Foucault, Governmentality, Marxism

The political economy of risk and the new governance of youth crime

“…Nevertheless, as neo-Marxist writers such as Rigakos and Hadden (2001: 62 and 75) point out, the logic of risk governance is not apolitical, but is 'class-based' and 'anchored juridically, philosophically, politically and economically to capitalism'. This suggests that an analysis of the dynamics of class and capitalism remains integral to any understanding of social, political and economic relations in advanced liberal societies (Pearce and Tombs, 1998) and that the specific deployment of risk logic supports a 'hegemonic mode of governance' through which powerful class factions are able to articulate their interests while maintaining the legitimacy of their social, political and economic leadership (Pearce and Tombs, 1996: 447). However, any attempt to include class in the analysis of risk governance is firmly rejected by many governmentality writers because of the epistemological contradiction between their position and that of the neo-Marxists.…”

Book Review: Understanding Regulation?

“…Tweedale's text is a testimony to the sheer brutality of contemporary corporate power, the implication of the state and governmental institutions, and the nature and limits of resistance. It stands as an important corrective to much contemporary social science which either ignores, or explicitly casts as anachronistic, the reality of class power and its relationship to state forms (see Pearce and Tombs, 1998b).…”

“…14. Relatedly, he shares with governmentality theorists -with whom he has recently closely aligned himself -the failure to theorise the nature of the contemporary state (Pearce and Tombs, 1998b). Thus, for example, in a recent piece, Braithwaite simply asserts some features of recent and contemporary states' activities, then shifts to other levels and objects of analyses (see Braithwaite, 2000b).…”

Reforming the World Bank: from social‐liberalism to neo‐liberalism

“…Most academic studies of the World Bank have assumed theoretical and other perspectives on power framed within Enlightenment thought (Foucault, 1986(Foucault, , 1993Gordon, 1993), in terms of a form of problematics of the state (Hindess, 1996;Hildyard, 1998;Pearce & Tombs, 1998), and often with a focus on policy doctrines, policy statements and practice. Rather, this article provides a different approach on the World Bank from an analytics of government perspective (Dean, 1999;Rose, 1999a) and focuses on the Bank as a financial banking enterprise (Jones, 2005(Jones, , 2007 as well as on questions of government (Foucault, 1991), especially questions about the emergence of a historically specific form of neo-liberal political reason of government in North America, advanced liberalism (Rose, 1999a), and attendant political and intellectual technologies of government (Hunter, 1993).…”