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Abstract Given the limitations of a short commentary, this article is restricted to an attempt to summarize the argument of a relatively small book, Discourses of Power. This book is [...]

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01336.x Byline: Mitchell Dean (a) Keywords: Society; social question; civil society; state; government; Foucault Abstract: Abstract Following conservative politicians, neoliberal philosophers and radical critics, different strands of social science, including those using Foucault's governmentality approach, joined the questioning of the salience of 'society' and ideas of 'the social' over the last decades. When the social reappeared, it was often in the moral domains of community and civil society. This argument re-evaluates the contribution of Foucauldian histories, or 'genealogies', of the social to these fundamental questions. Drawing upon them, it attends to their arguments concerning the place of social thought on the modern episteme in relation to economics, the emergence of the idea of 'society' with the modern arts of government of the state, and the formation of the 'social question'. The argument here allows that preconditions of formation of 'society' lie in the legal and political techniques of the territorial sovereign state. However, the literature under investigation indicates the implicit normativity of an idea of 'society' as a 'problematic unity' and the enduring necessity of a social domain in a law-governed state with a relatively independent economic sphere. This discussion thus seeks to contribute to the wider revaluation and redeployment of these terms in today's context. Author Affiliation: (a)Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University Article History: (Date accepted: August 2010) Article note: email: mitchelldean.dean@gmail.com

The international thought of Carl Schmitt, particularly his concept of the nomos of the earth, is addressed from the perspective of international law. Schimitt's mythologies of the earth as mother of law and of the sea as the characterless element reveal not a universal perspective but the very global orientation contained in that system of law, from which, his philology provides a striking understanding of the conditions of the political and social order of European modernity.

The notion of governing society has for a long time seemed self-evident. Society was conceived as a totality coincident with a certain space, a territory, and occupied by a population. [...]

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. Keywords: liberalism; government; authoritarianism; freedom; liberal police.

The technology of government explores the crucial nexus between organized forms of knowledge and the regimes of practices within which it is located. While the concept is central to the critical history of rationality, uncertain valencies persist in the usage of the term technology in areas such as its propensity to multiply. The technological aspect of government is discerned by an orientation towards strategic rationality in conduct aimed at elevating human capacities and actions. Significant technological thresholds for government are indicators such as assemblage, system, force, and orientation.