From hegemony to governmentality: changing conceptions of power in social history.

What was new about social history in its pioneering phase in the 1960s and 1970s? Answers to this question tend to focus on its objects of enquiry: the attention given to neglected social groups and the opening up of fresh fields of study, such as crime and popular culture. These objects in turn are often related to the wider ambitions of the new social history, including the critique of both traditional political history and of econometrics, and the championing of a history of society as a totality. (1) All this is relevant to an understanding of the origins of social history, though as Miles Taylor has argued, those origins were as often intellectually and politically conservative as radical, in Britain at least. (2) What is often undervalued in these accounts, however, is the significant re-conceptualisation of power that followed from a generation of social historical studies, including Thompson, Genovese and other less canonical but collectively important works. Social history proposed a substantial extension to the understanding and expression of power; it was no longer seen as restricted to institutions of government and state, but operative in multiple sites: in the workplace, on the streets, in the home. Social history, it was emphasised, was not history with the politics left out; instead, political history was radically expanded by looking beyond parties and organised movements to the political cultures rooted in the labour process and structures of popular belief. Power was at issue outside the frame of what had conventionally been deemed 'political'. Women, workers, slaves were not to be viewed as victims or as passive objects of power--they too had agency, were engaged in struggle. At its roots, social history challenged a traditional version of power as a smooth, one-way process; it represented the past as replete with checks, resistances, dissonances.

It would be wrong to imagine that social history was unique in expanding the notion of power in this way. Similar thinking was occurring in disciplines such as sociology and political theory, as I shall indicate, not to mention in the new social movements of the period. Nevertheless, social history had an exemplary role in disseminating new ideas and in providing specific case-studies of power relationships, the multifarious forms which dominance and resistance have taken. In emphasising the dispersal and contingencies of power as well as in its critique of historical orthodoxy, one could suggest that social history was postmodern before postmodernism. It was these factors--and, not least, the capacity of social history to illuminate the politics of the present--which attracted many people to it in the 1970s.

A concept that exemplified this extended notion of power was that of 'hegemony', whose influence was registered directly and indirectly within social history in the 1970s and 1980s. Derived from the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, hegemony answered to the need of social historians for a theory that articulated this capacious new concept of power. But in the last decade or so, the ways in which power and power relationships were understood in social history, including hegemony, have been superseded in certain quarters by the framework provided by the notion of 'governmentality'. In this paper I trace the shift from hegemony to governmentality, attempting to draw out the underlying ideas and their application to the field I know best--modern British history. This shift is important precisely because of the centrality of the subject of power to social history as it has developed as a domain of study. In so doing, I shall identify some of the problems with both hegemony and governmentality as organising concepts, and indicate briefly an alternative way of thinking about power that might prove productive for social historians.

Models of power: hegemony

In a classic study, first published in 1974, the political philosopher Steven Lukes identified three different views of power used in political analysis. The first, which he called the one-dimensional view of power, focused on the act of decision-making in the political process. Power resided with those whose will prevailed where a conflict of interest or policy was apparent. What was significant in the one-dimensional view was that to count as such power must involve a visible conflict between actors with differing interests or preferences on a particular political issue. The two-dimensional view of power accepted this emphasis on conflict and decision-making, but added in the ability to control the political agenda--what counts as a political issue and what does not--and the fact that conflict and interests might be hidden as well as open. It thus criticised the previous view as overly concerned with the direct behaviour of participants and as ignoring the latent or contextual issues in any political conflict, including the potential significance of 'non' decision-making. Finally, Lukes proposed a three-dimensional or 'radical' view of power. While not excluding conflict and decision-making from view, this extended the concept of power from the immediate political process to include the "socially structured and culturally patterned behaviour of groups and practices of institutions." (3) Power was thus less an effect of individuals than of collectivities. It was not restricted to situations of overt conflict between observable interests, but might be exercised to prevent needs or grievances finding political expression in the first place, as in cases of manipulation or the imposition of authority. The radical view, favoured by Lukes himself, thus incorporated within the definition of power the possibility that any consensus might be artificial and that real interests could exist beyond those politically visible in any given situation.

Historians generally have shown limited interest in such abstract speculations on power. Lukes' model is helpful, however, in mapping out the various theoretical positions which have underpinned historians' approaches to the study of politics and power. Thus the conservative historian of Tudor England, G. R. Elton, for example, vehemently upheld a one-dimensional view, arguing that political history was a matter of people--politicians--and of an observable political agenda--"what actually happened", not "abstract structures and forces which have reality only in the mind of the enquirer--if there." (4) Not all studies of 'high politics' fitted within this category, though. Lewis Namier's classic studies of British parliamentary politics in the eighteenth century, which reached their peak of influence in the 1950s, were predicated on the idea that the motive force of politics lay below the surface of observable political behaviour in the networks of economic interest, patronage and ambition. (5) But by the 1970s, many social historians followed Lukes in seeking to go beyond the one- and two-dimensional views. In arguing for a radical, three-dimensional view of power, Lukes was indeed responding to the resurgence of interest in Marxist theory which British social historians had done much to initiate. But his argument reflected, in particular, the increasing influence of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci in Britain at this period, across swathes of the humanities and social sciences, including social history

What Gramsci brought to the conceptualisation of power was the idea of 'hegemony'. In hegemony he sought to encapsulate the notion that the power of a ruling class was exercised less by coercion than by its intellectual and moral capacity to win the consent of the mass of the population. Gramsci saw this as a complex process, not as a matter simply of propaganda and manipulation. Hegemony implied more than ideology in the narrow sense; it involved the construction of a whole lived reality such that the existing political, economic and social structures would be taken for granted by the mass of the people, seen as 'common sense'. (6) Nor was the construction of hegemony a one-way, top-down process. It was the product of negotiation between the dominant and the dominated, so that hegemony was grounded in what Gramsci termed the 'national popular'. As this implies, hegemony was not a once-and-for-all condition, but a site of struggle. The consent of the masses was always provisional and therefore had constantly to be renegotiated and re-secured in historical circumstances which were themselves shifting. Especially important for Gramsci was the transition in early modern Europe from an aristocratic society, where the political class was kept aloof by an effective caste system, to a capitalist society, in which a bourgeois state actively sought to mobilise society as a whole in support of its aims and projects.

With its vision of power relations as extending beyond formal political institutions and its emphasis on the manufacture of consent as integral to the political process, Gramsci's concept of hegemony fitted well with Lukes' three-dimensional view of power. It corresponded with Lukes' point that the exercise of power--and its analysis--does not require that power be expressed through an observable conflict. Thus for Lukes "the most effective and insidious use of power is to prevent such conflict from arising in the first place." (7) The impress of Gramsci's thought was widely registered in historical work in the 1960s and 1970s. It is observable in E.P. Thompson's studies of eighteenth-century popular culture; in Eric Hobsbawm's account of the triumph of the European bourgeoisie, The Age of Capital (1975); and in R.J. Morris's survey of class and class consciousness in the industrial revolution (1979). (8) It was also to the fore in some of the most theoretically adventurous studies of the time, such as Robert Gray's "Bourgeois hegemony in Victorian Britain" (1977). Gray's declared intention was to "deploy the resources he [Gramsci] provides in concrete historical research, with a conscious effort to purge conspiratorial and mechanistic formulations from the vocabulary of Marxist analysis." The essay emphasised the complex power relations existing between different classes and fractions of classes (e.g. 'subaltern intellectuals', the labour aristocracy). Through his analysis Gray sought to distinguish between the 'governing fraction' of landowners, which dominated parliament and the state apparatus, and the 'hegemonic fraction'--the group "whose interests preponderate in the exercise of state power"--identified with the industrial bourgeoisie. The complexion of government concealed the real nature of power in Victorian Britain, according to Gray, which lay elsewhere in the workings and interests of industrial capitalism. The operations of power were hidden, as it were, beneath the surface of formal politics. (9)

Gramsci's concept of hegemony informed a series of debates in the 1970s and 1980s about the possibility of a reinvigorated Marxist history, the formation of power in modern states and the character of relations of dominance and subordination. It represented perhaps the most influential example of what Lukes termed the radical, three-dimensional view of power applied to social history. Its influence has continued to be registered in social historical writing as well as taking on fresh life in new intellectual contexts, notably postcolonial history. (10) But under the impact of the cultural turn, many social historians in the United States and Britain were finding existing models of power and the political inadequate by the 1990s and were increasingly looking beyond the three views outlined by Lukes. With others in the human sciences, they turned to the work of Michel Foucault in rethinking the categories of power and the political. The ideas elaborated by Foucault, particularly in his later work on governmentality, offered a major challenge to both the liberal and Marxist approaches to power identified in schema such as that of Lukes.

Foucault, power and governmentality

Foucault's history was a history of knowledge rather than of ideas and of power rather than of politics. In his early work especially, he was concerned to demonstrate the symbiosis of power and knowledge, realised in the formation of major institutions of Western modernity--the asylum, the clinic, the prison. "My problem" he stated in a discussion with French historians "is to see how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth." (11) Foucault also sought to break with what he regarded as orthodox tenets of Western historiography. He was hostile to any notion of progress, for instance, as also to the idea of an historical sequence of events linked by cause and effect, and his writings consequently emphasise rupture and disjunction in historical processes. He was also antipathetic to social history, identified for him with the French Annales school, considering its ambitions to encompass economy, society and culture to be totalising. Most radically of all, perhaps, Foucault questioned the existence of a continuous human subject of history. The 'individual' in a modern sense, he argued, was a product of the nineteenth century. Historians' attempts to see social categories as subjects or agents of history (the bourgeoisie or women, for example) he rejected along with the idea that these entities possessed coherent interests.</p> <pre> One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that is to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges,

discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference

to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field

of events or runs its empty sameness throughout the course of history. (12) </pre> <p>Foucault adopted an equally iconoclastic approach to power and the political, and here too his thought changed over time. Whereas in The Birth of the Clinic and Madness and Civilisation power was treated in conventional fashion as a repressive force, from Discipline and Punish onwards he viewed it more flexibly as a technology or strategy rather than as a possession. Power was more than merely repressive; it was also, in several senses of the term, productive. In his later work he began to study the political more directly, through the developing concept of 'governmentality'. By governmentality Foucault designated a specific modern form of power targeted at 'population', which came to predominate over other types of power in Western Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The social theorist Mitchell Dean defines it more expansively as a "novel thought-space across the domains of ethics and politics, of what might be called 'practices of the self' and 'practices of government,' that weaves them together without a reduction of one to the other." Governmentality encompassed the 'conduct of conduct', the art and rationality of all forms of governance. (13)

Foucault clarified this concept by describing the historical conditions of its emergence. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, he argued, there was a rapid expansion in literature devoted to the problem of government at all levels, from the state to the school and family. In this literature it was possible to see a shift occurring from a form of government whose over-riding purpose was to strengthen the ruler's relationship with his territory and subjects, as in Machiavelli's The Prince, to other more complex forms of governmental rationality. By the eighteenth century government was seen as having not a single but multiple ends, such as the increase of wealth and population. Through new forms of knowledge such as political economy, population itself was rendered visible both as an object and as an end of government. How to manage a population and to maintain its wealth and security became an essential part of the art of government and its rationality. At the same time, 'politics' and 'economy' came to be understood as distinct, the former dealing with the techniques of government, the latter with a sphere of activity increasingly viewed as autonomous and self-regulating. These shifts were themselves linked to successive modes of rule: 'reason of state' associated with the rationalisation of the principles of state government; 'police' with its apparatus of surveillance which first constituted population as an object of knowledge; and subsequently with liberal governmentality, as we shall see. (14)

Such ideas were a deliberate provocation to existing right- and left-wing views of power. On the right, Foucault attacked the notion of sovereignty, specifically the idea that ultimate power was located in a determinate body--the crown, the people or, as formulated in nineteenth-century Britain, the 'monarch in parliament'. "Power must be analysed as something which circulates ... It is never localised here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth." (15) This meant that power was to be analysed in its effects rather than its sources and at the margins rather than at the centre. To understand the power of the penal code, for instance, was not to view it as a set of abstract principles or a system of justice but to analyse its effects on the body of the punished. Historical analysis should therefore be concerned not with who possessed power but how power was exercised, its practices, strategies and technologies at micro-level. "Mechanisms of power have never been much studied by history. History has studied those who held power ..." (16) Foucault's critique of historical orthodoxy also extended to left-wing and Marxist views of power. He was sceptical of views which identified the modern state as the fulcrum of power, preferring to see the state itself as a set of practices rather than as an institution or 'apparatus', as dispersed rather than unitary, and as invested in domains usually associated with civil society, such as sexuality and the family. Whereas Gramsci tended to look through the modern state to its role as a vehicle for class interests, Tony Bennett has observed, Foucault sought to look at it, at how governmental power worked as a mode of rule. (17) By extension, Foucault did not consider that power and political agency lay with social classes. "I believe that anything can be deduced from the general phenomenon of the domination of the bourgeois class. What needs to be done is something quite different. One needs to investigate historically, and beginning from the lowest level, how mechanisms of power have been able to function." (18) Furthermore, power itself was not to be regarded solely as an instrument of repression or domination, but as an omnipresent force, neither good nor evil. Consequently, resistance--the talisman of radical politics and history--was not the opposite of power, but its corollary. In Foucault's term, resistance was the 'counterstroke' to power, the two always operating together. For if there can be no resistance without power, without resistance there can be no history.

Foucault argued that, ultimately, both liberal and Marxist conceptions of power shared a certain economism. While in the liberal version power was seen as a right, to be possessed like a commodity, in the Marxist version power was understood to be rooted in the economy itself. It was with this pervasive economism that Foucault sought to break. No less fundamental was his critique of sovereignty, the notion that power must ultimately reside in a specific location--in parliament, the state, the bourgeoisie, for instance. Here Foucault saw contemporary analysis of politics as immured in an old problematique, a discourse of "despotism and legitimation, rights and repression." By holding to this inherited idea of sovereignty, whose origins went back to the ancien regime, historians remained trapped in an anachronistic conception of power: "we have still not cut off the king's head." (19) Foucault's proposal for the study of the 'micro-physics of power' consequently went well beyond the model of analysis outlined by political theorists such as Lukes. In what follows, I want to examine how his ideas of power have been deployed in two recent studies of nineteenth-century Britain.

Historical epistemology 

In Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830-1864 (1995), Mary Poovey drew inspiration from Foucault's writings on the origins of the human sciences and the formation of modern rationalities. For Foucault, as we have seen, the emergence of objective, statistical knowledge of economy and society from the eighteenth century was an important political development. This knowledge, characteristically termed 'political economy', was to become the basis for forms of governance that for the first time took population as their object, its wealth, welfare and security. The development of political economy marked the transition from the view of government as an art to that of a science, 'political science'.

In Making a Social Body Poovey appropriated elements of this approach and applied them to the study of the preconditions for a unified 'mass' culture in later nineteenth-century Britain. Her conceptual framework owed an explicit debt to Foucault's mode of discourse analysis and, in particular, his account of the emergence of the human sciences. This framework Poovey termed 'historical epistemology' which she defined as the field that "allows for the production of what counts as knowledge at any given time." (20) The epistemological field consists of domains--what constitutes the boundaries and internal rules of a given area of knowledge--, discourses, rationalities and disciplines. These were understood by Poovey to be the product of the epistemological field itself, not of external agents, such as the state, or of identities, such as gender and class. Epistemology--the formation of knowledge--shaped identity, not the other way round; it enables us to grasp how identities such as 'race' became visible at particular historical periods. Adopting this perspective, Poovey's strategy was to uncover and analyse the process of disaggregation of modern domains of knowledge--the 'economic', the 'political', the 'social' and so on. This disaggregation was seen as the precondition for the emergence of 'mass culture' from the later nineteenth century onwards. Poovey's enterprise was therefore an ambitious one: to show how fundamental categories of modern thought and governance took root in mid-Victorian Britain.

As her title suggests, part of Poovey's aim was to indicate how a concept of the 'social' developed as a relatively autonomous domain. The issue is critical given the importance of the concept of the social in the human sciences and the fact that it inevitably bears the marks of its origins. In the eighteenth century, Poovey argued following Foucault, the concept of the economic, previously related to the management of the household, was yoked to that of the political to refer to the governance of national resources, as in 'political economy'. Alongside this stood a medieval notion of the 'body politic', referring to those recognised as political subjects (as against, for example, the excluded poor), which was steadily replaced by the term the 'body of the people'. By the nineteenth century, both concepts were overtaken by the metaphor of the 'social body', which retained an important ambiguity of meaning: it could denote either the whole of the population of a nation-state or the poor alone. "The phrase 'social body' therefore promised full membership in a whole (and held out the image of that whole) to a part identified as needing both discipline and care." (21) The term 'social' designated both an aggregated population (society, the poor) and a disaggregated domain of knowledge and action (social problem, social relations). Poovey described how this emergent social domain was given definition between 1820 and 1860 by technologies of 'population', such as observation, fact-gathering and statistics. Early nineteenth-century Britain was overtaken by an avalanche of numbers in every area of enquiry from epidemic disease to social insurance. Statistical surveys showed time and again the taming of chance; human actions appeared to follow laws as regular as those of physics. (22) The statistical societies established from the 1830s contributed to the creation of a separate social domain by identifying 'social' (as against 'economic') topics such as health, crime and education at the same time as focusing analytical attention on the poor. Poovey presented the New Poor Law of 1834 as an example of these processes. The measure was framed on the basis of facts assembled by a Royal Commission and analysed by experts. In 'solving' poverty its purpose was precisely to demarcate the social from the economic dimensions of the problem. Pauperism was distinguished from poverty, the former understood as a social phenomenon to be subjected to remedial action in the workhouse, while the latter was deemed an economic category, to be left to the workings of the market. The New Poor Law thus reflected the understanding of an emergent social domain while simultaneously giving form to that domain through its institutional effects.

Crucially, Poovey argued, the disaggregation of domains such as the social and the economic was predicated on a quintessentially modern model of scientific abstraction, which allowed populations to be seen as internally homogeneous and therefore amenable to statistical calculation. The origins of this model of abstraction lay in the scientific method of the seventeenth century and its result was the powerful idea that space is abstract and empty. Abstract space was uniform, always the same and representable in the form of an empty grid. Because it encompassed both physical and social space (human relations) it enabled individuals to be viewed as functionally equivalent to one another and for persons to be identified with place. The concept of abstract space thus came to operate in the early nineteenth century as a paradigm of Foucaultian disciplinary power. It helped shape the view of the city itself as a 'social body', promulgated by influential medical men who were central to the construction and dissemination of new forms of statistical knowledge and empirical method. (23) In the work of reformers such as James Kay and Edwin Chadwick between the 1820s and 1840s, the conditions of the poor were scrutinised, quantified and analysed prior to sanitary and pedagogic intervention. Through the process of abstraction, people were conflated with their environment; poor persons were transformed into 'slum-dwellers'. Intervention in the domain of the social, Poovey argued, left the market free as demanded by the principles of laissez-faire. Abstraction simultaneously served to relieve the emergent economic domain of moral obligations derived from earlier religious discourse. By the 1860s the effect of these processes was to produce a new conception of the 'disciplinary individual', self-reliant and self-governing, yet homologous with other individuals. (24)

Power and knowledge were thus synchronous in Poovey's account. While historical formations and processes operated at the level of domains in the epistemological field, their effects were registered materially on the bodies of the poor and the fabric of the city. Lest this model of power appeared too monolithic and determinist, Poovey argued that it accommodated complexity. The full logic of abstraction was never practically implemented; it was inhibited by religious obstacles in education and by popular resistance in the case of the New Poor Law. More fundamentally, power was never total because the process of disaggregation of domains was uneven. In the field of historical epistemology emergent domains like the social had to co-exist and compete with residual domains of knowledge, notably the theological. The persistence of culturally and legally-sanctioned gender inequality, for instance, reflected the pressure of an older theological logic on the abstract rationality of the emergent economic domain of homologous individuals. In areas like philanthropy the complex interweaving of knowledges was especially evident, abstract rationality operating at the same time as old assumptions about God-given hierarchy and the importance of knowledge derived from personal experience. (25) Poovey's historical epistemology, the disaggregation of domains and the creation of the liberal individual, thus extended Foucault's own genealogical account of the human sciences. While power worked in and through knowledge (Foucault's 'orders of discourse'), modern rationality simultaneously totalised and individualised its principal object, 'population'. In Poovey's words, by 1860 British society was 'free' "in the sense that its members constituted individualised instances of a single subject, whose life was subdivided among the domains that claimed autonomy but appeared to be alike." (26) Neither individuals nor classes made history; rather, these categories only came to the surface of historical visibility through the organisation and workings of knowledge.

Liberal governmentality

In addition to studies of epistemology, the Foucaultian history of governance has been addressed directly in Patrick Joyce's The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (2003). As with Poovey, the context for Joyce's study is nineteenth-century Britain, but in this case the conceptual framework is provided by the notion of 'liberal governmentality'. After Foucault, Joyce defines liberal governmentality as a mode of rule whose lynchpin was the liberal subject itself, a self which was at once self-watching and watchful of power. "In liberalism rule is ceded to a self that must constantly monitor the very civil society and political power that are once the guarantee of freedom and its threat." (27) As this implies, the idea of freedom was integral to the liberal mode of rule; it represented not simply an end of government, an absence of restraint, but also, paradoxically, a technique of rule and thus a form of restraint. In liberal governmentality, Foucault observed, freedom is the condition of security. (28) In Joyce's study, then, liberalism refers to more than a political party or ideology. It designates rather a form of governance that proclaimed its transparency, cultivated the reflexive and vigilant citizen, and sought to govern at a distance from its object. Consequently, liberalism is better understood as a set of practices than of principles. Joyce's aim in The Rule of Freedom, therefore, is to re-evaluate politics in Victorian Britain in the light of the conceptual shifts wrought by the notion of governmentality.

Rather than taking the conventional frame for studies of governance, the nation-state, however, Joyce takes the city. From the 1820s cities like Manchester, Glasgow and, above all, London posed urgent problems of order as their populations escalated and Britain shifted from a predominantly rural to the most highly urbanised society in the world. The city, Joyce argues, was the principal locus and object of liberal rule, the site where the techniques of rule were earliest and most systematically honed. Initially, at least, this necessitated the implementation of techniques drawn from the repertoire of 'police', notably the amassing of information on populations. In order for power to be exercised in the name of liberal freedom, its object must be known, rendered visible. Joyce thus indicates the numerous media through which knowledge of the city and its inhabitants was acquired from the 1820s. They included statistical surveys, the census, maps (the Ordnance Survey was active with ever-increasing detail at this time), newspapers, guide-books and the spread of street signs and door numbers with the advent of the Penny Post in 1840. From this perspective, 'democracy' in its mid nineteenth-century incarnation appeared as a 'gigantic political technology based on number'. (29)

Liberal governance affected the way the city itself was viewed, as a vast self-regulating system akin to the human body. In the early Victorian period this meant that intervention by government was seen in pathological terms as restoring the urban body to its natural state of health. Circulation was a vital principle for the idea of the sanitary city, whether it involved circulation of water (drainage, water supply), air (ventilation of houses, parks as 'lungs') or people (crowds, traffic). Rather than viewing the history of the city as being defined by steadily increasing governmental jurisdiction over its running--a linear narrative that implicitly informs much urban history--, Joyce sees successive phases of liberal rule as based on changing governmental conceptions of the city. Thus the 'moral city' of the mid-Victorian decades was marked by a didactic historicism, expressed most strikingly in the architecture of the city centre, the monumental warehouses, public buildings and town halls. Architectural historicism was at this point an important way in which cities expressed their modernity, but buildings acted also as a form of moral address, providing a constant reminder of the ethical dimensions of citizenship. From the late nineteenth century the moral city was overtaken by the notion of the 'social city', predicated on what was now seen as the inherent sociability of populations which could be promoted by effective planning of the urban environment. From Joyce's perspective, political will was not so much imposed on the physical infrastructure of the city as built into it, thus overriding conventional distinctions between government and people, state and civil society. Indeed, Joyce argues that liberal rule inhered in and worked through the very material fabric of the city. For not only were pavements, pipes and sewers designed so as to facilitate the freedom of the liberal subject by removing all impediments to movement, they were also developed in certain ways as self-regulating systems with their own in-built forms of agency. (30)

In its incarnation in the nineteenth-century city liberal governmentality was characterised by a number of other features. Governance of self and society involved 'publicity': liberal freedom depended "upon creating the conditions of a political legibility and visibility which would entail full knowledge of the subject's self, and just as much of the subject's society." (31) The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 required that local government should be opened up, made visible to itself and to the wider community. Likewise, the free library movement inaugurated in 1850 was intended to bring the light of knowledge to bear on urban society and its citizenry. The design of many public libraries, of which the British Museum Reading Room, built in 1847, was exemplary, itself contributed to the making of the liberal subject. As well as being free and public, the library offered private, silent reading overseen by a central supervisor; it promoted 'self-help and self-culture', knowledge of the world and of the local. Moreover, it was not sufficient that liberal rule should invoke freedom; it had to be seen to enact it. This required what Joyce terms the 'performance' of liberalism in a variety of ways. The objectivity of government was performed partly by the separation of politics from administration, the former defined by party conflict, the latter identified with neutrality and expertise. Liberal freedom was also performed by walking the city, as in the figure of the solitary wanderer. By means such as these, liberal rule was embedded in practices and technologies that provided it with great scope and flexibility. The continuing power and pervasiveness of liberalism, according to Joyce, lies not just in its connection to "our sense of being free," but also "to the way it is knitted into everyday life." (32)

Drawing extensively on Foucault, The Rule of Freedom provides a significant re-conceptualisation of nineteenth-century politics. Its focus is not parties, classes or ideologies but techniques of rule, the strategies and practices by which governance was enacted. The study therefore accords with Foucault's injunction to analyse the exercise of power instead of those deemed to hold it. By extension, power is seen as the product of abstract political rationalities rather than of individuals and groups with coherent interests. Political change involved shifts in governmental rationality and the techniques of rule, not new policies or altered class alignments. Furthermore, Joyce's study departs from the conventional geographical frame of political analysis, the nation-state or the specific locale used as a 'case-study'. While the focus in The Rule of Freedom is on nineteenth-century British cities, it encompasses also cities in Europe and beyond. In particular, liberal governance in Britain is seen as shaped by the encounter with colonial subjects, in Ireland and India, where modern techniques of rule were often first trialled. This emphasises, finally, how extensively politics and the political are expanded in Joyce's study. "Power and also rule itself," he argues, "are dispersed far beyond the areas and channels in which they are usually acknowledged." (33) Power did not stop at parliament or town hall in the nineteenth century; it haunted the material world, down to the water pipes and paving stones of the modern city.

Critical Reflections

It would be premature to describe these studies as marking a paradigm shift in the treatment of power in social history; plenty of historians continue to rely on the one-, two- and three-dimensional views of power which Lukes identified thirty years ago. Nevertheless, the influence of Foucault, long promised (or threatened) in history, only recently seems to have been registered in significant studies, such as those of Poovey and Joyce, beyond the specific fields of madness and crime. While some historians, like Dror Wahrman, have sought to extend Poovey's approach based on 'historical epistemology', others have turned to the 'late' Foucault, above all to his work on bio-politics and governmentality. The result has been in a steady stream of neo-Foucaultian studies, ranging across social and cultural history, cultural geography and historical sociology. (34) If the numbers are still small, they may be disproportionately influential, in the same way that Gramsci's ideas informed debates about class, power and the state well beyond the limited group of social historians who engaged directly and sustainedly with his theoretical work. Moreover, to those open to new ways of thinking about the history of power and governance there is much to welcome in this body of neo-Foucaultian work. It represents a productive attempt to go beyond the old duality between liberal pluralist and Marxist conceptions of power that for several decades tacitly structured debates in social history. Its emphasis on practice, the notion that power is always an exercise and not simply an attribute, is likewise crucial, for it highlights the need to show how power works, rather than assuming that it derives automatically from a political position or set of social relationships. Perhaps most important of all, it extends what I described at the outset as one of the pivotal insights of an earlier social history, the idea that power and power relations are located in the fabric of everyday life and are not confined to 'politics' in the narrow understanding of the term. The concept of governmentality invites us to explore how the conduct of the self might be linked to the management of the household and, indeed, the running of the state--what Foucault himself termed the "contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self." (35)

Nevertheless, I think the neo-Foucaultian approach confronts social historians with certain difficulties. I shall identify two such problems here, apparent to a lesser or greater extent in both of the historical studies I have discussed. The first is the 'top-down' tendency that characterises their analytic optic, despite the idea that power circulates rather than being imposed from above. To borrow one of Foucault's own analogies, the historian (and reader) partakes of the omniscient view of the 'overseer', rarely, if ever, of the subject position(s) of the viewed. Nor is there much concern to enable the subaltern voice--in whatever form--to speak. In a critique of Poovey's work, Regina Gagnier has observed that the 'rhetorical contest' between power/knowledge and its object, 'is entirely one-sided'. (36) Furthermore, despite their emphasis on the practical nature of power/knowledge, Poovey and Joyce present the latter in highly abstract form, as 'epistemology' or 'rationality'. In part this derives from the sources and methods used: the tendency to select canonical texts or sources produced by the powerful and to undertake interpretation by a process of 'close reading', especially noticeable in the case of Poovey. But as an anonymous critic of Making a Social Body noted, "Textualising non-literary events and interpreting them by the lights of even apparently non-formalist poststructuralist theories silently assimilates all kinds of events and texts to the ontology, language and professional work that were initially specific to the formalist, aesthetic and university-based treatment of literary texts." (37) Nor is this simply a function of method, as the author herself hints. It is a product also of what might be termed the 'abstractionist eye' of the modern university, the preference of the academic institution for rationality over messiness, which historians as much as literary critics tend to reproduce in their accounts of the past.

Secondly, there is the question of agency or, rather, its absence. It is possible to agree with Foucault that power is not a commodity and history not a matter of sequential cause and effect, but this leaves unanswered the question of how historical change occurs and who or what contributes to it. What defines and generates change in a technology, a rationality or an epistemology? Foucault himself preferred to substitute the concepts of 'problem' and 'necessity' for those of 'will' and 'interest' but this seems merely to defer rather than resolve the issue. (38) It also creates difficulties for historians such as Joyce who seek to integrate this understanding into their analyses. Thus in The Rule of Freedom the reader is confronted by statements such as "it was necessary to moralise" the city or the state "felt its way into the future." (39) Why it was necessary, what impelled the state and, indeed, what constituted 'reason' and 'rationality' are all questions, however, that remain unexplained. The rejection of social agency becomes particularly acute in areas such as political rights or public health where the intervention of institutions, groups or even individuals clearly had a significant part in changing the relevant discourse. (40) Furthermore, by placing the emphasis on historical phenomena as the effects of knowledge, neo-Foucaultian perspectives fail to explain certain persistent features of the organisation of power in modern societies. Why, for example, did all modern definitions of the social focus remorselessly on the bodies of workers and the poor while excluding the well to do? Why, if power is dispersed and multivalent, did it so often appear as unidirectional?

These last observations point to a way forward, one avenue, at least, that might profitably be explored by social historians. We need to focus on the body (or, rather, bodies) in power relations, not just on language, on 'incorporating' as well as 'inscribing' practices. (41) For all the emphasis on practice and the materiality of power, the body remains in certain respects oddly absent in Foucaultian historiography. It tends to figure only as an object of power (the abstract entity on which power works) or as a representation (the body as image). This reflects a more general tendency in hermeneutic analysis to 'read' the body in the manner of a text. One result is that the body as a physical entity and bodily practices as a distinctive domain of quotidian experience have become lost to historical view. As the anthropologist Paul Connerton puts it, under the impress of the linguistic turn "the life of human beings, as a historical life, is understood as a life reported and narrated, not life as physical existence." (42) Yet the body is central to an understanding of power relations; it functions as the subject and the object of power, as both representation and embodiment. The choreography of authority is customarily expressed through bodily performance and the metaphors associated with it are intended to remind us of this fact: 'high', 'low', 'upright', 'status', 'deference', 'subordination' and so on. It is precisely to dissolve the effects of such authority that political caricature deploys bodily distortion as part of its armoury. Indeed, one can follow Pierre Bourdieu in seeing social structure itself as incorporated, sedimented in the body at the level of habit and gesture: "the body is in the social world but the social world is in the body." (43) Much of social relations was carried out in this register in the public life of the Victorian industrial city: the 'ritual exchange' of gifts between employers and workers, described by Robert Gray as "performances of a highly structured kind" which followed a pre-given 'script'; and the giant civic processions in which the order of the marchers represented symbolically the urban social order itself. (44) Here sets of power relations, often the result of delicate negotiations, were incorporated in bodies and enacted through them.

Such an approach upholds a number of the insights drawn from the Foucaultian legacy: the emphasis on practice, the idea of power as potential rather than property, something to be exercised rather than held, and the rejection of dualistic divisions between individual and society, structure and agency. It is in line with the proposal of the labour historian Richard Biernacki who, against the tendency to see the cultural as the explanatory grounding for all historical events, argues for a more restricted understanding of culture as "the corporeal know-how of practice." (45) It encourages also an attention to the micro-physics of power--how power works in specific situations, is negotiated and performed. These points, in turn, suggest the possibility of discriminating between different types of power and its exercise, beyond the old Weberian framework of coercion, authority, manipulation and so on. By means of such an analysis one might envisage a typology of historical forms of power, distinguished from each other by their operations as well as their effects. Not least, an approach to power focused on the body responds to social history's own radical insistence on rooting its analysis in the material, the contingent, the ordinary--that is to say, in the dynamics of everyday life.

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ENDNOTES

1. Two key articles describing these shifts are Eric Hobsbawm, "From social history to the history of society," Daedalus (1971); Geoff Eley, "Is all the world a text? From social history to the history of society two decades later," in Terence McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, 1996). See also the articles in Journal of Social History, 31, 1 (2003), especially those by Hartmut Kaelble and Mark M. Smith.

2. Miles Taylor, "The beginnings of modern British social history?," History Workshop Journal, 43 (1977), 155-76.

3. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (Basingstoke, 1974), 22. A substantially revised second edition has been published by Palgrave (2005), including a new introduction by Lukes.

4. G.R. Elton, "What is political history?" in Juliet Gardiner, ed., What is History Today? (Basingstoke, 1988), 20-1.

5. Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1928).

6. Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Noteboooks (London, 1982). For a stimulating commentary on hegemony see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977).

7. Lukes, Power, 23.

8. For a useful overview see Harvey Kaye, "Political theory and history: Antonio Gramsci and the British Marxist historians," Italian Quarterly, 25 (1984).

9. Robert Gray, "Bourgeois hegemony in Victorian Britain," in Jon Bloomfield, ed., Class, Hegemony, Party (London, 1977).

10. For a useful introduction to this literature see Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London, 2000), especially the essays by Arnold and Sarkar. For an overview of the new post-Gramscian turn in Indian historiography see Prasannan Parthasarathi, "The state of Indian social history," Journal of Social History, 31, 1 (2003).

11. Michel Foucault, "Questions of method" in Graham Burchell et al., eds., The Foucault Effect (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), 79.

12. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Hemel Hempstead, 1980), 117.

13. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality" in Burchell, Foucault Effect, 102-103; Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (London, 1994), 174. On governmentality see also Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, 1999).

14. Colin Gordon, "Governmental rationality: an introduction," in Burchell, Foucault Effect, 1-51; Michel Foucault, Power (London, 2002), 201-222 and 298-325.

15. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 98.

16. Ibid., 51.

17. Tony Bennett, "The Foucault effect" in Bennett, Culture: A Reformer's Science (London, 1998), 69.

18. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 100.

19. Cited in Gordon, "Governmental rationality," ix.

20. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830-1864 (Chicago, 1995), 13.

21. Ibid, 7-8.

22. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1991).

23. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 151; Poovey, op.cit., 37-42, 455-72.

24. Poovey, op.cit., 24.

25. Poovey, op.cit., 43-52.

26. Poovey, op.cit., 24.

27. Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), 4.

28. Gordon, "Governmental authority," 19.

29. Joyce, op.cit., 24.

30. Ibid., 11-12.

31. Ibid., 100.

32. Ibid., 8, 261.

33. Ibid, 188.

34. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self (New Haven, 2004); Thomas Osborne, "Security and vitality: drains, liberalism and power in the nineteenth century," in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, eds., Foucault and Political Reason (London, 1996); Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge, 1999); Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Christopher Otter, "Making liberalism durable: vision and civility in the late Victorian city," Social History, 27, 1 (2002), 1-15.

35. Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the self" in L.H. Martin, H. Gutman and P.H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London, 1988), 19.

36. Regina Gagnier, "Methodology and the new historicism," Journal of Victorian Culture, 4, 1 (1999), 117.

37. Anon, "From new historicism to historical epistemology," Journal of Victorian Culture 4, 1 (1999), 137.

38. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 206.

39. Joyce, op.cit., 15, 23.

40. See for example Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick (Cambridge, 1998).

41. Paul Connerton explores this distinction at some length in How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1996), 72-104.

42. Ibid., 101.

43. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge, 2000), 152.

44. Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England 1830-1860 (Cambridge, 1996), 226-8; Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class (Manchester, 2000), 171-8. For a different, but highly productive, attention to embodied subjectivity in nineteenth-century urban culture, see Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge, 1998).

45. Richard Biernacki, "Method and metaphor after the new cultural history," in Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley, 1999), p. 77.

By Simon Gunn

Leeds Metropolitan University