Book Review
The social in the global: Social theory, governmentality and global politics Jonathan Joseph Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012, 320pp., £60, ISBN: 978-1107022904 Acta Politica (2014) 49, 234–237. doi:10.1057/ap.2013.13
Jonathan Joseph adds his voice to a growing literature exploring the implications of Foucault’s concept of governmentality for political studies. Joseph draws on the governmentality analytic as a ‘critical theory’ (p. 6) to examine contemporary social and political theories of the global as well as practical approaches to governance in international institutions. He makes two arguments. First, rather than providing convincing (let alone critical) accounts of the present, theories of globalisation, global governance and global civil society (Chapter 3), networks and social capital (Chapter 4) and reflexivity and risk (Chapter 5) effectively align with neoliberal political strategies and governmentalities, and thereby naturalise and reproduce the very phenomena they analyse. Second and related, key tenets of these theories inform the governance agendas of international organisations like the European Union (EU) and the World Bank, albeit with different effects. Whereas neoliberal governmentality aiming at rational, responsible and entrepreneurial conduct and the well-being of populations finds a quasi-natural habitat in the ‘advanced liberal societies’ of the EU (Chapter 6), in the developing countries targeted by the World Bank it rather serves as a disciplining device for governments without genuinely advancing the population (Chapter 7). The longest chapter of the book preceding the development of these arguments clarifies Joseph’s understanding of governmentality and its place in political explanation which is at variance with much of the governmentality literature. Joseph believes that a ‘meaningful’ engagement with Foucault’s approach has to focus on a specifically neoliberal (rather than a generic analytical) conception of governmentality (p. 29), and that the latter needs to be placed within the ‘deeper structures’ of social relations of production and geopolitics. Foucault, Joseph says, ‘explains the how, but not the why’ (p. 15) of power and governance. Joseph therefore argues that governmentality should be situated within a historical materialist framework highlighting shifting modes of capitalist regulation, changing hegemonic projects and historic blocs, and the unevenness of socioeconomic development across the © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 0001-6810 Acta Politica www.palgrave-journals.com/ap/
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international system. Concretely, this translates to the argument that the rise of neoliberal governmentalities (including rationalities and techniques of empowerment, partnership, risk, benchmarking, networks and others) is a consequence of US-led neoliberal political strategies of market liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation that have unravelled the welfarist-Keynesian postwar settlement since the 1980s. This deeper ‘logic of capital’ (p. 263) and ‘power politics’ (p. 7), Joseph contends, eludes social and international theories that see globalisation, networks or risk society as the fundamental dynamics of late modernity. Much of what these theories consider to be new, like global governance, misrepresents actual developments or derives from enduring features of capitalism, now sublimated into the incentivising and individualising strategies of neoliberal governmentality: ‘global governance … rather than a powerful empirical reality … is a rationality guided by the power of global capitalism that filters down to … the micro level of everyday practices’ (p. 97). And where such theories may perceive a demise of the state and the states system, Joseph sees states and Western-dominated international organisations as the central purveyors of neoliberal governmentality. As targets of performance evaluations assessing the socioeconomic condition of the population, states (rather than populations themselves) are also the main objects of neoliberal governmentality in the global South. In contrast to the EU, Joseph argues, externally imposed international initiatives for civil-society involvement, partnerships and peer review in Africa, for instance, are liable to failure and therefore better seen as window dressing for coercive and exploitative North– South relationships. While potentially innovative, Joseph’s arguments about contemporary theories of the global as expressions of neoliberal governmentality, the combination of governmentality with historical materialism and the effects of governmentality in different contexts have serious limitations. Ironically, these largely stem from a lack of appreciation of the social–theoretical import of the concept of governmentality as well as the reduction of the latter to neoliberalism. Joseph adeptly draws on the governmentality analytic to denaturalise much of what contemporary social and international theories take for granted, such as seemingly inevitable and self-generating dynamics of globalisation, risk or individualisation. However, Joseph himself in turn takes for granted as the ‘deeper’ causes and ‘ontological conditions’ (p. 15) behind these trends some of the very phenomena that Foucault and governmentality studies have sought to denaturalise, namely, capitalism, the state and the states system. It is one thing to say (with Foucault) that the micropowers of neoliberal (and other) governmentalities may be discursively mobilised by the macro-powers of states or international organisations, but quite another to claim (as Joseph does) that neoliberal governmentality reflects the balance of social forces in neoliberal capitalism and ultimately US dominance in the international system (p. 48). Unlike Foucault, Joseph thus understands power as ontologically prior and external to, rather than embedded within specific governmental rationalities, practices and techniques. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 0001-6810
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Joseph not only resurrects a number of dichotomous distinctions (between structure and process, reality and discourse, the material and the ideational), which governmentality seeks to transcend, but also mistakes governmentality analysis for a kind of ideology critique (pp. 86, 160) concerned with exposing the ‘mystifications’ and ‘obfuscations’ of the zeitgeist. What contemporary theories of the global reproduce, he says, ‘is ultimately the nature of capitalist society itself and the various surface forms of knowledge and practice that it generates’ (p. 111). This kind of ‘superstructural’ reading of governmentality within a hermeneutics of suspicion leads to a number of missed connections in Joseph’s analysis. By reducing governmentality to an ‘idea’, Joseph is largely oblivious to the more technical, practical and material aspects of Foucault’s concept. For instance, rather than considering network approaches as (mere) theories ‘fetishising’ firms and flows (p. 117), a governmentality analysis might have investigated how techniques of quantification and visualisation in more formal versions of network analysis may contribute to shaping the social relations and identities said to be at play in networks in the first place. Another problem, as indicated, is Joseph’s conflation of governmentality with neoliberalism. While neoliberal rationalities and techniques have undoubtedly been (and continue to be) important in the governance approaches of many international organisations, a limitation to neoliberalism by analytical fiat deprives governmentality of much of its analytical richness and empirical texture including, for instance, the consideration of police and pastoral power. Despite Joseph’s critical intent, this also leads to a skewed history of the present that inadvertently glorifies the postwar period (1945–1970) as a golden age before governmentality, and close to a rather unFoucauldian historicist view of the present as ‘a neoliberal era’. The problem is compounded by Joseph’s rather narrow conception of neoliberalism which blurs conventional and governmentality understandings of the term but shows no interest in the genealogy of neoliberalism outlined by Foucault or those contributions to the governmentality literature that have highlighted illiberal elements such as hierarchy and inequality as intrinsic features of (neo-) liberalism. Eschewing Foucault’s account, Joseph’s analysis misses ordoliberal echoes in what he calls the ‘post-Washington consensus’ (with its emphasis on institutional frameworks for markets). Lack of attention to the interplay of liberal and illiberal aspects within neoliberal governmentality ironically leads Joseph to a rather ‘airbrushed’ understanding of neoliberalism (including an uncritical affirmation of a neoliberal narrative around the EU). Finally, Joseph’s contrast between the ‘effectiveness’ of governmentality in ‘advanced liberal societies’ and its failure in societies ‘at different levels of development’ (pp. 5, 16) is dubious. Relying on a rather modernisation-theoretical idiom, it presupposes as external conditions what should be investigated as internal to the governmentalities operating in specific contexts. As demonstrated by several references to failures of neoliberal governmentality in the EU (pp. 185, 191, 194, 211, 213), it is not even borne out by Joseph’s own empirical account. A related methodological issue is whether the empirical evidence Joseph marshals to demonstrate failures of the stated 236
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objectives of neoliberal development programmes in the global South actually testifies to failures of neoliberal governmentality. The latter assessment might require a more interpretative approach investigating the effects of governmentality as a regime of truth and subjectivity with potential effects quite independent of the ‘objective’ achievement of stated development targets. Using governmentality as a hammer rather than a scalpel, The Social in the Global is more successful as a (however fairly conventional) ideology critique than as a contribution to governmentality studies. Hans-Martin Jaeger Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
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