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Government, authority and expertise in advanced

liberalism
a
Nikolas Rose
a
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths' College, University of London, London, SE14 6NW
Published online: 28 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Nikolas Rose (1993): Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism, Economy and
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 Government, authority and
expertise in advanced
liberalism
Nikolas Rose

Abstract

This paper outlines Foucault's concept of governmentality and argues for its
contemporary significance. It focuses upon the role that liberal modes of
government accord to the exercise of authority over individual and collective
conduct by expertise. The paper argues that nineteenth-century liberalism as a
mode of rule produced a series of problems about the governability of individuals,
families and markets and populations. Expertise provided a formula for resolving
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these problems instantiated in a range of complex and heterogenous 'machines' for

the government of individual and collective conduct. Over the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries one sees the rise of a new formula for the exercise of rule,
which one can call 'the welfare state' - within which expertise becomes linked to the
formal political apparatus in new ways. The strategies of rule generated under this
formula of'the welfare state' have changed fundamentally over the last fifty years. A
new formula of rule is taking shape, one that we can perhaps best term 'advanced
liberal'. The analpcal machinery of most conventional political sociology - and
most radical analyses that take their cue from Marxism - have not proved successful
in characterizing these forms of rule nor evaluating their consequences. T h e forms
of power that subject us, the systems of rule that administer us, the types of
authority that master us, do not find their principle of coherence in a State, nor do
they answer to a logic of oppression or domination. Analyses of governmentality can
enable us to explore these relations between mentalities of rule, forms of truth
telling, and procedures of expertise.

I. Four propositions on liberal rule

W h a t is liberalism if we consider it neither as a political philosophy n o r as a

type of society b u t as aformula of rule? Perhaps one might gain some insights
into this problem by examining the experience of those apparently 'illiberal'
nations of Eastern Europe and t h e Soviet Union currently seeking to
transform themselves into liberal democracies. A casual glance is enough to

Economy and Society Volume 22 Number 3 August 1993

0Routledge 1993 0308-5 147/93/2203-0283 $3.00/1
 284 Nikolas Rose

suggest that, as the apparatus of the party and the plan is dismantled, other
devices for the exercise of authority are born, other modes of guidance which
seek to inform and shape decisions of the newly freed subjects, whether these
be in industry, in management, in education, in 'private life' or in politics itself.
One small example, perhaps, is provided by the account given by a Czech
professor of psychology, at a recent international conference, of the changes
that the 'Velvet Revolution' had produced for his own profession. There were
six new journals of psychology including those with a focus on marital
problems, psychotherapy, family therapy and counselling. Six new pro-
fessional associations of psychologists had been formed - of clinical
psychologists, social psychologists, industrial and organizational psycholo-
gists, school counsellors and psychotherapists. Institutes had been established
for marital guidance, counselling, educational psychology and transport
psychology. This proliferation of expert knowledge of human conduct is not
confined to psychology or Czechoslovakia. Prior to the breakup of the Soviet
Union, 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' were accompanied by the burgeoning of
social scientific research on the population - public opinion polling, market
research, a multitude of demographic enquiries. In Hungary and Poland, the
transition to a 'market economy' has brought with it the importation from the
West of a host of organizational consultants, experts on marketing and
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consumer research. This list could be prolonged.

These little phenomena, multiplied though they may be at a molecular level,
might seem of marginal interest - merely by-products of the massive shifts in
political apparatus and economic institutions that such societies are under-
going, paling into insignificance in comparison with the spectacular eruptions
of conflicts staged in nationalist terms. Yet one is struck, also, by the active
promotion, by the European Community and numerous western 'develop-
ment agencies', of these new 'expert systems' - in applied micro- and
macro-economics, accounting, auditing, management and business as well as
in the management of human misery. And thus it might be worth examining
whether this proliferation of practical knowledge of individual and social
conduct in the former centrally planned party states can direct our attention to
the nature of 'power' in contemporary liberal societies. I suggest it highlights
something that is fundamental to theforms of authority that inhabit them and
the deuices of rule that constitute them. Let me state this, first of all, in the form
of some schematic propositions.
(1) Nineteenth-century liberalism, if it is considered as a rationality of rule
and not simply as a set of philosophical and normative reflections upon rule,
produced a series of problems about the governability of individuals, families
and markets and populations. Expertise in the conduct of conduct - authority
arising out of a claim to a true and positive knowledge of humans, to neutrality
and to efficacy - came to provide a number of solutions which were of
considerable importance in rendering liberalism operable. Liberal rule thus
produces a new modality of authority, and a new authority for authority.
(2) Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this liberal
 Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism 285

formula of government was perceived from a variety of perspectives as failing

to produce the necessary economic, social and moral consequences. One sees
the rise of a new formula for the exercise of rule, which one can call 'the state
of welfare'. The authority of expertise becomes inextricably linked to the
formal political apparatus of rule, in attempts to tame and govern the
undesirable consequences of industrial life, wage labour and urban existence.
Expert authority, bound into complex devices of rule, is to re-establish
solidarity in a social form. This was not so much a process in which a central
state extended its tentacles throughout society, but the invention of various
'rules for rule' which sought to transform the state into a centre that could
programme - shape, guide, channel, direct, control - events and persons
distant from it. Persons and activities were to be governed through society, that
is to say, through acting upon them in relation to a social norm, and
constituting their experiences and evaluations in a social form. Unlike
socialism, however, these formulae for a state of welfare sought to maintain a
certain distance between the knowledges and allegiances of experts and the
calculations of politicians. The truth claims of expertise were highly
significant here: through the powers of truth, distant events and persons could
be governed 'at arms length': political rule would not itself set out the norms of
individual conduct, but would install and empower a variety of 'professionals'
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who would, investing them with authority to act as experts in the devices of
social rule.
(3) The strategies of rule generated under this formula of 'the state of
welfare' have changed fundamentally over the last fifty years. These changes
have arisen, on the one hand, through a series of critiques that have
problematized welfare from the point of view of its alleged failings. On the
other hand, they have been made possible through a range of new devices for
governing conduct that have their roots, in part at least, in the 'success' of
welfare. A new formula of rule is taking shape, one that we can perhaps best
term 'advanced liberal'. Advanced liberal rule depends upon expertise in a
different way, and articulates experts differently into the apparatus of rule. It
does not seek to govern through 'society', but through the regulated choices of
individual citizens. And it seeks to detach the substantive authority of
expertise from the apparatuses of political rule, relocating experts within a
market governed by the rationalities of competition, accountability and
consunler demand.
(4) These three propositions should not be understood as a 'periodization'.
Rather, they are an inevitably schematic way of identifying a number of
distinct - if not sharply delineated or mutually exclusive - problematizations
of rule: ways of asking what should be ruled, by whom and through what
procedures. It is these problematizations that accord the activity of politics its
intelligibility and possibility at different times; it is these problematizations
that shape what are to be counted as problems, what as failures and what as
solutions. What we inhabit as the present is a 'virtual' space composed where
the residues of past rationalities intersect with the phantasms that prefigure
 286 Nikolas Rose

the future. The political imagination of most conventional political sociology -

and that of most radical analyses that take their cue from Marxism - is
discomforted by these characteristics of rule, and powerless to evaluate their
consequences. The oppositions that haunt them and animate them -
state/market, dominatiodfreedom, publidprivate, compulsory/voluntary -
are themselves the ghosts of liberal political philosophy. They are, as it were,
founding rhetorical elements within liberal programmes and strategies of rule;
no wonder, then, that they have so much difficulty in analysing their own
conditions of possibility.
Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality has a significance for us today
because it suggests alternative ways of thinking the activity of politics. The
forms ofpower that subject us, the systems of rule that administer us, the types
of authority that master us - do not find their principle of coherence in a State
nor do they answer to a logic of oppression or domination or the other
constitutive oppositions of liberal political philosophy - least of all, its ways of
dividing the political from the non-political. The force field with which we are
confronted in our present is made up of a multiplicity of interlocking
apparatuses for the programming of this or that dimension of life, apparatuses
that cannot be understood according to a polarization of public and private or
state and civil society. In the name of public and private security, life has been
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accorded a 'social' dimension as a result of the formation of a complex and

hybrid array of devices for the management of insecurity and risk comprised
by practices of social work and welfare, mechanisms of social and private
insurance, and a range of other social technologies. In the name of national
and individual prosperity, an 'economic machine' has taken shape, which may
have as its object an economy made up of enterprises competing in a market,
but traces out and structures that domain through devising and implanting
modes of economic calculation, through fiscal regimes,. through promoting
changes in economic organization, and through techniques of financial
regulation and accounting. In the name of public citizenship and private
welfare, the family has been configured as a matrix for organizing domestic,
conjugal and child rearing arrangements and instrumentalizing wage labour
and consumption. In the name of social and personal well-being, a complex
apparatus of health and therapeutics has been assembled, concerned with the
management of the individual and social body as a vital national resource, and
the management of 'problems of living', made up of techniques of advice and
guidance, medics, clinics, guides and counsellors.
The strategies of regulation that have made up our modern experience of
'power' formulate complex dependencies between the forces and institutions
deemed 'political' and instances, sites and apparatuses which shape and
manage individual and collective conduct in relation to norms and objectives,
but yet are constituted as 'non-political'. They do not have law and
constitutionality as their governing principle, but entail diverse ways in which
legal mechanisms, agents, codes and sanctions are called upon and activated
in different contexts. The lines between public and private, compulsory and
 Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism 287

voluntary, law and norm operate as internal elements within each of these
complexes, as each links the regulation of public conduct with the subjective
emotional and intellectual capacities and techniques of individuals, and the
ethical regimes through which they govern their lives. They invent complex
'machines' for government, each of which is itself an assemblage of diverse
components, persons, forms of knowledge, technical procedures and modes
of judgment and sanction. Each such 'dispositif is a machine only in the sense
in which Foucault compared the French legal system to one of those machines
constructed by Tinguely - more Heath Robinson than Audi, full of parts that
come from elsewhere, strange couplings, chance relations, cogs and levers
that don't work - and yet which 'work' in the sense that they produce effects
that have meaning and consequences for us (cited in Gordon 1980). Such
machines do not extend rule from a central site ofpower across the inhabitants
of a national territory. Rather, relations are established between various
centres of calculation and diverse projects of rule -more or less 'rationalized'
as the case may be - such that events within the micro-spaces of bedroom,
factory floor, schoolroom, medical consulting room might be aligned with
aims, goals, objectives and principles established in political discourse or
political programmes.
Such forms of rule clearly invent new modalities of authority, new ways in
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which authority is itself authorized through a certain relation with truth and
subjectivity. This is not simply a question of the proliferation of new objects of
authority - sex, incest, children, crime. It is also a matter of a certain ethos of
authority- its distinctive character, spirit, and manner of reflecting upon itself
and its practice. And it is a matter of the techne of authority - its particular arts,
skills and modes ofmaking itself technical. Within these new relations, there is
no simple distinction between those who have power and those who are
subject to it: a diversity of types of authority have been invented, justified in
different ways, and with different relations to their subjects. And, ofcourse, so
many of those who are subjects of authority in one field play a part in its
exercise in another.

TI. Government
Colin Gordon has pointed out that Foucault utilized the concept of
government in two senses (Gordon 1991). First, to draw attention to a
dimension of our experience - not itself specifically modern - constituted by
what one might fancifully term 'the will to govern'. The notion of government,
here, draws our attention to the variety of ways of reflecting and acting which
aimed to shape, guide, manage or regulate the conduct of persons - not only
other persons but also oneself- in the light of certain principles or goals. What
made these forms of reflection governmental, rather than theoretical, philo-
sophical or moral, is their wish to make themselves practical, to connect
themselves up with various procedures and apparatuses which would seek to
 288 Nikolas Rose

give them effect - whether these be the practice of diary writing in order to
govern conscience, practices of child rearing in order to govern children,
practices of security and subsistence in order to govern pauperism, or
techniques of financial inscription and calculation in order to govern
economic activity. No doubt throughout the ages humans have reflected upon
the conduct of themselves and others, but such thought becomes governmen-
tal to the extent that it seeks to render itself technical, to insert itself into the
world by 'realizing' itself as apractice.
This perspective on government bringsinto focus a plethora of goals,
programmes, strategies and techniques which have often been rendered
invisible, seen as trivial, dismissed as ideological or assimilated to a matter of
domination. It opens up for investigation the complexity and diversity of the
relations between authorities and subjects, and the ways in which such
practices have not suppressed freedom but, on the contrary, sought to 'make
up' subjects capable of exercising a regulated freedom and caring for
themselves as free subjects.
Foucault uses the term government in a second, and more circumscribed
manner, one that helps us to repose our analyses of the problematics of rule as
they have taken shape in the West over the last three centuries. By
problematics of rule, I mean the ways in which rulers, of all stripes and hues,
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have posed themselves the question of the reasons, justifications, means and
ends of rule, and the problems, goals or ambitions that should animate it. Here
the notion of government addresses itself specifically to the domain of the
political, not as a domain of State or a set of institutions and actors but as a
certain mentality of rule. Governmentality is a way of problematizing life and
seeking to act upon it. It both extends the concerns of rule to the ordering of
the multitudinous affairs of a territory and its population in order to ensure its
well being, and simultaneously establishes divisions between the proper
spheres of action of different types of authority.
Studies of government eschew the sociological realism characteristic of
recent historical sociologies (e.g. Mann 1986, 1988; Hall 1985). They do not
seek to characterize the actual configurations of persons, organizations and
events at particular historical periods and to classify the networks of power
that obtain between them, identify determinants and explain transformations.
They are not concerned to describe or explain 'how it really was'; their
concern is with the ways in which, over the past two hundred years, authorities
have repeatedly asked themselves questions which follow this sociological
form: what is the condition of the people, the economy, the family; what
accounts for the problems and what would lead to their improvement; what
effects have our strategies produced in the past; what can and should be done,
and by whom, in order to make things better? And they are nominalistic about
the state: it has no essential necessity or functionality derived from a particular
mode of economic production, a certain level of social complexity or a
particular system of domination (Miller and Rose 1990; Rose and Miller
1992). The state can be seen as a way of dividing a 'political' sphere, with its
 Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism 289

particular characteristics of rule, from other 'non-political spheres' to which it

must be related. The vocabulary of the state thus functions as an historically
variable linguistic device for conceptualizing and articulating rule - or, as in
the present demands to 'roll back the State', as a means of contesting the
nature and limits of political power. Hence political discourse is more than
ideology or rhetoric. It should be seen, rather, as a kind of intellectual
machinery or apparatus for rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it is
amenable to political deliberations. Language, from the perspective of
governmentality, is not a matter of meanings, but of the ways in which the
world is made intelligible and practicable, and domains are constituted such as
'the market', or 'the family' which are amenable to interventions by adminis-
trators, politicians, authorities and experts - as well as by the inhabitants of
those d~mainsthemselves - factory managers, parents and the like.
Governmentality, for Foucault, is specified in opposition to a notion of
police (Foucault 1989,1991; cf. Pasquino 1991). Eighteenth-century Europe
attempts to codify and exercise rule in terms of police dreamed of a time in
which a territory and its inhabitants would be transparent to knowledge - all
was to be known, noted, enumerated and documented. At the same time, the
conduct of persons in all domains of life was to be specified and scrutinized in
minute particulars, through detailed regulations of habitation, dress, manners
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and the like - warding off disorder through a fixed ordering of persons and
activities (cf. Oestreich 1982). Liberalism, as a mentality of rule, abandons
this megalomaniacal and obsessive fantasy of a totally administered society.
Government now confronts itself with realities - market, civil society, citizens
- that have their own internal logics and densities, their own intrinsic
mechanisms of self-regulation. As Graham Burchell has pointed out,
liberalism thus repudiates raison d'itat as a rationality of rule in which a
sovereign exercises his totalizing will across a national space (Burchell 1991).
Rulers are confronted, on the one hand, with subjects equipped with rights
and interests that must not be interdicted by politics. On the other hand, rulers
are faced with a realm of processes that they cannot govern by the exercise of
sovereign will because they lack the requisite knowledge and capacities. The
objects, instruments and tasks of rule must be reformulated with reference to
these domains of market, civil society and citizenship, with the aim of ensuring
that they function to the benefit of the state as a whole.
The two, apparently illiberal, poles of 'power over life' that Foucault
identifies - the disciplines of the body and the biopolitics of the population -
thus, surprisingly, find their place within liberal mentalities of rule, as rule
connects itself up with ways of rendering intelligible and practicable these vital
conditions for the production and government of a liberal polity (Foucault
1977, 1979). Those mechanisms and devices operating according to a
disciplinarylogic, from the school to the prison, seek to produce the subjective
conditions, the forms of self-mastery, self-regulation and self-control,
necessary to govern a nation now made up of free citizens. From henceforth,
citizenship will take an inescapably 'social' and 'civilized' form. At the same
 290 Nikolas Rose

time, bio-political strategies - statistical enquiries, censuses, programmes for

enhancement or curtailment of rates of reproduction or the minimization of
illness and the promotion of health - seek to render intelligible the domains
whose laws liberal government must know and respect: legitimate government
will not be arbitrary government, but will be based upon intelligence
concerning those whose well-being it is mandated to enhance (Foucault
1980b).
Analyses of government in this second sense examine the diverse ways in
which, from the moment of liberalism onwards, political and other authorities
have posed themselves the questions of how to govern, what to govern and
who should govern, have sought to establish the legitimacy of particular
systems and techniques of government, have sought to distinguish properly
political arts of government from those which are not political but find their
rationale and legitimacy elsewhere. They seek to describe the ways in which
mentalities of rule have invented, deployed, sought to utilize or become
dependent upon these various technologies which promise to connect up
authorities with those over whom their authority is to be exercised. From this
moment onwards, rule must be exercised in the light of a knowledge of that
which is to be ruled - a child, a family, an economy, a community - a
knowledge both of its general laws of functioning (supply and demand, social
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solidarity), of its particular state at any one time (rate of productivity, rate of
suicide), and of the ways in which it can be shaped and guided in order to
produce desirable objectives whilst at the same time respecting its autonomy.

111. Liberalism
The experience of liberalism has been fundamental in shaping the govern-
mental rationalities of the West (cf, for what follows, Rose and Miller 1992).
Liberalism, as a rationality of rule, sought to limit the scope of political
authority, and to exercise vigilance over its exercise (cf. Gordon 1991;
Burchell 1991). Yet simultaneously government acquired the obligation to
foster the self-organizing capacities of markets, citizens and civil society, now
seen as natural spheres, with their own characteristics, upon whose well-being
good government would demand. Political rule was given the task of shaping
and nurturing those domains that were to provide its counterweight and limit.
Liberal limits on power, and liberal doctrines of the freedom of subjects under
the law were thus accompanied by strategies that sought to shape these
domains of the market, the public sphere and the liberty of the individual in
desired directions, without destroying their existence and autonomy. We can
draw out five significant features of liberalism from the perspective of
government.
(1) Liberalism inaugurates a new relation between government and knowledge.
Whilst all formulae of government are dependent upon a knowledge of that
which is to be governed, and indeed themselves constitute a certain form of
knowledge of the arts of government, liberalism ties government to the
 Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism 291

positive knowledges of human conduct - economic conduct, familial conduct,

criminal conduct - developed within the social and human sciences. The
activity of government becomes connected up to all manner of theories
(philosophies of progress, conceptualizations of epidemic disease), to dia-
grams (sanitary reform, child guidance), to techniques (double entry book
keeping, compulsory medical inspection of schoolchildren), knowledgeable
persons (architects, accountants, social workers). Knowledge here is an
apparatus for the production, circulation, accumulation, authorization and
realization of truth. And truth is a technical matter - it is the 'know how' that
promises to make government possible.
(2) Liberalism depends upon a novel specification of the subjects of rule as active in
their own government. Whilst all mentalities of rule embody a conception of the
subjects over whom rule is to be exercised, liberalism invests great hopes in
these subjects. It both depends upon the existence of free individuals and
seeks to shape and regulate that freedom in a social form, simultaneously
specifying the subjects of rule in terms of certain norms of civilization, and
effecting a division between the civilized member of society and those lacking
the capacities to exercise their citizenship. It thus becomes dependent upon
devices (schooling, the domesticated family, the lunatic asylum, the reforma-
tory prison) that promise to create individuals who do not need to be governed
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by others, but will govern themselves, master themselves, care for themselves.
From this time forth, liberal rationalities of government will dream that the
national objective of the good citizen will fuse with the personal objective for
the good life.
(3) Liberalgovernment is inherently bound to the authority of expertise. Liberal
arts of rule, from the middle of the nineteenth century, sought to modulate
events, decisions and actions in the economy, the family, the private firm, and
the conduct of the individual person. The problem was how political
aspirations could instrumentalize expert capacities (and vice versa) without
compromising their independence, their truth values, or the autonomy of the
domains over which their authority was to run. As Foucault himself suggests,
these modes of intervention did not answer to a single logic or form part of a
coherent programme of 'State intervention' (Foucault 1980a). Rather, largely
through the proselytizing of independent reformers, a number of frictions and
disturbances - epidemics and disease, theft and criminality, pauperism and
indigence, insanity and imbecility, the breakdown of marital relations -were
recoded as 'social' problems, events which had consequences for national
well-being and thus called for authoritative attention. The relations that were
brought into being between political authorities, legal measures and indepen-
dent authorities differed according to whether one was seeking to regulate
economic exchanges through contract, to mitigate the effects of factory labour
upon health, to reduce the social dangers of epidemics through sanitary
reform, to moralize the children of the labouring classes through industrial
schools and so forth. In each case, experts, in demanding that economic,
familial and social arrangements are governed according to their own
 292 Nikolas Rose

programmes, attempt to mobilize political resources such as legislation,

funding, or organizational capacity for their own ends. Political forces seek to
utilize and instrumentalize forms of authority other than those of 'the State' in
order to govern - spatially and constitutionally - 'at a distance'. They act to
accord authority to expert authorities whilst simultaneously seeking to secure
that autonomy through various forms of licensure, through professionaliz-
ation and through bureaucratization. From this time forth, the domain of
liberal politics will be distinguished from other spheres of authoritative rule,
yet inextricably bound to the authority of expertise.
(5) Liberalism inaugurates a continual questioning of the activity of rule itself:
Analyses of our post-modem condition have stressed the 'reflexivity' that they
consider to be characteristic of our age (Giddens 1990). Analyses of
governmentality do indeed concern themselves with a certain 'reflexivity' that
appears to characterize the problematics of rule in our present. This is not
indicative of some terminal stage of modernity; on the contrary, it is a type of
analysis that emerges in nineteenth-century liberal political rationalities.
Liberalism confronts itselfwith the question 'why rule?' - a question that leads
to the demand that a constant critical scrutiny be exercised over the activities
of those who rule -by others and by authorities themselves. For if the objects
of rule are governed by their own laws, 'the laws of the natural', under what
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conditions can one legitimately subject them to 'the laws of the political'?
Further, liberalism confronts itself with the question 'who can rule?' Under
what conditions is it possible for one to exercise authority over another, what
founds the legitimacy of authority. This question must be answered, not
transcendentally or in relation to the charismatic persona of the leader, but
through various technical means - ofwhich democracy and expertise prove to
be two rather durable solutions. Liberalism perplexes itself about rule; as
Foucault suggests, it should be seen less of a formula of rule as a constant
suspicion of rule (Foucault 1989). This leads to the recurrent dilemma of
liberal government: the fear of not governing enough versus the fear of
governing too much. Liberalism inaugurates a kind of perpetual dissatisfac-
tion with government, a perpetual questioning of whether the desired effects
are being produced, of the mistakes of thought or policy that hamper the
efficacy of government, the imperative not necessarily to govern more but to
govern better.

lV. Governing the state of welfare

The real history of liberalism, over the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, is bound up with a series of transformations in the problematics of
rule. What Foucault refers to as the governmentalization of the state is here
linked to the emergence of a problem in which the governabilityof democracy
- to use Jaques Donzelot's terms - seems to raise a number of difficulties to
which the 'socialization of society' seemed to be the solution (Donzelot 1991;
 Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism 293

see also Ewald 1991). From a variety of perspectives it was argued that the
projects of nineteenth-century liberalism had failed, and were powerless in
the face of the forces of social fragmentation and individualization of modern
society, evidenced by rates of suicide, crime and social disaffection. Further,
economic affairs had profound social consequences which had not been
alleviated by the vestigial constraint of factory legislation and the like - they
damaged health, produced danger through the irregularity of employment
and encouraged the growth of militant labour. 'The welfare state' was one
formula for recoding, along a number of different dimensions, the relations
between the political field and the management of economic and social affairs,
in which the authority of truth, and of experts as those who can speak and
enact truth, was to be accorded a new role. The state was to become the
guarantor of both the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the
capitalist enterprise. At the same time, the state was to produce a set of
technical devices that would 're-invent community', socializing both individ-
ual citizenship and economic life in the name of collective security.
Social insurance and social work can exemplifj two axes of this new formula
of government - one inclusive and solidaristic, one individualizing and
responsibilizing. Social insurance is an inclusive technology of government
(O'Malley 1992; Rose 1993). It incarnates social solidarity, collectivizing the
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management of the individual and collective dangers posed by the economic

riskiness of a capricious system ofwage labour, and the corporeal riskiness of a
body subject to sickness and injury, under the stewardship of a 'social' state.
And it enjoins solidarity in that the security of the individual across the
vicissitudes of a life history is guaranteed by a mechanism which personifies
what citizens share by virtue of their common sociality. Social insurance thus
establishes new connections and associations between 'public' norms and
procedures and the fate of individuals in their 'private' economic and personal
conduct. It was only one of an assortment of ways in which, at the start of the
twentieth century, the 'privacy' of the private spheres of family and factory was
attenuated. Together with other regulatory devices such as health and safety
legislation and laws on child care, the autonomy of both economic and familial
spaces was weakened, and new vectors of responsibility and obligation took
shape between state and parent, child, or employee.
Social work, correlatively, operates within a strategy in which community is
to be secured by enjoining the responsibilities of citizenship upon incapable or
aberrant members of society (Donzelot 1979; Rose 1985; Parton 1991). It
acts, not on a community of citizens as a whole, but on specific problematic
cases, radiating out to them from locales of individualized diagnosis of
particular conducts judged as pathological in relation to social norms. The
juvenile court, the school, the child guidance clinic operate as centres of
adjudication and co-ordination of these strategies, targeted not so much at the
isolated individual citizen, but at individuals associated within the matrix of
the family. The family, then, is to be instrumentalized as asocial machine-both
made social and utilised to create sociality - implanting the techniques of
 294 Nikolas Rose

responsible citizenship under the tutelage of experts and in relation to a variety

of sanctions and rewards.
Each of these modes of social government transform the relations between
rule, truth and expertise - each locates expertise within different relations of
authority and subjectivity. Each, in a different way, extends the boundaries of
the sphere of politics through linking the judgements and deliberations of
experts as to rates of benefit or patterns of child care into the machinery of the
state. Yet simultaneously each, to a certain extent, depoliticizes and
technicizes a whole swathe of questions by promising that this machinery will
operate according to a logic in which technical calculations - as to the best way
to economic growth, industrial organization, social harmony and individual
well-being - will overrule a logic of contestation between opposing interests.

V. Advanced liberalism

Foucault remarks that neo-liberalism, as it was developed in Germany in the

post-war period and in the Anglo-Saxon world, is more innovative than its
critics have often recognized (see the discussion of Foucault's lectures on
neo-liberalism in Gordon 1991). The importance of neo-liberalism does not,
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however, lie principally in its status as political philosophy. Rather, it lies in its
capacity to associate itself with certain key elements of an alternative formula
of rule, a set of strategies for governing in an 'advanced liberal' way.
Neo-liberalism was potent because it did not merely articulate a range of
familiar criticisms of welfare - its cost, its bureaucracy, its granting of
discretionary authority to unaccountable professionals and administrators, its
paternalism, its inequity, its crushing of autonomy - but managed to turn these
criticisms governmental - that is to say, to render them technical. Nowhere is
this more so than in relation to expertise, and in reposing the question of the
government of expertise in an 'advanced liberal' form.
Critical political analyses of expertise from civil libertarians sought to
surround experts with a clumsy paraphernalia of legal restraints, tribunals and
rights (Reich 1964; Adler and Asquith 1981). Those from the left, when they
were not satisfied with the denunciatory modes embodied in the distinctions
between true and ideological knowledges, or between the use and abuse of
knowledge, suggested two other formulae. On the one hand, there was that of
'away with all expertshetter red than expert' as in the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, anti-psychiatry or certain forms of feminism. On the other, there
was the formula of 'the generalization of competencies' as in certain
movements for workers' co-operatives to replace hierarchically owned and
managed workplaces. But neo-liberalism managed to reactivate the sceptical
vigilance of classical liberalism and link it up with a series of techniques - none
of them in itself particularly new or remarkable - which could render them
operable - techniques such as monetarization, marketization, enhancement of
the powers of the consumer, financial accountability and audit. It is this
 Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism 295

capacity to create operable technical forms for exercising perpetual scrutiny

over the authority of authority that made the formulae invented by neo-
liberalism so versatile for all those other strategies and programmes that
sought to govern in an advanced liberal way.
What is it 'to govern in an advanced liberal way'? Whilst the breathless
celebrations or condemnations of Thatcherism have proved to be overblown,
it is none the less possible, I suggest, to identify a more modest yet more
durable transformation in rationalities and technologies of government (cf.
Bulpitt 1986; Daintith 1986; Harden and Lewis 1986). 'Advanced liberal'
government entails the adoption of a range of devices that seek to recreate the
distance between the decisions of formal political institutions and other social
actors, and to act upon these actors in new ways, through shaping and utilizing
their freedom.
(1) A new relation between expertise andpolitics. Welfare might be considered
a 'substantive' rationality of rule, in the sense that the objectives of rule -
health, income levels, types of economic activity and the like - were to be
directly inscribed into the calculations of rulers, more or less directly
transcribed from the views of experts into the machinery of rule. Simul-
taneously, the very powers which the technologies of welfare accorded to
those who possessed knowledge and could speak the truth enabled expertise
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to establish enclosures within which its authority could not be challenged,

effectively insulating itself from external political attempts to govern it. In
contrast, advanced liberal modes of rule have a certain 'formal' character. The
calculative regimes of positive knowledges of human conduct are to be
replaced by the calculative regimes of accounting and financial management.
And the enclosures of expertise are to be penetrated through a range of new
techniques for exercising critical scrutiny over authority - budget disciplines,
accountancy and audit being three of the most salient.
Perhaps one might link this not only to the specific dialectic of hope and
suspicion today attached to experts and their truths, but also to a more general
problematization of the forms of reciprocal social understandings that were
embodied in rationalities of trust (cf. Giddens 1990; Beck 1992). As Michael
Power has suggested, audit, in a range of different forms, has come to replace
the trust that formulae of government once accorded to professional
credentials (Power 1992). The constant demands for audit both witness to,
and contribute to, the erosion of trust, and seek to establish new distantiated
relations of control between political centres of decision and 'non-political'
procedures, devices and apparatuses - such as schools, hospitals or firms -
upon whose conduct they are dependent for the possibilities of health, wealth
and happiness.
Audit is thus one of a number of new ways of responding to the plurality of
expertise and the inherent controversiality and undecidability of its truth
claims. Marketization, for example, seeks to render expertise governable by
establishing various forms of distance between the political and the expert
machines, an apparent devolution of regulatory powers from 'above' -
 296 Nikolas Rose

planning and compulsion - to 'below' - the decisions of consumers. In its ideal

form, this imagines a 'free market' in expertise, where the relations between
citizens and experts are not organized and regulated through compulsion but
through acts of choice. It addresses the pluralization of expertise, not by
seeking to adjudicate between the rival claims of different groups of experts,
but by turning welfare agencies - social service departments, housing
departments, health authorities - into 'purchasers' who can choose to 'buy'
services from the range of options available.
(2) A newpluralization of 'social'technologies. Such strategies ofpluralization
and autonomization, which characterize many contemporary programmes for
reconfiguring social technologies from various parts of the political spectrum,
embody a wish for a kind of'de-governmentalization of the state' - a detaching
of the centre from the various regulatory technologies that it sought, over the
twentieth century, to assemble into a single functioning network, and the
adoption instead of a form of government through shaping the powers and
wills of autonomous entities. This has entailed the implantation of particular
modes of calculation into agents, the supplanting of certain norms - such as
those of service and dedication, by others, such as those of competition and
customer demand. It has entailed the establishment of different networks of
accountability and different arenas of accountability. It is these new ways,
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these new relations amongst persons and authorities in the governmental

machines of advanced liberalism, that we need to understand.
(3) A new spenjication of the subject of government. The enhancement of the
powers of the client as customer specifies the subject of rule in new forms.
This new specification finds its locus of support not in the failure of welfare
but in the success of welfare and its associated experts in implanting norms of
health, education and the like into citizens. Thus social insurance, as a
principle of solidarity, gives way to a kind of privatization of risk management,
what Pat O'Malley has termed prudentialism - in which the citizen adds to his
or her obligations the need to adopt a calculative and prudent personal
relations to risk and danger (O'Malley 1992). And social work, as a means of
civilization under tutelage, gives way to the private counsellor, the self-help
manual and the telephone help line, as practices whereby each individual
binds themselves to expert advice as a matter of their own freedom. Here we
can witness precisely the 'reversibility' of relations of authority - what starts off
as a norm to be implanted into citizens can be repossessed as a demand which
citizens can make of authorities. Of course, this new configuration has its own
complexities, its own logics of incorporation and exclusion. However, the
'power effects' certainly do not answer to a simple logic of domination, and nor
are they amenable to a 'zero sum' conception of power. T o analyse them
requires an investigation of the 'making up' of the modern citizen as an active
agent in his or her government (Rose 1989,1992a; cf. Hacking 1986).
 Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism 297

V. Conclusions

When analyses of government insist on the heterogeneity of the procedures

assembled together within strategies of rule, and the political role of truth,
they are not making an epistemological assertion, arising out of distaste or
critique of 'grand theory' or of the possibility of objectivity. Nor are they
making an ontological assertion - based upon a claim that reality itself is
more fragmented than we have been prepared to recognize. Their argu-
ment, rather, is historical: a dispersion of systems of authority characterizes
the modalities of rule that have taken shape over the last two centuries in
Europe and North America. They seek to render intelligible a specific but
none the less fundamental question: how have human beings deliberated
upon the problem of regulating, managing or governing their world, the
conduct and capacities of others and their inter-relations? in relation to
what grids of intelligibility, to what bodies of knowledge, through what
modes of problematization? in pursuit of what goods or values, and in re-
lation to what moral codes and ethical systems? through what technical
means and procedures? T o attend to the problematics of rule in the present
is, therefore, not to diagnose a cultural epoch or aform of life - fragmented,
without foundation, reflexive, post-fordist, lacking in a coherent narrative.
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It is to attempt an analysis of certain historically specific mentalities and

technologies of rule.
Liberal forms of government, I have suggested, have depended for their
possibility upon the power of experts and the authority of truth. The relations
between expert authority and the political apparatus have varied in different
formulae of rule. But the authority of expertise has played a crucial role in
making liberal rule operable, in implanting forms of sociality and norms of
responsible autonomy within subjects of rule, and in connecting up key locales
to the ambitions of government in ways that both preserve and shape their
internal systematics.
The proliferation of expertise over the conduct of conduct in the former
centrally planned states is thus more significant than it may at first sight
appear. It should not be seen naively as a flowering of unbiased and concerned
humanism, nor cynically, as merely evidence of professional entrepren-
eurialism. Rather, it demonstrates, in the clearest manner, the dependence of
liberal modes of government upon strategies, techniques, agents and
procedures that cannot be analysed according to the normative logic of
political philosophy. And perhaps the enormous problems of governability
that have been encountered, most notably in Russia, testify in part to the
preconditions that have established the possibility of advanced liberal
government. The freedom upon which such modes of government depend,
and which they instrumentalize in so many diverse ways, is no 'natural'
property of political subjects, awaiting only the removal of constraints for it to
flower forth in forms that will ensure the maximization of economic and social
well-being. The practices of modem freedom have been constructed out of an
 298 Nikolas Rose

arduous, haphazard and contingent concatenation of problematizations,

strategies of government, and techniques of regulation (Rose 1992b).
'Advanced liberalism', as a formula of government, is a much more
significant phenomenon than the brief flowering of neo-liberal political
rhetorics may indicate. Whilst welfare sought to govern through society,
advanced liberalism asks whether it is possible to govern without governing
society, that is to say, to govern through the regulated and accountable choices
of autonomous agents - citizens, consumers, parents, employees, managers,
investors. As an autonomizing and pluralizing formula of rule, it is dependent
upon the proliferation of little regulatory instances across a territory and their
multiplication, at a 'molecular' level, through the interstices of our present
experience. It is dependent, too, upon a particular relation between political
subjects and expertise, in which the injuctions of the experts merge with our
own projects for self-mastery and the enhancement of our lives. This is not to
say that our freedom is a sham. It is to say that the agonistic relation between
liberty and government is an intrinsic part of what we have come to know as
freedom.

Department of Sociology
Goldsmiths' College
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University of London
London SE14 6NW

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