William Walters and Martina Tazzioli (eds.), Handbook on Governmentality – Edward Elgar, April 2023

Now published, though as an expensive hardback and e-book. The front matter, Introduction and first chapter by Daniele Lorenzini are available open access.

My piece in here is entitled “The Yoke of Law and the Lustre of Glory: Foucault and Dumézil on Sovereignty”. It’s the first in a series of pieces exploring the links between Foucault and Dumézil through Foucault’s career. I’m happy to share if you email me.

The Handbook on Governmentality discusses the development of an interdisciplinary field of research, focusing on Michel Foucault’s post-foundationalist concept of governmentality and the ways it has been used to write genealogies of modern states, the governance of societal problems and the governance of the self.

Contributors include: Claudia Aradau, Carol Bacchi, Wendy Brown, Graham Burchell, Partha Chatterjee, Sahil Jai Dutta,  Stuart Elden, Ben Golder, Colin Gordon,  Jef Huysmans, Jonathan Xavier Inda, Hans-Martin Jaeger, Samuel Knafo,   Susanne Krasmann, Clara Lecadet, Emanuele Leonardi, Daniele Lorenzini, Ian Alexander Lovering,  Brett Neilson, Luigi Pellizzoni, Cristina Rojas, Nikolas Rose, Srila Roy, Ranabir Samaddar, Maurice Stierl, Martina Tazzioli, Miriam Ticktin,  William Walters, Richard Weiskopf, Chenchen Zhang 

‘Nearly forty years after his death, governmentality remains Michel Foucault’s most elusive and productive theoretical concept; especially in generating interdisciplinary empirical scholarship. Now with its revelatory introductory chapter and powerhouse collection of leading contemporary scholars, Walters and Tazzioli’s Handbook on Governmentality has demystified the topic and opened governmentality to a new generation of critical researchers across the social sciences and humanities.’
– Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley, US

‘Governmentality has become a ubiquitous term in social and political theory. Stemming from Foucault, the concept has been stretched and even squeezed over the last years. This impressive Handbook lays the basis for a new season in governmentality studies, exploring new geographical and conceptual frontiers. An amazing achievement!’
– Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna, Italy

And the abstract for my chapter:

In his 1975-76 course ‘Society Must Be Defended’ Foucault briefly comments on Indo-European sovereignty. His auditors would have recognised a reference to Georges Dumézil, and the editors provide a reference indicating his work. In a series of books, Dumézil proposed his influential tripartite hypothesis, with a division between kings and priests, warriors, and farmers or traders. The first function of sovereignty is itself split between a worldly, juridical form and a magical, supernatural one. It is this distinction, particularly discussed in Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, to which Foucault alludes. Dumézil and Foucault met in the mid-1950s, and Foucault pays tribute to Dumézil in key places, including the History of Madness and his inaugural lecture to the Collège de France. Here the focus is an examination of the sense of sovereignty Foucault develops from Dumézil, and how it relates to the notion of governmentality.