The ‘government of men’: Moving beyond Foucault’s binaries

Abstract

Recent controversies surrounding Michel Foucault suggest tensions and unresolved issues in his unfinished work. Here we interrogate Foucault’s legacy in relation to his claim that the welfare-state is a secularization of the Christian pastorate. We challenge Foucault’s binary narrative of the Christian flock versus the Graeco-Roman citizen and expand the focus to other ‘technologies of power’ in medieval Islam. Rather than an outburst of governmentality in modernity, we suggest a transregional and longue durée history of which the Christian pastorate was merely one facet. This non-binary framework indicates that Foucault’s claim of a ‘demonic’ fusion of sovereign and pastoral power in modern politics requires significant revisitation. Finally, we claim that Foucault’s much-discussed fascination with neoliberalism may have roots in this one-sided narrative regarding the birth of the welfare-state.

Keywords:

• art of government
• COVID-19
• global history
• Foucault
• pastorate
• welfare state

Acknowledgements

Both the authors wish to thank the important inputs by four anonymous referees and rich departmental conversations with our colleagues at ADI, Deakin University Australia, Chris Mayes and Miguel Vatter. We remain of course solely responsible for our findings and claims.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT180100240).

Notes on contributors

Maurizio Meloni

Maurizio Meloni is a social theorist and a science and technology studies scholar. He is the author of Political biology: Science and social values in human heredity from eugenics to epigenetics (Palgrave, 2016: Winner of the Human Biology Association Book Award, 2020), Impressionable biologies: From the archaeology of plasticity to the sociology of epigenetics (Routledge, 2019), co-editor of Biosocial matters (Wiley, 2016) and chief editor of the Palgrave handbook of biology and society (2018). He is currently Associate Professor in Sociology in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia, where he was previously an ARC Future Fellow (2019–2023).

Galib Bashirov

Galib Bashirov is an Associate Research Fellow at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University, Australia. His research examines state-society relations in the Muslim world and US foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia. His previous works have been published in Review of International Political Economy, Democratization, and Third World Quarterly.