This reissued work, originally published in 1985, is a uniquely broad and original survey of theories and beliefs about the growth, behaviour, performance and reform of the governments of modern Western democracies. After analysing the external pressures which have shaped modern governments, the author examines four different schools of political thought which seek to explain the behaviour and performance of governments, and which offer different remedies for the pluralism, corporatism and bureaucracy. To examine and test (...) these general theories, the author looks closely at how governments actually work. The book is illustrated with examples drawn from various Western societies. The final chapters present the author’s own conclusion about the future role of government, the limits of market philosophy, the future of politics, and the principles and problems of institutional reform. (shrink)

How contensted notions of modernity, civilisation and being governed were envisioned through the aid of photography.

Hubris is a notion that has recently acquired special urgency, as it seems to express in the post-communist era the demands of justice during the tragic clash between governance and violence. This ethico-political notion deserves to be studied not only in ancient writings but in modern drama and thought as well. Nikos Kazantzakis' unduly neglected Capodistria (1944) dramatizes the dilemmas of civic action during the democratic constitution of a polity. A reading of this tragedy from the perspective of political (...) theory suggests ways in which the meaning of hubris in modernity may be better understood. (shrink)

The main argument of the article regards Aristotle’s anti-realistic account, which presents a different viewpoint from that which simply fulfils or negates the truth-values of our statements on Mixed Constitutions. In modern times, the idea of a Constitution of many minds or of many individuals is proposed by Sunstein and by Hart, who maintain that neither intentions in juridical procedure nor Constitutional provisions can produce an ideal Constitution. Thus any interpretative procedure assigning to legal reality any definite, once-and-for-all meaning (...) is precarious, according to Aristotle who asks whether we can gain epistemic access to the real essences of Constitutions and their structure. These ideas respond to a challenge in the Works of Contiades, who will help us to turn the ideal Constitution into a realisable model in the situation in which we live nowadays. This is the main challenge to be met by the institutions of Europe in order to safeguard the nature of historical and intellectual values. (shrink)

It has been suggested that water and social values were divorced in modernity. This paper argues otherwise. First, it demonstrates the historical link between ethics and politics using the case of American water governance. It engages theories regarding state-centric water planning under ‘high modernism’ and the claim that water was seen as a neutral resource that could be objectively governed. By developing an alternate view from the writings of early American water leaders, J.W. Powell and W.J. McGee, the paper offers (...) a way to understand the project of state-centred governance without the claim that water falls to the latter half of a society/nature dualism. Second, the paper reviews how the emerging ‘water ethics’ discourse helps organise both the ethical and legal norms at play within contemporary political shifts towards decentralised governance. The review identifies how McGee's early influence may warrant more attention, both in terms of water governance and environmental ethics. The paper concludes by arguing that, given the arguments presented, success in decentralising water governance turns not only on political considerations, but also on fairly ordering normative claims as part of fostering and extending the reach of coordinated water governance. (shrink)

How contensted notions of modernity, civilisation and being governed were envisioned through the aid of photography.

Autonomy is a vital concept in much of modern theory, defining the Subject as capable of self-governance. Democratic theory relies on the concept of autonomy to provide justification for participatory government and the normative goal of democratic governance, which is to protect the ability of the individual to self-govern. Offering the first examination of the concept of autonomy from a postfoundationalist perspective, _The Autonomous Animal _analyzes how the ideal of self-governance has shaped everyday life. Claire E. Rasmussen begins by (...) considering the academic terrain of autonomy, then focusing on specific examples of political behavior that allow her to interrogate these theories. She demonstrates how the adolescent—a not-yet-autonomous subject—highlights how the ideal of self-governance generates practices intended to cultivate autonomy by forming the individual’s relationship to his or her body. She points up how the war on drugs rests on the perception that drug addicts are the antithesis of autonomy and thus must be regulated for their own good. Showing that the animal rights movement may challenge the distinction between human and animal, Rasmussen also examines the place of the endurance athlete in fitness culture, where self-management of the body is the exemplar of autonomous subjectivity. (shrink)

Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue that (...) the seeming inconsistency can be dispelled through a close examination of (i) the concepts of selfhood and self-government in Anglican women’s devotional texts of the period, and of (ii) the role that these concepts play in Astell’s feminist arguments. (shrink)

This article aims to analyse the governmental rationalities that took passions as an object in the French seventeenth century, unleashing the modern transformation in emotional power. The classical question of the intertwining between emotions and rationality is approached through a cultural and historical perspective, analyzing historically situated discourses that define political rationalities that propose to govern, with specific techniques and objectives, certain “emotions”’ that are conceived in a certain way. Passions emerged as an object of government through the statement (...) that passions and not inactive reason were the true drivers of human action. Analyzing the treatises on the government of passions as “arts of government” aimed at the authorities of the period, this article explores initially how Neostoic discourses promoted an exchange between Augustinian government of the will and reason of state’s strategies of manipulation of interests. Subsequently, by scrutinizing the texts of French moralists of the second half of the century, this article shows how, under the influence of Jansenism, they invert Neostoic logic and affirm a new emotional rule for political government: enlightened self-love. The idea that the commerce of selfish passions in the market could promote social peace and material progress cleared the path for the acceptance of a concupiscent order. The article’s contribution resides firstly in the history of the shift in the West’s fundamental emotional rule, love, and secondly in the way in which emotional power could work as a condition of possibility for the emergence of modern economic rationality. (shrink)

“Multiple modernities” is not a novel theme, as the editors and contributors amply concede in the volume. At its best, the conception is an invitation to ever more openness to the possibilities of...

The Laozi expounds a thoroughgoing and sustained criticism of government and society. In this paper, I will demonstrate that although this criticism is addressed to the ancient Chinese state, it can also have some validity for the modern state of today. I will first briefly discuss the metaphysical grounds of this criticism and stress that the ruler should use wuwei in governing. Then, I will examine the Laozi’s criticism of the oppressive governments that use unnatural governing through youwei (...) which increases the state disorder, as well as how this criticism is supported by its metaphysical grounds. Third, I will show that the selfish desires may significantly contribute to the state disorder and that the only one to be blamed for the arousing of them is the ruler. At last, I will attempt to show that this criticism may also to a certain extent be directed toward today’s modern state. (shrink)

Harmony has become a major challenge for modern governance in the twenty-first century because of the multi-religious, multi-racial and multi-ethnic character of our increasingly globalized societies. Governments all over the world are facing growing pressure to integrate the many diverse elements and subcultures which make up modern pluralistic societies. This book examines the idea of harmony, and its place in politics and governance, both in theory and practice, in Asia, the West and elsewhere. It explores and analyses (...) the meanings, mechanisms, dimensions and methodologies of harmony as a normative political ideal in both Western and Asian philosophical traditions. The book argues that in Western political thought - which sees politics as primarily concerned with resolving social conflicts and protecting individual rights - the concept of harmony has often been neglected. In contrast, since earliest times harmony or ‘he’ has been a profound theme in Confucian thought, and current leaders of many East Asian governments, and the Chinese government, have explicitly declared that the realisation of a harmonious society is their aim. The book also assesses how harmony is pursued, jeopardized or deformed in the real world of politics, based upon empirical analysis of a variety of different cultural, social and political contexts, including: China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Denmark, Latin America and the Scandinavian countries. It shows how harmony as an organizing concept can help to promote new thinking in governance, and overcome problems of modern-day governance like distrust, adversarial conflicts, hyper-individualism, coercive state intervention, and free-market alienation. It also discusses the potential problems posed by the pursuit of harmony, in particular in the grave threat of totalitarianism, and considers how these risks could best be mitigated. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the upcoming reform of local self-government initiated by amend­ments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation (2020) and the Draft Federal Law No. 40361-8 «On general principles of the organization of local self-government in a unified system of public author­ity», submitted to the State Duma of the Russian Federation in December 2021. The purpose of the study is to identify and analyze trends in the development of the institutional organization of local self-govern­ment, (...) manifested in the context of the development of the new Draft Federal Law. It is shown that a special type of institutional organization is emerging in the sphere of domestic local self-government, which can be defined as institutional minimalism. Its main features are highlighted. It is concluded that the manifes­tations of institutional minimalism are possible only in the conditions of continuation of such trends as the strengthening state control and unification of local self-government, which previously existed, but were further strengthened in connection with the building of a unified system of public power. (shrink)

Governing nursing conduct: the rise of evidence‐based practice Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’ to analyse the evidence‐based movement in nursing, we argue that it is possible to identify the governance of nursing practice and hence nurses across two distinct axes; that of the political (governance through political and economic means) and the personal (governance of the self through the cultivation of the practices required by nurses to put evidence into practice). The evaluation of nursing work through evidence‐based reviews (...) provides detailed information that may enable governments to target and instruct nurses regarding their work in the interest of preserving the health of the population as a whole. Political governance of the nursing population becomes possible through centralised discursive mechanisms, such as evidence‐based reviews that present nursing practice as an intelligible field whose elements are connected in a more or less systematic manner. The identity of the evidence‐based nurse requires the modern nurse to develop new skills and attitudes. Evidence‐based nursing is an emerging technology of government that judges nursing research and knowledge and has the capacity to direct nursing practice at both the political and personal level. (shrink)

The original lecture was delivered by the author in the Ateneo of Madrid, as part of the series called 'Tendencias actuales del pensamiento europeo' , on 20th April 1955.

In the United Kingdom, clinical governance has become a master narrative for health care over the last decade. While many see this political imperative as embodying both enlightening and humanistic goals, I argue that it has also become an apparatus for resuscitating a hypermodernist worldview which further conceals the political drivers of health care delivery. While resistance to clinical governance seems futile, insistence on the inclusion of historical analysis in understanding modern health care delivery may be profitable. Drawing from (...) selected dramatic texts by Henrik Ibsen, an historical moment of clinical governance may be analysed showing the complex interplay of the personal, social, empirical and ethical dimensions of health care delivery. (shrink)

One way to characterise the difference between analytic and Continental political philosophy concerns the different roles played by normative and descriptive analysis in each case. This article argues that, even though Michel Foucault’s genealogy of liberal and neoliberal governmentality and John Rawls’s political liberalism involve different articulations of normative and descriptive concerns, they are complementary rather than antithetical to one another. The argument is developed in three stages: first, by suggesting that Foucault offers a way to conceive of public reason (...) as a historical phenomenon. Second, it is suggested that both Rawls and Foucault allow us to consider rights as historical and particular rather than a-historical and universal. Third, it is argued that Foucault’s genealogy of modern liberal government illuminates some of the tensions and some of the alternatives within the liberal tradition in relation to the concept of political legitimacy. (shrink)

Early modern utopian literature includes an overlooked theme that explains many of the throughlines within the genre. This common theme is the biopolitical control of the population, which implies a form of governance that optimizes life through the regulation of sex, reproduction, health, food, hygiene, habitation, and “race.” In this article I examine four early seventeenth-century utopias—Campanella’s City of the Sun, Andreae’s Christianopolis, Burton’s “Utopia of mine owne,” and Bacon’s New Atlantis—and suggest that exposing this theme can lead to (...) a deeper understanding of both early modern utopian literature and the much debated history of biopolitics, which Foucault understood as a uniquely modern phenomenon. (shrink)

The concept of `governance' has become a central catchword across the social and political sciences. In Governing and Governance, Jan Kooiman revisits and develops his seminal work in the field to map and demonstrate the utility of a sociopolitical perspective to our understanding of contemporary forms of governing, governance and governability. A central underlying theme of the book is the notion of governance as a process of interaction between different societal and political actors and the growing interdependencies between the two (...) as modern societies become ever more complex, dynamic and diverse. Drawing upon a wide range of interdisciplinary insights, the book advances a comprehensive conceptual framework that seeks to capture the different elements, modes and orders of governing and governance. A series of useful distinctions are employed, for example, between self, `co', and hierarchical modes, and between first, second, or meta orders to illustrate the many different structures and levels of modern governance today. Theoretically rich and illuminating, Governing and Governance will be essential reading for all students and academics across the social and political sciences, public management and public administration. (shrink)

“It is this distancing of personal relationships, combined with their replacement by written contractual terms and conditions, which make the discussion of ethics within a corporate institutionalised context highly limited and problematic.’ The challenge is to find means of personalising modern corporations so as to encourage ethical behaviour. Atul K. Shah PhD ACA gained his doctorate from the London School of Economics and is Lecturer in the Department of Accounting and Financial Management, at the University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, (...) Colchester CO4 3SQ; e‐mail [email protected]. This article was conceived while he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Business, University of Maryland, USA. The author wishes to thank Dan Ostas, Lee Preston and Stephen Loeb for helpful comments on earlier drafts. (shrink)

Liberalism, Miguel de Beistegui argues in The Government of Desire, is best described as a technique of government directed towards the self, with desire as its central mechanism. Whether as economic interest, sexual drive, or the basic longing for recognition, desire is accepted as a core component of our modern self-identities, and something we ought to cultivate. But this has not been true in all times and all places. For centuries, as far back as late antiquity and early Christianity, (...) philosophers believed that desire was an impulse that needed to be suppressed in order for the good life, whether personal or collective, ethical or political, to flourish. Though we now take it for granted, desire as a constitutive dimension of human nature and a positive force required a radical transformation, which coincided with the emergence of liberalism. By critically exploring Foucault’s claim that Western civilization is a civilization of desire, de Beistegui crafts a provocative and original genealogy of this shift in thinking. He shows how the relationship between identity, desire, and government has been harnessed and transformed in the modern world, shaping our relations with others and ourselves, and establishing desire as an essential driving force for the constitution of a new and better social order. But is it? The Government of Desire argues that this is precisely what a contemporary politics of resistance must seek to overcome. By questioning the supposed universality of a politics based on recognition and the economic satisfaction of desire, de Beistegui raises the crucial question of how we can manage to be less governed today, and explores contemporary forms of counter-conduct. ​Drawing on a host of thinkers from philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis, and concluding with a call for a sovereign and anarchic form of desire, The Government of Desire is a groundbreaking account of our freedom and unfreedom, of what makes us both governed and ungovernable. (shrink)

As Michel Foucault and others have shown, from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, Western political discourse has perpetuated an art of governing aimed at societies and populations. This article argues that this modern art of governing is now coming undone, in the name of governance. The discourse on governance is taking us from an art of governing premised on producing policy for a society or a population to an art of governing premised on solving problems with no necessary (...) reference to any kind of society or population. Tracing the evolution of that discourse, the article argues that existing social and political theory has failed to make sense of this shift. It concludes that in order to access and assess the new art of governing on its own terms we need a sociological imagination that stretches beyond societies and a political imaginary without the presupposition of collectivities. (shrink)

Citizens' competence for democratic self‐government must be judged by their ability to perform the typical functions of modern citizenship, rather than by their scores on surveys of political information—which are flawed in a variety of important respects. The role requirements for effective citizenship have changed throughout American history because government has grown vastly in size, complexity, and the range of functions that it performs. Effective use of citizens’ political talents therefore requires limiting public surveillance and advice to broad overview (...) aspects, rather than to micro‐management. Citizens perform these more limited functions adequately, demonstrating that government by the people remains viable under modern conditions. (shrink)

This paper argues that attempts to apply Alasdair MacIntyre’s positive moral theory to business ethics are problematic, due to the cognitive closure of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice. I begin by outlining the notion of a practice, before turning to Moore’s attempt to provide a MacIntyrean account of corporate governance. I argue that Moore’s attempt is mismatched with MacIntyre’s account of moral education. Because the notion of practices resists general application I go on to argue that a negative application, which (...) focuses on regulation, is more plausible. Large-scale regulation, usually thought antithetical to MacIntyre’s advocacy of small-scale politics, has the potential to facilitate practice-based work and reveals that MacIntyre’s own work can be used against his pessimism about the modern order. Furthermore, the conception of regulation I defend can show us how management is more amenable to ethical understanding than MacIntyre’s work is often taken to imply. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the way political representation was understood in the early modern Netherlands by focusing on the contemporary contribution of Simon van Slingelandt. His views of the representative nature of the government of the Dutch Republic were deeply polemical when he developed them, but went on to have a profound influence on the later literature and are notably sustained in modern histories of the subject. The best way to nuance the view of political representation our historiography has (...) inherited from Van Slingelandt is by returning to the earlier views he set out to discredit. By examining both views, I thus hope to shed some new light on the representative nature of early modern Dutch government. (shrink)

After two generations of emphasis on governmental inefficiency and the need for deregulation, we now see growing interest in the possibility of constructive governance, alongside public calls for new, smarter regulation. Yet there is a real danger that regulatory reforms will be rooted in outdated ideas. As the financial crisis has shown, neither traditional market failure models nor public choice theory, by themselves, sufficiently inform or explain our current regulatory challenges. Regulatory studies, long neglected in an atmosphere focused on deregulatory (...) work, is in critical need of new models and theories that can guide effective policy-making. This interdisciplinary volume points the way toward the modernization of regulatory theory. Its essays by leading scholars move past predominant approaches, integrating the latest research about the interplay between human behavior, societal needs and regulatory institutions. The book concludes by setting out a potential research agenda for the social sciences. (shrink)

The introduction of mass public education posed unfamiliar problems for the governments of modern states, and the ways in which governments worked through those problems can reveal much about the culture and values of a state. This paper focuses on central Government officials and the Ministers they advised, with particular attention to the pivotal period 1960-1976. Trends identified include: the shift from post-War optimism to the more pessimistic view of schooling since the late 1960s; the dynamics of (...) professional development amid over-rapid expansion and contraction; relationships between training institutions and schools; and policy-makers' changing perceptions of teachers as professionals. Four themes are considered in detail: the imperatives of numbers; status concerns as a driver of change; linkages among the 'partners' in the schooling enterprise; and accountability. Some questions are posed about the sustainability of the schooling enterprise in England and Wales. (shrink)

Religious-secular distinctions have been crucial to the way in which modern governments have rationalised their governance and marked out their sovereignty – as crucial as the territorial boundaries that they have drawn around nations. The authors of this volume provide a multi-dimensional picture of how the category of religion has served the ends of modern government. They draw on perspectives from history, anthropology, moral philosophy, theology and religious studies, as well as empirical analysis of India, Japan, Mexico, (...) the United States, Israel-Palestine, France and the United Kingdom. (shrink)

Toward the end of his famous Rule, written late in his life, near the middle of the sixth century, St. Benedict provides instructions for the selection of an abbot, the leader and spiritual "father" of the cenobitic monastic community, who is to represent Christ to the men under his charge. The beginning of Chapter 64 of RB states: In the installation of an abbot, the proper method is always to appoint the one whom the whole community agrees to choose in (...) the fear of God. Or a part of the community, no matter how small, may make the choice if they possess sounder judgment. Let the candidate be chosen for merit of life and wisdom of teaching, even if he hold the last rank in the community. But it can happen... (shrink)