Foucault News

Riemann, M.
“As Old as War Itself”? Historicizing the Universal Mercenary
(2021) Journal of Global Security Studies, 6 (1).

DOI: 10.1093/jogss/ogz069

Abstract
IR scholarship has increasingly begun to scrutinize the ahistorical and ahistoricist assumptions pervading the discipline. Specifically, attention has been turned to those concepts, actors, and practices that appear to be without history and that therefore assumed the status of universals. This article contributes to this scholarship by critically investigating the seemingly transhistorical figure of the mercenary, whose history, it appears, is little less than the history of organized warfare itself. This article questions this assumption by investigating how the Renaissance Landsknechte, actors invoked to support the transhistorical mercenary claim, were problematized within their own historical specificity. Through this analysis, this article rejects the notion that the mercenary is a transhistorical phenomenon as the ideas and categories associated with this figure are tied to specific modern accounts of statist political community and individual identity, as well as a modern account of self-interest. It is argued that the mercenary is not a phenomenon that predates the emergence of the modern state and the system of states, but its own existence is grounded within them. This article, thus, reinstates the historicity of this figure and argues that the mercenary is not “as old as war itself”but a product of specific modern conditions. © 2020 Crown.

Author Keywords
Foucault; genealogy; history; mercenaries

Häberlen, J.C.
Spiritual Politics: New Age and New Left in West Germany around 1980
(2021) European History Quarterly, 51 (2), pp. 239-261.

DOI: 10.1177/02656914211004441

Open access

Abstract
In the late 1970s, an increasing number of West German ‘alternative’ leftist authors and activists turned to spiritual ideas. A milieu that had once been characterized by what Timothy Scott Brown called a ‘scholarly-scientific imperative’ now turned to magic and mystics, fairy tales and stories about American Indians. The article explores this turn to spirituality within the ‘alternative left’ in West Germany around 1980. Drawing on a close reading of several books, mostly published by Munich’s famous left-wing publisher Trikont Dianus, the article argues that fairy tales, myths and accounts of American Indian shamans promised a deeper and more holistic understanding of the world that was beyond the grasp of rational scientific thinking, including Marxism. This holistic understanding of the world provided the basis for a form of politics focused on living in harmony: in harmony with oneself, not least in a bodily sense; in harmony with nature and the universe; and in harmony with the community and the past, which is why authors began to re-evaluate notions of Heimat (homeland), a notoriously right-wing concept. For leftists tired of the confrontational and often violent politics of the 1970s, such ideas proved appealing. The article suggests understanding the fascination with spiritualism as part and parcel of a moment when old, confrontational forms of politics were rapidly losing appeal and were replaced by a politics concerned with questions of self-hood. Spiritual politics were, to quote Michel Foucault, part of the struggles that attacked ‘not so much “such and such” an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class, but rather a technique, a form of power’, namely a power that determined ‘who one is’. © The Author(s) 2021.

Author Keywords
New Age; New Left; religion; spirituality; West Germany

Dix, G.
Incentivization: From the current proliferation to the (re)problematization of incentives (2020) Economy and Society, 49 (4), pp. 642-663.

DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2020.1774256

Abstract
Incentives are so widespread and seemingly so insignificant that we might simply take them at face value and fail to ask how we can account for their emergence and proliferation. Building upon Foucault’s notion of ‘problematization’ as a mode of reading history, this paper questions the taken-for-granted place that incentives have come to acquire in our current reflections and practices. To do so, it returns to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when American mechanical engineers and social scientists turned the behaviour of factory workers into a managerial problem and began to design new instruments to incentivize them. The shift from the current proliferation of incentives to their past opens up a genealogical space that invites us to explore the contingent shifts in meaning and use of incentivization as a framework to understand and govern human behaviour over the course of the twentieth century. Such a shift opens up an analytical space too. The return to early instances of incentivization allows us to compare labour incentives with labour discipline and to tease out some of the similarities and differences between these two ways of wielding power on the shop floor–and possibly beyond. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
discipline; incentive; labour history; mechanical engineers; power

Index Keywords
engineering, incentive, labor market, management practice, power relations, twentieth century