‘Despotism’ and ethical liberal governance

Abstract

Recent Foucaulation theorizations of liberal practies of self, while innovatove iv avoiding ontological presuppostions either about individuals or about collectivities, run the danger of ontologizing liberal ethical governance itself, of envisaging it as internally consistent and self-identical. This article seeks to demonstrate that liberal ethical governance can never be identical to itself through an analysis of the persistent coexistance of liberal modes of moral/ethical governance. Such coexistence occurs at two levels: externally, various types of subjects and various sapects of human experience continues to governed through practices J. S. Mill would have called ‘despotic’; internally, the paradigmatic liberal subjects often his ‘passions’ through non-liberal means even as both he and his authorities seek to maximize self-rule and other liberal rationalities. It is argued that the coexistence of contradictory regimes of governance: the naturalization of distinct ‘kinds’ or types of humans and the geographicalization of distiinct spaces supposedly requiring distinct modes of governance.