Search

This paper identifies and elucidates what it calls the Malthus Effect from two perspectives: a genealogical-theoretical one and an empirical-diagnostic one. The first concerns its implications for Michel Foucault's genealogy and conceptions of modern governmentality. The second suggests that Malthusian concerns have an enduring presence in recent and contemporary politics. In them we find a government of life that tethers the question of poverty to that of population, as both a national and international concern, links biopolitics to questions of national security and is a key source of the modern environmental movement. It remains present in areas such as welfare reform and immigration policy, notions of sustainability and in the global public health and environmental movements. It takes the form of agenopolitics, a politics of the reproductive capacity of human populations and the human species. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the intelligibility of authoritarian measures within Foucauldian analyses of the liberal government of the state. Such measures are understood as following from a liberal understanding of the task of government itself. This understanding rests on a distinction between the legal and political order (of 'the state') and a 'liberal police' of what is exterior to it, classically conceived as 'civil society'. The relation between these two aspects is conceived as a series of 'foldings' between the two sides of a liberal governing, which turn the injunction to govern through freedom into a set of binding obligations potentially or actually enforceable by coercive or sovereign instruments. The paper places this perspective within aspects of the genealogies of economy, poverty, welfare and police and discusses the trajectories of such foldings in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper falls into two parts. The first contributes to the development of concepts necessary to understand questions of 'self-formation', particularly in relation to domains of government. The second seeks to work these concepts within a case-study of what it calls 'governmental-ethical practices'. The case-study consists of an examination of the recent reform of social security and income support practices concerning the unemployed in Australia and the utilization of the language, rationality and techniques that have been elaborated under the rubric of the 'active society' by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It offers an analysis of these governmental-ethical practices of the unemployed in terms of what they seek to govern, the means by which they propose to do so, their forms of subjectification, and the mode of existence they envision. It suggests that the analysis of these practices challenges and forces us to refine our approach to the formulae of neoliberal or advanced liberal government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to a genealogy of the discourses and government of poverty. It offers a statement of what might be understood by a genealogical perspective and method, and then focuses on the emergence of a 'liberal mode of government' of poverty in the early nineteenth century, of which the reformed poor law in England is emblematic but not exhaustive. The emergence of this mode of government is followed through a series of related transformations of the older systems of the relief and administration of 'the Poor', best understood as a dimension of 'police' in its archaic sense. The conditions of the problematization of this older system of governance are discussed as are transformations in the language and practice of government in mailers of population, economy, police, and so on. This emergence has implications for the formation of a national labour market, notions of self-governance and responsibility, forms of patriarchy and household, and issues of morality, philanthropy, administration, and the state. Above all, it is within this liberal mode of government that we can witness both the constitution of poverty as a field of knowledge and intervention, perhaps for the first time, and also the various surfaces of emergence for what will become 'the social'. The implications of this liberal mode of government for our present are far from exhausted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]