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Scholarly discussion has treated the account of the state of nature which Locke presents in his Second Treatise as neither an hypothesis nor a description but rather as a fiction. John Dunn, for example, claims that it is a `theoretical analysis of the fundamental relations of right and duty which obtain between human beings, relations which are logically prior to the particular historical situations in which all actual human beings always in fact find themselves'. Here Dunn presents a misleading account of Locke's argument, presumably, as the title of his paper suggests, in order to mount an argument of his own about the `political relevance' of Locke's work to a time when no one takes seriously the early modern idea of the state of nature. However, this article also has a more serious concern. I argue that the representation of the state of nature as a merely imaginary, `theoretical analysis' of social relations obscures the significance of the early modern idea of a state of nature, not only for the work of Locke and his near contemporaries, but also, more importantly, for the broader development of western social and political thought. The idea of an original condition of freedom and equality played a central role in Locke's argument, serving as a means both to undermine the view that humans were born into a natural condition of subjection to the rule of others and to justify European expropriation of land in the Americas. It also represented one end of a developmental continuum, running from the original, most primitive, condition of humanity through to the societies of contemporary western Europe, which was thought to encompass all sections of humanity. While the idea of an original asocial condition on which this continuum was based was later brought into question, a closely related developmental framework nevertheless informed later movements in history and the social sciences. After being abandoned in its original form, this category was finally revived in 20th-century political theory, this time precisely in the form that Dunn mistakenly ascribes to Locke. The article concludes by speculating on the relationship between these normative and empirical perspectives on the state of nature.

Contemporary usage presents an opposition between states and terrorism, as if to suggest that terrorism is not an instrument of the state but something that is used against it. Yet the two most influential foundational myths of the modern states system suggest that the state's capacity for terror is the source of peace and order within the territorial community. It also makes other states think twice about attacking its territory. The author examines the ramifications of these myths and shows how they underlie conventional accounts of what is at stake in the war on terror.

There is little of value to be said about the concept of power as such. The term itself is best seen as invoking the ‘total structure of actions brought to bear’ by some on the actions of others. What is of interest, then, is not power as such but rather the special cases in which relatively stable configurations of power can be identified. Lukes' focus on domination obscures the significance of other configurations. One is the political power of the state, which Lukes simply takes for granted, focusing instead on the question of who has control over its use. Another, which overlaps with political power but is not reducible to it, is government of the state. The system of states is the site of a third major limitation in PRV‘s discussion, which is the point of the plural, states, in my title. Neither the American debate to which PRV made an influential late contribution nor Lukes' expanded discussion have much to say about the role of these configurations of power in the world today. A view of power that simply ignores them may be radical in certain respects but it is blinkered in others.

This article considers Michel Foucault's work on the rationality of government and the practices in which it has been implemented. Specifically, it develops a critique of Foucault's analysis of political reason in relation to the governmental significance of electoral politics, to liberal commitments to the promotion of individual liberty, and to the focus on government within states to the neglect of the international system and the problem of sovereignty.

L'A. developpe une analyse critique du traitement reserve dans les pays occidentaux, et plus particulierement en Australie, aux refugies et aux demandeurs d'asile. Il expose les liens et les contradictions existant entre ces politiques et le projet liberal de mondialisation, en tant que regulation et controle des populations a travers les marches

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Michel Foucault's work on government has been his treatment of liberalism as a distinctive form of political reason. Liberalism is commonly regarded as a normative political doctrine or theory that treats the maintenance of individual liberty as an end in itself and therefore views liberty as setting limits of principle both to the legitimate objectives of government and to the manner in which those objectives may be pursued. Foucault's account of liberalism as a rationality of government also accords central place to individual liberty, which is seen as giving rise to a prudential concern that one might be governing too much. The suggestion is that, rather than pursue its objectives through the detailed regulation of conduct in the manner of police, it might be more effective for the government of a state to work through the maintenance and promotion of certain forms of individual liberty. According to this account, underlying the liberal fear of governing too much are two distinct but related perceptions of the population to be governed. It is seen first as containing a number of self-regulating domains of social interaction, and secondly as consisting of individuals endowed with a capacity for autonomous, self-directing activity. In liberal political thought, Foucault observes, the market epitomizes both perceptions, serving, in effect, as "a locus of privileged experience where one can identify the effects of excessive governmentality."1 Liberal political reason, then, sees individual liberty as a limit, not simply to the legitimate reach of government, but also to its effectiveness. More recent scholars have adapted this account of liberalism to the analysis of neoliberal attempts to govern through the decisions of autonomous individuals.

Academic discussion of citizenship focuses primarily on the citizen in relation to the particular state of which he or she is a member. From this perspective, the modern spread of citizenship is usually regarded as a definite advance in human well-being, turning what had once been the privileges of the few into the rights of the many. This article argues that an understanding of the impact of citizenship in the modern world must consider not just its role in bringing together members of particular subpopulations and promoting some of their interests but also the effects of rendering the global population governable by dividing it into subpopulations consisting of the citizens of discrete, politically independent and competing states.

The invocation of large-scale social unities - states, societies, empires, cultures, civilizations - is a long-established and pervasive practice among sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists and so on. This article examines the treatment of such unities as defined or held together by shared understandings and values, and as independent, boundary-maintaining social systems. We argue that both the ideational and the systemic presumptions at work here are dependent on what Foucault calls the figure of man: the first as an inescapable consequence of that figure, the second as a tempting, but by no means necessary, one. Our first major argument concerns the remarkable persistence of concepts, such as ‘culture’, which designate unities that are ideational in character. We use the case study of anthropology to suggest that this is a consequence of the constitutive role of the figure of man within the human sciences. Human scientists and others critical of the stress on sameness resulting from the concern with ideational unities - cultures, ideologies, discourses and so on - as shared across a population, will find it well-nigh impossible either to modify significantly or to jettison altogether such concepts; as long as they rely on some version of the figure of man, scholars are committed irrevocably to the use of these concepts. Our second major argument concerns the conception of society as a systemic unity, a conception which we see as reflecting the influence of the figure of man in the field of governmental reason. In this part of the article we follow Foucault’s argument that the liberal rationality of government leads to a view of social life as traversed by numerous self-regulating spheres of social interaction. However, we dispute his further suggestion that the concept of society itself, as designating a self-regulating sphere of this kind, can be seen as a product of the liberal critique of police.

Academic discussion of citizenship focuses primarily on the citizen in relation to the particular state of which s/he is a member. From this perspective the modern spread of citizenship, first in a few western states and then somewhat more generally, is usually regarded as a definite advance in human well-being, as turning what had once been the privileges of the few into the rights of the many. This paper aims, if not entirely to undermine, then at least to unsettle this celebration of citizenship. It suggests that an understanding of the impact of citizenship in the modern world must consider not just its role in bringing together members of particular sub-populations and promoting some of their interests, but also the effects of rendering the global population governable by dividing it into sub-populations consisting of the citizens of discrete, politically independent and competing states.

Critical examination of the concept of actor shows, first, that actors' choices are an important part of the explanation of their actions (but those choices are not reducible to the rationality of the actors concerned or to effects of their structural location) and, second, that there are actors whose concerns and objectives are not reducible to those of human individuals (but classes are not among them). These arguments undermine analyses of politics in terms of the actions or interests of classes and the attempts of rational choice theory to analyze politics in terms of a methodological individualism.

This paper criticizes the ways in which `power', `interests', and related notions are used in the analysis of social relations. Two broad approaches to power analysis are considered. The first involves `capacity-outcome' conceptions in which power is defined in terms of the capacity of an agent to secure particular outcomes. The second involves more general usages in which power is supposed to be effective not only as regards the outcomes of particular struggles, but also in the determination of the conditions of struggle themselves by the systematic exclusion or suppression of certain interests. I argue that both approaches operate to foreclose serious analysis of the constitution of arenas of struggle and the forces active in them by means of gross oversimplification of the conditions in which struggles take place.

This paper argues that interests have consequences in so far as they provide actors with reasons for action, and that actors may find reasons for action in interests they ascribe to themselves and in interests they ascribe to others. This argument undermines many of the ways in which concepts of interests have traditionally been used in social and political analysis. Section I is an introductory discussion of the uses of concepts of interests in political analysis. Section II discusses the place of interests in the explanation of action and Section III discusses connections between interests and actors' social location. A brief conclusion summarises the main arguments of the two central sections.

It is sometimes possible, using census data and overall voting figures, to estimate the voting behaviour of various socio-economic groups. In particular this involves, under certain assumptions, the use of least square regression analysis. The results themselves provide a partial check on the validity of these assumptions. This study shows, taking the city of Liverpool as a whole, that there is no consistent relationship between socio-economic group and voting behaviour. But more consistent patterns are revealed if the city is divided into a number of areas according to their social composition.