Failure is an ubiquitous and central feature of social life. Yet much sociological inquiry focuses not on failure but on success. This paper adopts a sceptical approach to sociological theory, advancing an account of the necessary limits of sociological inquiry and defending the idea of the primacy of failure on two fronts: first, through the examination of a sociological approach currently developing around the Foucaultian idea of 'governmentality'; and second, through a more general philosophical consideration of the connections between failure and practices of governance or control.
Focusing on Foucault's distinction between an older, superseded model — the juridical/sovereignty model — and a newer one — which he refers to by a variety of names, such as disciplinary bio-power, art of government and governmentality — this article seeks, first, to demonstrate that his account of modern positive power is an unsatisfactory explanation of this type of power. It does this by contrasting it with an account that locates modern positive power in a set of early modern limiting mechanisms, mechanisms that actually produced the modern limited domain of the social, the principal object of sociology, initially only as a domain of respite from raging religious violence. On the back of this argument, the article also seeks to show that Foucault's account is politically problematic, in two ways: one, that it is rooted in a tradition of unengaged `critique' and, two, that it is tied, albeit inadvertently, to totalitarianism.
If it is to become a more widely used resource at the present time, when the demand is growing for explanations of the predicament of modern western society in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001 and various similar subsequent events around the globe, classical sociology might pay more attention than it usually does to a particular set of early modern developments. These developments, it is argued here, actually created the form of the social that became large-scale modern western society. This new form of the social was and remains distinct from those older forms that were seen to flow from the natural sociality of human beings. Between the middle of the 16th century and the end of the 17th the new form of the social emerged in different parts of Europe, contingently but not entirely accidentally, as a separate domain of relatively safe and free human interaction. It was a consequence — in part intended, in part unintended — of different bids to secure civil peace in times of extreme inter-communal, inter-confessional violence. These bids included, to name just three measures: the development of new forms of public law, especially in Germany; the development of the absolutist state, especially in France; and the separation of private religious conscience from public legal conscience, especially in England. As they were all, in one way or another, steps towards stemming, stopping, and/or preventing the flow of blood caused by religious hatreds, they are here called early modern limiting measures, and the social at the centre of the article is sometimes called the limited social or limited society.
If we take the basic definition of postmodernism given in Lyotard’s seminal The Postmodern Condition ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’ - (1984, xxiv) as a working definition for sociology, then a postmodern sociology is an attractive possibility. At first glance, at least, a postmodern theoretical umbrella for sociology can allow the discipline to develop its increasingly diverse strengths without the enormous constraint, which has weighed it down in false expectation for much of this century, of the idea that it is a science of ‘society as a whole’, moreover the idea that it is such a science in the name of human emancipation.
In this essay I consider a possible postmodern sociology and I argue that while it may be a very attractive idea for theorising sociology and for theorising some directions for it, it is seriously flawed. However, rejecting postmodernism as a theoretical possibility does not mean a return to the idea of society as a whole, it does not signal a call to return to some mythical ‘golden age’ when sociologists were able to produce understandings of society which could enlighten and emancipate us all. This ‘grand vision’ theorising of sociology has of course been around for a long while, in various guises - Marxist, Parsonian, etc. I’m not, then, doubting its intellectual heritage. Rather, I’m questioning the worth of its commitment to epistemology and I’m working from a critique of the political effects of epistemology. My essay assumes this critique.
The study of civility is branching out. A wide range of new studies have been published in the last twenty years. While the increase in the diversity of approaches usefully expands the scope of the concept, it is also a cause for concern. Much of the new work pays little attention to civility’s complex history as a practice and simply assumes its fundamental capacity to lead interaction between human beings in a peaceful direction, leaving this body of work in no position to fully appreciate the crucial role of the state. Our main argument here is that civility emerged alongside the modern state in early-modern Europe to form an ongoing state–civility nexus, a nexus by which the state produces and maintains conditions that allow civility to flourish, in turn allowing civility to help the state maintain itself, particularly by restraining the state’s raw power. We pursue this argument by exploring two sets of writings. One set is composed of work by early-modern writers, especially Thomas Hobbes, with some attention paid to four others: Justus Lipsius, Jean Bodin, Samuel Pufendorf, and Christian Thomasius. The second set is composed of work by twentieth-century writers, especially Norbert Elias, with some attention paid to two others: Max Weber and Edward Shils.
This set of essays engages with some aspects of Foucault’s notion of governmentality, particularly at the junction where law/regulation meets ‘the social’. ‘The social’, as a special sphere of government, is a special area of concern for those working within broad intellectual spaces of the ‘governmentality approach’. Is it the basis of modern liberal systems of government? Is it dead, or even feeling unwell? Has it spawned hybrid forms of government like neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, or even neo-socialism?
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