Liberal conduct

Abstract

Liberty is a practice. So there may, in fact, always be a certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even to break them, but none of these projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it will be established by the project itself. (Michel Foucault/Space, Knowledge, Power' [an interview], 1982)The Commonwealth of learning here is taking a complete holiday; we have all become politicians. (John Locke to P. van Limborch, 7 August 1689) I Recently, liberal theory has been confronting itself in a historical guise. One result has been an interpretation that says it is simply one tradition among others and thus embodies certain contingent rather than universal features. More interestingly, another interpretation claims that even if this is the case, it is a 'contingent' tradition that embodies universal claims; it might just be a tradition but it is one that includes, for example, the Declaration of the Universal Rights of Man.' Whatever the case, there is a need to come up with the goods, so to speak, and to show as precisely and carefully as possible the historical contours of this tradition. There are (at least) two general reasons for doing so. One is to identify a cluster of practices or constraints working on or through an ideology, and which seem to remain opaque to its objects (and sometimes its practitioners); hence the imperative to 'excavate' or 'restore'. The second reason is that in doing so we loosen the grip of these conceptions and practices by seeing them as recent or contingent, and thus learn to distinguish between 'the necessary' and possibly modifiable. The point, as Foucault put it, is to lay the depth out in front; 'depth is

Psychological knowledge for the governance of the South

“…This is a central preoccupation that is linked to the contemporary liberal view of making cities competitive for the globalised market, where the fast and reliable transportation of the labour force is one of the indicators of a well‐governed city. Such competitiveness corresponds to the liberal style of thinking and the concern with a specific way of government (Ivison, 1993). Cities like Bogotá have become such an important “node” that they are taking over the central role of nation states in regulating international competence (Lungo, 2005; Osborne and Rose, 1998; Sassen, 2003).…”

Introduction

“…At the heart of the liberal ideal lay the self-governing subject, a familiar figure from humanist literature on citizenship, in whom the civic and the civil were bound together. Burchell (1995) and Ivison (1993) have traced the characteristics and capacities required of liberal citizens back to the classical, civic tradition closely associated with pre-liberal political thought and the governmental tradition of 'police'. Neo-stoic notions of self-government concerned with emancipation from the passions remained as central to the liberal citizen as to his forebears.…”

Making Sense of Global Civil Society

“…The creation of civil society as an autonomous sphere was one of the major achievements of the liberal art of government. Rather than being a natural domain for spontaneous interaction and exchange between free agents -as classical liberal rhetoric would have it -civil society is the outcome of a peculiar technique of government that proceeds by autonomization of individual subjects as well as of society as a whole (Ivison, 1993). The idea of civil society hence presupposes 'a specification of the objects of government in such a way that the regulations they need are, in a sense, selfindicated and limited to the end of securing the conditions for an optimal, but natural and self-regulating functioning' (Burchell, 1991: 127).…”