Foucault, Governmentality, Marxism
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399800700408 |
| Author | Frank Pearce,Steve Tombs |
| Published date | 01 December 1998 |
| Date | 01 December 1998 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
FOUCAULT,
GOVERNMENTALITY, MARXISM
FRANK
PEARCE
Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
AND
STEVE TOMBS
Liverpool John Moore University, UK
HERE IS little doubt that the recent ‘governmentality’1 literature has
t
made available to us sets of concepts which have helped to redescribe
fruitfully the past and diagnose crucial aspects of contemporary and
emerging social relations. Drawing, in particular, upon Foucault’s later work,
scholars working within this tradition have challenged the belief that ’state’
activities are the major source of social ordering, since such ordering depends
upon actions which take the governance of self, the actions of others, and
relations within populations as their object; the locus of such actions is
necessarily decentred, indeed, the state itself is something of a fiction. In his-
torical2 and in more contemporary analyses,3 we find the description and
analysis of political rationalities, governmental programmes, technologies
and techniques of government. The paper in this issue by Rose and Valverde,
’Governed by Law’, self-consciously locates itself in this tradition.
Much of this analysis is interesting and timely, both providing useful
insights within, and posing important questions for, much contemporary
social science; indeed, we have ourselves drawn on aspects of the earlier gov-
ernmentality literature (Pearce and Tombs, 1996; 1998). In a period when the
nature and role of many national-states is being significantly modified, legal
pluralist analyses are likely to be particularly pertinent. In the economic
sphere, Macauley’s (1963) discussion of ’non-contractual relations’, Henry’s
(1983) considerations of ’private justice’, and Latham’s (1961) analysis of
’The Body Politics of the Corporation’ have lost none of their pertinence
(Hunt, 1993; Pearce, 1993); but these need to be supplemented by similar
explorations of other areas of social life. This is really what has been under-
taken by Rose and Valverde,4 but, unfortunately, some of the ’new’ concepts
they have deployed are not particularly helpful in this task; indeed, they are
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199812) 7:4 Copyright © 1998
SAGE
Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 7(4), 567-575;
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not all terribly original. For example, among others, Elias and his followers
have explored in some depth the phenomenon of exclusion/inclusion (Elias
and Scotson, 1965). Further, Cousins and Hussain (1984), Hirst (1986) and
Pearce (1989) have all argued that sovereignty is a ’fiction’; crucially, all these
authors argue that this is a ’necessary fiction’. Indeed, for Hirst, a differentia
specifica of a society wishing to be characterized as subject to the ’rule of law’
is that its laws are classes of rules (usually) effectively claimed ’by the agen-
cies issuing them to be the dominant and binding rules in a given territory’
(Hirst, 1986: 83; and see Hunt, 1993: 298). This reference to an imperative
power over a territory was and remains crucial and cannot simply be wished
away. However, in this piece we wish to draw attention to what we see as two
key problems with the governmentality literature, as exemplified by Rose and
Valverde’s article. First, their dismissal of (a sterile version of) Marxism, and
thus of any analysis of social relations within which class is integral; and,
second, their appropriation of Foucault, an appropriation which is in danger
of assuming the mantle of an orthodox interpretation of his work, and which
in our view entails an unhelpful closure and so denial of much that his work
offers to us as social scientists.
On
the first point, Rose and Valverde, following earlier work by Rose
are
dismissive of Marxism, a dismissal facilitated by representing Marxism in its
most determinist and reductionist form. Thus they state that, ’Marxists have
long argued that a particular form of subject is brought into existence by capi-
talist relations of production’ (Rose and Valverde, 1998: 575, emphasis
added). We can only assume that this is a reference to Pashukanis (1978) who
argued that possessory right was the central legal category, and that it was a
function of exchange relations and the commodity form (these, incidentally,
precede and will outlast capitalism). While there are problems with this
formulation (cf. Arthur, 1977; Fine, 1984; Hirst, 1979; Hunt, 1993), the legal
form which was the focus of Pashukanis’s analysis has certainly played a key
role in many capitalist economies (Pearce, 1985). Theoretical considerations
alone surely do not warrant a simple dismissal of his arguments: more appro-
priate is a retheorization of Pashukanis’s work around the question of the
analytically distinct genealogies and ’correlation’ of legal and economic
relations, in a way akin to Marx’s (1965) development of separate genealogies
of the production of a class of landless free labourers and of the processes by
which capital was accumulated and capitalists as a class constituted.
Indeed, recent Marxist scholarship on law and legal forms has moved some-
what beyond Pashukanis’s position. For example, Taiwo (1996) has developed
a natural law argument based upon the full range of legal supports required
by a capitalist mode of production, and Jones (1982), drawing particularly on
Poulantzas, has provided an account of the complex elements of property
relations and how they function in different forms of capitalism (and see
Campbell, 1996). Woodiwiss (1990a; b) has distinguished between the non-
necessary genesis of particular legal forms, how they help constitute specific
capitalistic economic relations (for example, the ’employment contract’), and
how the specific nature of their articulations with other legal and social forms
are sites of political struggle. Woodiwiss (1990b; 1998), Taiwo (1996) and
569
Pearce and Tombs (1998) have all developed more elaborate conceptions of
right by drawing upon Hohfeld’s distinctions between right-duty, liberty-
’no-right’, power-liability and immunity-disability (Hohfeld, 1913).
As we have recently argued (Pearce and Tombs, 1998:...
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