Abstract
In his 1978 lectures, Security, Territory, Population (Palgrave Macmillan: 2007, p. 116), Michel Foucault tackled the problem of the state and population by examining the ‘insubstantial and vague domain of governing’ through the equally vague notion of ‘governmentality’. In a similar vein, the second edition of Mitchell Dean’s Governmentality addresses the vague notions of governing and governmentality through a critical, socio-historical charting of the changing ways people, economies, and states are governed. He argues that the trajectory of government is undergoing a modification, shift, and possible displacement from a governmentalized state to a ‘governmentalization of government’ or ‘reflexive government’. In the first three chapters, he details and clarifies the various meanings of the terms government and governmentality while outlining his ‘analytics of government’ perspective. In the remaining chapters, Dean traces the shift to reflexive forms of government by situating governmentality within broader relations of power, the international domain, risk, and liberal and non-liberal forms of rule.
Dean charts the governmentalization of the state by discussing the ‘householding’ and ‘dispositional’ forms of government that emerged in Europe during the 16th and 18th centuries and its connection to pastoral power, reason of state, and police. Interestingly, rather than simply providing a historical overview of this form of government, Dean provides a genealogy of social forms of government and rule, and identifies several problems that have been inherited from pastoral forms of government. By doing this, he begins to map a possible transformation of social forms of government. Namely, the shift from ‘city-citizen’ and ‘shepherd-flock’ models of social government, to the fusion of these models within modern welfare states.
After discussing the values and ideals that underpin the welfare state and social forms of government, Dean claims that the shift from a dispositional and householding government to a ‘government of certain processes’, such as economic, biological, psychological, and social processes, is ‘the broadest condition of the emergence of social and liberal forms of rule for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (p. 117). He explores this argument by outlining the connections between bio-politics, liberalism, sovereignty, and the governmentalization of the state. However, in a chapter on authoritarian governmentality, Dean also argues that governmentality and the governmentalization of the state can be located within authoritarian forms of rule. In this chapter, Dean examines the connections between sovereignty, bio-politics, and non-liberal rule.
It is from the 1970s, Dean argues, that there is ‘a new trajectory on which the governmentalization of the state meets a governmentalization of the mechanisms of government themselves’ (p. 173). Although the rise of reflexive forms of government is interwoven with neo-liberal mentalities and regimes of government, Dean also discusses how it intersects with other forms of rule, such as neo-conservatism and communitarianism. Reflexive forms of neo-liberal government seem to signal the ‘death’ of social forms of government. However, Dean argues that this form of rule signals a shift to post-welfarist forms of government that seek to transform society ‘through the government of the mechanisms, techniques and agencies of government themselves’ (p. 226).
The second edition benefits from a new introduction, a chapter on international governmentality, and a postscript on the crises of neo-liberal governmentality. Given that the first edition only briefly mentions international relations, the chapter devoted to international governmentality is a welcome addition. Dean explores Foucault’s own narrative on the international domain by discussing its relation to reason of state and liberal government, and how his perspective can be used to ‘identify the features of contemporary international rationalities, spaces and technologies’ (p. 247). Although Foucault did not explore the genealogy of international governmentality in depth, Dean demonstrates how his object and method can be used to make a number of general observations about the international domain. Dean claims that the international domain is not a ‘ready-made’ object or thing that has been modified throughout history, but is a category ‘for thinking about relations between states or empires, or between metropolis and colony, land and sea, and so on’ (p. 238). He suggests that Foucault’s method of enquiry can be used to investigate ‘the changing conditions and surfaces by which the international becomes identified as a problem, is rendered thinkable, knowable and actionable’ (p. 238).
While Dean could have revised a number of the chapters to reflect the various social, economic, and political changes that have occurred in the ten years following the publication of the first edition, he decided not to significantly alter the book’s main arguments or its conceptual and theoretical framework. Instead, he includes a postscript that briefly discusses two crises of neo-liberal governmentality that he suggests have occurred from the 9/11 events and the recent financial and economic crises. Dean argues that the first was a crisis of how freedom is practised in relation to rationalities of risk and mechanisms of security, whereas the second crisis of neoliberal governmentality was a crisis of financial security and regulation that raised concerns over the balance between governing ‘too much’ and not governing enough.
Readers who are familiar with the first edition of Governmentality may welcome the new introduction’s five ‘singularities’, which characterize the structure of the book. In a review of the first edition, a reviewer noted that Dean’s suggestion that governmentality may form a new ‘sub-discipline’ is problematic because it may produce intellectual closure. The new introduction no longer includes this suggestion and instead notes that the second edition’s approach is based on ‘a critical ontology of ourselves and our present’ (p. 14). Although Dean manages to avoid turning governmentality into a ‘sub-discipline’ or methodology, I found that this was at the expense of the concise overview of the first edition’s main chapters and structure. I thought that readers who are unfamiliar with Foucault’s work might find the second edition difficult to navigate with these deletions.
Overall, however, Dean has gone to considerable lengths to outline the concepts of government and governmentality. Yet I found his dismissal of ideology critique to be problematic. In his discussion of welfare dependency, Dean explores the relationships between language, social structure, and social practice. He suggests that ideology critique ‘regards language as a second-order phenomenon shaped by more fundamental forces and conditions’, whereas ‘an analytics of government attempts to grasp what language makes possible and what it does’ (p. 79). While Dean usefully highlights how the notion of ‘welfare dependency’ is not simply symbolic of social structures and relations, he appears to exclude ideology critique in general from an analytics of government perspective, which seems to contradict his aim of engaging ‘with the concepts and theories of our present’ (p. 12). For instance, given that government, according to Dean, is an activity that works through desires, interests, and beliefs, contemporary forms of ideology critique are well placed to provide insights into the government of human conduct without simply ‘unmasking’ the ideological content of language (p. 18).
Apart from these minor criticisms, the second edition of Governmentality has been thoughtfully updated and expanded by Dean. Rather than encasing Foucault’s work within a narrow social science methodology, he has provided an accessible text that engages with the changing techniques and rationalities of governing ourselves and others.