Governing the Soul

Shaping of the Private Self

Nikolas Rose author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Free Association Books

Published:1st May '99

Should be back in stock very soon

Governing the Soul cover

This work is now widely recognised as one of the founding texts in a new approach to analyzing the links between political power, expertise and the self. This "governmentality" perspective has had important implications for a range of academic disciplines including criminology, political theory, sociology and psychology and has generated much theoretical innovation and empirical investigation. This second edition adds a new introduction setting out the methodological and conceptual bases of this approach and a new final chapter that considers some of the implications of recent developments in the government of subjectivity.

It's the mark of a good book that distance enhances value. This appraisal of the role which the human sciences have played in the production of selves at once governable and self-governing still bites. Rose shows how political technologies reappear as canons of personal ethics, and thus points to self transforming properties in our practices of understanding and intervention at the very junctures where we take "ourselves" most seriously. A brilliant intervention itself. It is great stuff. Professor Marilyn Strathern, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

ISBN: 9781853434440

Dimensions: 235mm x 146mm x 25mm

Weight: 610g

352 pages

2nd Revised edition