to produce such sustainability. While the fire protection industry promotes a vision of these differences being reconcilable through technological progress, this paper argues that the current politics reflects long-term political and economic divisions and scarcely reconcilable understandings of fire protection that go to the heart of what ‘sustainability’ is in the built environment.