Governmentality draws on Foucault's work along with wider analytical frameworks to reclaim centre stage for this sociological concept. The author argues for a new understanding of how the individual is related to the state and vice versa.

This article explores contemporary biopolitics in the light of Michel Foucault's oft quoted suggestion that contemporary politics calls `life itself' into question. It suggests that recent developments in the life sciences, biomedicine and biotechnology can usefully be analysed along three dimensions. The first concerns logics of control - for contemporary biopolitics is risk politics. The second concerns the regime of truth in the life sciences - for contemporary biopolitics is molecular politics. The third concerns technologies of the self - for (...) contemporary biopolitics is ethopolitics. The article suggests that, in these events, human beings have become `somatic individuals': personhood is increasingly being defined in terms of corporeality, and new and direct relations are established between our biology and our conduct. At the same time, this somatic and corporeal individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation and so to a politics of `life itself'. (shrink)

In this important new study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as his best selling Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late nineteenth century it became possible to think of statistical patterns as explanatory in themselves, and to regard the world as not necessarily deterministic in character. Combining detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breath and verve, The Taming of Chance (...) brings out the relations among philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics and the development of social institutions, and provides a unique and authoritative analysis of the "probabilization" of the Western world. (shrink)

Discusses how cultural and economic changes around the world have caused a shift in the concepts that shape modern politics and defined the new global order.

The development of both the modern state and modern scientific discourses in the non-Western world are closely linked together, both being the outcome of the colonial encounter. Using a Foucauldian framework of power/knowledge and his notions of ‘episteme’ and ‘governmentality’, this article explores how colonial governmentality in India produced statistical knowledge of the country thus ushering in a new social scientific discourse of ‘progress’, ‘history’, ‘economy’ and ‘society’.

Comparing the rhetoric of global unity common in the 1920s and early 1930s with the rhetoric of globalization today, Pemberton (politics and international relations, University of New South Wales) articulates the faith in technology and scientific progress underlying much of the rhetoric's persuasive force. The ideological implications, and political manipulations that follow, are also detailed. These are contrasted with the opposing views, in the past and the present, which have emphasized and do emphasize multiplicity and many-ness. c. Book News Inc.