The ‘government of men’: Moving beyond Foucault’s binaries
Maurizio Meloni,
Galib Bashirov
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 vs. 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 longue-durée history of which the… Show more
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