To understand how we have become what we are requires, following Foucault, not a theory but an `analytics' which examines how technologies of power and knowledge have, since antiquity, intertwined and developed in concrete and historical frameworks. Distilling from Foucault's oeuvre as a whole a rough periodization of western political rationalities, this article shows how the processes whereby some people discipline or govern others are frequently closely connected to procedures of identity-constitution and knowledge-production. Platonic, Stoic and Christian pursuits of self-mastery (...) and self-knowledge, often via the intervention of an external master, were initially confined to an elite, but thereafter were amplified and generalized to encompass entire populations in conjunction with the rise of the modern state. Via techniques of confession and ascetic conduct, faith and empiricism, and selfreflection and everyday reality, western political rationalities, in the form of combined totalization and individualization technologies whereby some (struggle to) discipline others even as all (are exhorted to) discipline themselves, have come to dominate the globe. (shrink)

The opening sentence to Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's Empire1 is pregnant with promise and peril. Signifying a process deemed to be under way, it hearkens back to and beyond that famous Manifesto of 1848, even while looking forward to a time when what is now only imminent will have become reality. In part summoned into existence to fulfill the ancient prophecies of declining Rome and rising Christianity, Empire is said to be 'realizing' or 'manifesting' itself in time honoured 19th-century, (...) especially Marxist, fashion; but whereas the specter invoked by the Communist Manifesto haunted only a continent, the immaterial spirit of Empire, dripping crisis like ectoplasm, stalks the entire world. (shrink)

Dirck Coornhert was a Dutch humanist whose seminal 1587 book, Boeven-tucht, redefined issues of poverty, charity, development and crime. A transitionary document, Boeven-tucht lies on the cusp of what Michel Foucault called the 'great confinement', which took place between about 1600 and 1750 and which was the common response by local and national authorities to the social disorder concomitant upon population expansion, a widening gap between rich and poor, religious discord and war. Inspired by Boeventucht, the Amsterdam Rasphuis and Spinhuis (...) were the European prototypes of houses of correction which sprang up all over Europe, intended to apply 'a punishment more bitter than death' to all 'criminal idlers'. This introduction to the first-ever English translation of Boeven-tucht situates Coornhert's text in the space between unmediated absolutist sovereignty and full-blown modern discipline, when disciplinary techniques were as yet only gradually emerging from the monasteries and lay fraternities in which they had been incubated, and before they spread into all facets of modern society. (shrink)

This article develops a Foucauldian account of the rise of the modern school, on the basis of a thorough examination of all references to education in Foucault's work. It analyses the seventeenth-century origins of mass schooling and traces its development up to the nineteenth century. It identifies several overlapping stages in this multifaceted and largely contingent development, particularly a fundamental shift from a negative to a positive conception of the school. This Foucauldian understanding of the rise of schooling as a (...) disciplinary technology suggests that an initial focus on the exclusion or confinement of disorderly groups was gradually superseded by a focus on the inclusion or “attachment” of diverse individuals and on the development of their potential. It concludes by cautioning against over-simplistic applications of Foucault's work to the field of education. (shrink)

Globalization presages an important new stage in the centuries-old 'civilizing process,' which Norbert Elias analyzed with such clarity and in such depth. At the root of the fundamental transformations of our world of nation-states are combined integrating and disintegrating tendencies, or centralization and individualization, which manifest themselves in a steady monopolization of the means of violence and taxation, an interventionist human rights discourse, and war as a means of democratizing and pacifying the planet. Elias' 'historical social psychological' approach offers new (...) categories of analysis with which to both explain the effects of globalization and indicate how international interdependence fosters both control and resistance, both democratization and radicalization, and both integration and disintegration. (shrink)