Was it enough merely to say "sorry" on the part of those who had the humility, courage and honesty to say "sorry"? And what of those who are perhaps too arrogant to utter this simple word?' 1 In his speech at the commemoration of the Rwandan genocide in April 2004, South African President Mbeki questions the relevance of offering an apology when such a heinous crime has happened. After himself apologizing for South Africa's passivity and highlighting the inaction of the international community during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, he continues to wonder if uttering this simple word is actually enough. In doing so, he seems to exemplify the 'paradoxical qualities' (Tavuchis, 1991: 5) that are often attributed to political apologies: they cannot undo or 'unstate' what has been done, but they are also often seen as extremely meaningful in healing processes, including those that take place at the national and international level.According to some scholars, we live in an ' age of apology' (Brooks, 1999;Gibney et al., 2008), a time in which countries are increasingly being called upon to take responsibility for past wrongdoings and to redress these wrongs by offering apologies. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, numerous apologies have been offered

This article asks what uniform practices in schools can tell us about how power functions through a comprehensive analysis of the uniform policies of all Scottish state secondary schools (n = 357). Against the backdrop of large-scale shifts from disciplinary societies to ones dominated by 'neoliberal governmentality' identified by Foucault and others, we investigate how these modes of power seem to be entangled in school uniform policies. The analysis reveals the specification of detailed uniform policies that both homogenise, divide and hierarchise the school body, suggesting that disciplinary techniques are alive and well. However, in the justifications that schools provide, we see uniform policies framed not as a tool to enforce discipline, but rather as a technique for pupils to fashion themselves into respectable and employable future adults. We suggest the rise of a 'neoliberal governmentality' has shaped how schools justify their practices of control more than it has shaped the practices themselves.

What are we to make of the fact that world leaders, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, have, within the last few decades, offered official apologies for a whole host of past injustices? Scholars have largely dealt with this phenomenon as a moral question, seeing in these expressions of contrition a radical disruption of contemporary neoliberal individualism, a promise of a more humane world. Focusing on Canadian apology politics, this essay instead proposes a nonideal approach to state apologies, sidestepping questions of what they ought to do and focusing instead on their actual functioning as political acts. Through a sociologically informed speech act theory and Foucault’s work on power, apology is conceptualized as a speech act with an essentially relational nature. The state, through apologizing, reaffirms the norms governing its relationship to its subjects at a moment when a past transgression threatens to destabilize this relation. From a Foucauldian point of view, the state’s power inheres in the very stability of the state–citizen relation, and we should therefore see apologies as defensive moves to protect state hegemony. In the context of Western liberal democracies, such as Canada, apologies embody, rather than challenge, the logic of neoliberal governmentality by suggesting that everything, including resentment against the state, can be managed within the current status quo. Nevertheless, total cynicism about apology politics is not warranted. In many indigenous apology campaigners’ demands for contrition we see another side of apologies: their potential to bring about change by enacting counterhegemonic relations to the state.

The historiography of Michel Foucault has recently become an embattled area of scholarly interest; a scene for fierce debates about the past and future of progressive politics and academic theory. 1 Against this backdrop, Elden's latest book on the early Foucault feels like a breath of fresh air-somewhat dusty, antiquarian air, perhaps, but refreshing nevertheless. The Early Foucault is the latest instalment in Elden's ambitious series of books which aims to provide a detailed intellectual history of the philosopher's entire career. The present volume is the third to appear-after Foucault's Last Decade (2016) and Foucault: The Birth of Power (2017)-but chronologically the first, covering Foucault's intellectual development from his student days to the publication of History of Madness (a fourth and final volume, The Archaeology of Foucault is in the making). As Elden puts it, '[w]hile many studies of Foucault begin with the first major book, History of Madness, in 1961, that is where this book ends' (p. 5).The Early Foucault is, first and foremost, a treasure trove of information for any scholar interested in the intellectual history of Michel Foucault. It follows Elden's previous two volumes in providing impressively detailed analysis of the gradual changes in Foucault's scholarly interests and the direction of his work. While the book is mainly structured as a history of History of Madness, the many 'other paths explored but not ultimately taken' also form a major theme of the book (6). The Early Foucault thus very much continues the approach of Foucault's Last Decade and The Birth of Power in its impressive attention to detail, in the enormous range of sources, and in highlighting subtle continuities where, superficially, there appear to be ruptures in Foucault's intellectual development. Nevertheless, the fact that this period of Foucault's life has so far been much less explored than his later developments means that Elden relies more on archival sources compared to the previous volumes, and rather than intervening in existing debates about the philosopher's intellectual trajectory, he provides large amounts of new information about periods of Foucault's life that were so far barely discussed. This means that The Early Foucault

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