Reviews
| Date | 01 September 2000 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.t01-1-00294 |
| Published date | 01 September 2000 |
REVIEWS
Mitchell Dean,Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, London:
Sage Publications, 1999, 235pp, pb £15.99.
Mitchell Dean is one of a network of scholars, based primarily in the UK and
Australia, who have constructed what sometimes comes close in ambition at least to
an alternative political theory on the basis of a decidedly tentative lecture first
delivered by Michel Foucault in 1978 entitled ‘Governmentality’, which Dean here
appropriates as the title of his latest book.
Governmentality is offered as a contribution to the critique of political reason. It is a
limited enquiry in the sense that the study does not explore ‘politics or power relations
in general’ but ‘attempts to (more or less) rationally affect the conduct of others and
ourselves’ (p 198). Following Barry Hindess, Dean stresses the distinction between
government and politics, with the result that ‘governmental rationality might try to
regulate politics’. This distinction between government and politics is particularly
important, for Dean, in contemporary neo-liberalism, because ‘many of the techniques
of ‘advanced’ liberal government are also attempts to govern political actors such as
government departments, public servants and politicians by promoting quasi-market
relations between them, and between them and their clients, or by removing the
provision of public services from the sphere of political decision altogether’ (p 198).
Dean’s concern, then, is to develop what he calls with an echo of Foucault an
‘analytics of government’. Crucial to this project is the distincti onbetwe en the ‘strategy
of regimes of practices’ and the ‘programmes that attempt to invest them with particular
purposes’ (p 22). Analysis can reveal a ‘non-subjective intentionality’ that is distinct
from ‘explicit, calculated and programmatic rationality’, granting to these regimes ‘a
reality, a density and a logic of their own’ (p 22). Such analysis tries to ‘avoid any
premature reduction’ of these regimes to a ‘more fundamental or real level or order of
existence’ (p 22). In other words, Dean takes as his object of study an analysis of the
different logics which drive and give coherence to governmental projects at different
periods of history, logics which may not always be apparent to the individuals who use
or are captured by them but which in the end can only be apparent to the interpreter
positioned like Dean as an observer. And a crucial postulate of such a study is that these
logics warrant investigation as autonomous entities in their own right.
The analytics of government are focused on how we govern and are governed
(p23). Dean outlines their ‘characteristic moves’. These are: the identification of
problematizations; the priority given to ‘how’ questions; practices of government as
assemblages or regimes, rather than, say, emanations of some particular principle or
philosophy; the examination of fields of visibility of government; the concern for the
technical aspect of government; the approach to government as rational and
thoughtful activity (so it ‘eschews a sociological realism’ (p 31)); the attention to
the formation of identities (‘[r]egimes of government do not determine forms of
subjectivity. They elicit, promote, facilitate, foster, and attribute various capacities,
qualities and statuses to particular agents’ (p 32)). This analytics also needs to extract
utopian elements since government is a fundamentally utopian activity, focused on
better worlds and new horizons (p 33). However, ‘values’, which form part of the
rhetoric of government, must be treated with circumspection – in particular, regimes
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 2000 (MLR 63:5, September). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 785
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