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Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government , Barry Andrew, Osborne Thomas and Rose Nikolas, eds., London: UCL Press, 1996. 278 pp.

What do most social scientists associate with the name Foucault? One could draw up a list which would probably include the body, sexuality, discipline, prisons, power, postmodernism and punishment, micro-physics and madness, and perhaps a strange "gallic" notion that "everything is discourse." For those late to Foucault and his followers, Foucault and Political Reason will point to a very different "Foucault." For those already familiar with Foucault, it will provide a very useful overview of the growing "governmentality" literature which takes "late Foucault" as its point of departure. However, it does not accomplish these things by providing a new "reading" of Foucault. Although his name appears in the title (perhaps a concession to the publisher), this is not another a book about Michel Foucault, philosopher, political theorist, historian, post-structuralist. Foucault and Political Reason is more about what you can do with Foucault. This edited collection uses Foucault to enhance the "thinkability" of our present. The dimension of our existence which the contributors are keen to make more "thinkable" is that of government. They do not mean government in its current, political-institutional sense, but something much broader and slightly more archaic. These are studies in governmentality, a neologism Foucault coined to express the idea of governmental rationality. They are analyses of "political reason itself, of the mentalities of politics that have shaped our present, the devices invented to give effect to rule, and the ways in which these have impacted upon those who have been the subjects of these practices of government" (introduction, p. 2). Each of the contributors addresses at least one of the following themes: What is political reason? How is there a hitherto neglected technological dimension of politics and government, and what are some of the diverse forms this has taken? How is the government, and ultimately the very constitution, of the self linked to these political rationalities and technologies? I shall discuss these points in turn. Many of the essays in the book are explorations of political reason, and liberal political rationality in particular. The essays by Graham Burchell, Nikolas Rose, Barry Hindess, Thomas Osborne and Alan Hunt all argue that liberalism