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The paper examines "authoritarian governmentality". It argues that there are salient differences between the contemporary intellectual and political context and those of the 1990s when it was first developed. Chief among these is the confidence by which we can approach liberal governing itself as the norm of contemporary governmentality. The first wave of governmentality studies identified authoritarian governmentality in both non-liberal regimes and in the consequences of liberalism's norm of the self-responsible subject and its governing through civil society. This paper extends these observations: first by proposing an analysis of the kinds of order that different rationalities and technologies invoke, and secondly, by arguing for the linking of an analytics of government to both the practical capacities of sovereignty and the practices through which supreme authority is constituted. While liberal and authoritarian governmentalities are far from mutually exclusive, the absent concept of authority helps clarify what is at issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While this ‘extraordinary’ book appears as an intermezzo within the Homo Sacer series (Negri, 2008), it supports two fundamental theses with its own philological, epigraphic, liturgical and religious-historical research, and a close reading of figures such as Ernst Kantorowicz and Marcel Mauss. These theses concern political power first as an articulation of sovereign reign and economic government and, secondly, as constituted by acclamations and glorification. These can be approached theoretically through its author’s engagement with Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality and with the Erik Peterson/Carl Schmitt debate on the closure of political theology. Agamben’s reformulation of power and his derivation of liberal governmentality from the theological oikonomia prove convincing. A renewed analytics of power and politics of resistance should be possible, however, without recourse to a project seeking to deactivate all profane powers including those of public bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the notion of 'governing society'. It does this first through revisiting the founding Hobbesian symbol of the state as Leviathan and its status in contemporary social science discourses proclaiming the end of the nation-state and of the social project it contained. It then proceeds to outline the genealogical sites of emergence of governing society and the social project from, in turn, an internal or domestic perspective afforded by the notion of governmentality, and then from an international perspective of a system of states and their location in a global spatial order. An assessment of the project of governing society and the fate of the social, would need to be framed not in terms of the life and mooted death of the Leviathan nation-state, but in terms of the struggle between two monsters. The latter struggle might symbolize, from time to time, the relations between such a state and civil society, the social and the economic, the domestic and the international, land and sea, change and order, nation-state and globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]