Anonymous
Posted September 21, 2007
Despite the claims of many post-modern scholars, the usefulness of the concepts of society, state, and government, as both analytic categories and descriptive generalizations, has not ended. Laws are still enacted and enforced, taxes are still levied and spent, and migrations are still restricted and regulated. Conditions have certainly changed since the end of World War Two, but this has simply created challenges for societies, states and governments to adapt to, rather than the totally discounting of these concepts and the decline of the efficacy of these organizations. This is Mitchell Dean¿s argument, and he makes a very credible case. In this book, Dean is critical of both ¿conventional analysis¿ and of ¿post-modern re-conceptualizations¿. As he sees it, conventional accounts of society, state, and government have usually been too ¿establishment-centric¿, whereas the reality of these organizations has always been the struggle between the powerful to exercise social control, and the dissenters to gain empowerment and oppose the official agenda ¿ the issues and memberships change, but the conflict goes on. Post-modern accounts are too ready to dismiss all previous arrangements as ¿totally obsolete¿ and re-state social science in terms of new categories and processes ¿ often for no other apparent reason that to gain recognition as new entrants to the scholarly fields! By tracing the history and ecology of both geopolitical developments and concept formation, Dean shows that current practices are entirely in keeping with previous trends, and that a continuity of concepts is the one way to assure a continuity of understanding. Change for the sake of change is just stylistics, in scholarship as much as in fashion. Such ¿novelty imperative¿ does not serve the purpose of accurate description or useful insight. Humanity has experienced a lot of disruptive change recently, and Sociologists are struggling to keep up with this just as much as anyone else ¿ the most effective strategy is NOT to try to ¿re-invent ourselves¿ with every turn in the road, but to learn from our experience, and apply our investigative and analytical tools so that they disclose patterns and provide meaning within events.
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More About This Textbook
Overview
Today, many people in academia, politics and business, question the idea of being able to govern society. The nation state and sovereign government are displaced by globalization and individualization.
Mitchell Dean focuses on ‘governing societies’ as a distinctive project that continues to define political life today. The book offers a critical analysis of contemporary liberal approaches to governing societies both in domestic and international affairs.
Governing Societies provides an overview of current perspectives and theories and examines recent transformations in techniques and rationalities of rule. It presents a new argument for the importance and transformation of sovereignty and powers of life and death and how they are integral to governing liberal-democratic societies.
The book is key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology and politics, as well as researchers and academics.
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Table of Contents
Series editor's foreword vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: setting the scene 1
The 'long twenty-first century' 2
Political projects 6
Meaning of the political 9
This book 14
Dilemmas 21
Zombie categories? 23
Historical conditions of 'governing societies' 25
The concept of 'governing societies' 35
Conclusion 42
Ungoverning societies 44
From ungovernability to governance 44
Post-societal governance 52
Conclusion 59
Individualization 60
Individualization and modernity 63
Criticizing individualization 69
Dividing practices: truth, norms and power 73
Conclusion 77
Diagnostics 79
Life and death 81
Governmentality 81
Normative and analytical dilemmas 84
Governing without society? 88
Heterogeneous and indistinct powers 91
Liberal democracies 96
Transformations of contemporary government 101
Conclusion 107
Authoritarian liberalism 108
Genealogy of liberalism 112
Liberalism as a legal and political order 118
Liberal police 122
Conclusion 128
Departures 131
Sovereignty and violence 133
The concept of sovereignty in recent thought 133
Sovereignty as supreme power 139
Sovereignty and violence 146
Conclusion 156
State of exception 158
Sovereign exception 159
Agamben and the exception 164
Giorgio in Guantanamo 167
Conclusion 174
Contemporary liberal exceptionalism 176
Assemblage and decision 178
The annihilation of sovereignty and liberalism 186
Sovereignty, security and governing societies 191
Conclusion 195
Conclusion 196
Notes 204
References 210
Index 221