The Concept of Authoritarian Governmentality Today

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.