Mitchell Dean, The Concept of Authoritarian Governmentality Today (2024)

Dean, Mitchell. 2024. “The Concept of Authoritarian Governmentality Today.” Global Society, June, 1–20..

DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2024.2362739

Open access

Abstract
The paper examines “authoritarian governmentality”. It argues that there are salient differences between the contemporary intellectual and political context and those of the 1990s when it was first developed. Chief among these is the confidence by which we can approach liberal governing itself as the norm of contemporary governmentality. The first wave of governmentality studies identified authoritarian governmentality in both non-liberal regimes and in the consequences of liberalism’s norm of the self-responsible subject and its governing through civil society. This paper extends these observations: first by proposing an analysis of the kinds of order that different rationalities and technologies invoke, and secondly, by arguing for the linking of an analytics of government to both the practical capacities of sovereignty and the practices through which supreme authority is constituted. While liberal and authoritarian governmentalities are far from mutually exclusive, the absent concept of authority helps clarify what is at issue. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
authority; Foucault; Government; order; sovereignty

[…]
Today, the rise of what is called populism, particularly in its hard right-wing versions, in liberal-democracies, and the awareness of diverse forms of autocratic rule throughout the world, has sharpened the concern for authoritarian measures and potentials in the way in which governing occurs. It was one thing to point to the necessity of authoritarian practice within the relatively stable liberal political and economic orders of the late twentieth century; it is quite another to note the rise of opportunistic, messianic, volatile, and apparently anti-rational movements and forces within and outside these liberal orders today (Vasilache 2023). However one diagnoses the present, the last decade has witnessed a series of mutations and disruptive forces in liberal-democracies and in the international order.