Foucault's New Domains

This book explores the influence of Foucault’s later writings on basic theoretical and research concerns in the social sciences. The introduction contextualizes the development of Foucault’s writings within a biographical frame and leads into Foucault’s College de France lecture, ‘Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution’ which (along with Colin Gordon’s commentary) raises the issues crucial to Foucault’s latter project: the relationship between reason and liberty. The answer suggested – involving a reformulation of the relationship between the subject and power – connects with the issues raised in subsequent chapters, including Pasquino’s focus on the relationship between the governmentality of the modern state and the self-governing individual and Meuret’s analysis of the link between Adam Smith’s novel conception of political economy and the emergent political structures of modern capitalist states.
The following four chapters all extend Foucault’s insights into new domains of social analysis: namely the role of language in constructing and governing the econmomy (Miller and Rose), the shifting relations between sovereignty and responsibility in the welfare state (Donzelot), the role of the proffesional expert in constructing new social realities amenable to governance (Johnson), the significance of th technologies of government in the development of a political rationality of the humanities (Hunter). In the final chapter Bevis, Cohen and Kendall subject Foucault’s last major enterprise, the history of sexuality, to a critique, the criteria of which are derived from Foucault’s own methodological measures of adequacy – that it be a history of the present which enable sus to think in novel ways and facilitates action. By showing how Foucault’s writings increasingly influence and reconstruct social theory and analysis the book will appeal to a wide range of social scientist and other academics.