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French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment
	Author: Paul Rabinow Publisher: The MIT Press Category: Book Buy New: $30.00 as of 11/20/2009 23:52 PST details New (3) Used (11) from $17.98 Seller: Amazon.com Media: Paperback Pages: 464 Number Of Items: 1 Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2 Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 1.1 ISBN: 0262680661 Dewey Decimal Number: 100 EAN: 9780262680660 ASIN: 0262680661 Publication Date: February 19, 1991 Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours


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Editorial Reviews: Product Description Paul Rabinow's study of space and society, power and knowledge in France from the 1830s through the 1930s uses tools from anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to make fascinating connections between diverse protagonists and domains. In each of these domains - ranging from medicine to the layout of colonial cities - Rabin ow describes the creation of norms and the search for forms adequate for understanding and regulating what became known as modern society. He also focuses on an unexplored middle ground between the masters of high culture and the experiences of ordinary life, which he calls "middling modernism."

Customer Reviews: Laboratories of Modernity May 10, 2008 Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Tokyo, Japan) 4 out of 4 found this review helpful The idea that colonies were laboratories of modernity has become a central tenet of foucaldian studies (Foucault's own theoretical perspective was centered on the archeology of Western knowledge, and he didn't devote much attention to colonies and empires). According to this line of thought, the creation of norms and forms suitable for the government of society, the disciplining of bodies, and the constitution of selves owes much to the colonial experience, where these norms and disciplines were first tested and implemented. This axiom has generated many academic studies (works by Timothy Mitchell or Ann Laura Stoler come to mind). However, it raises several questions. First, how is it to be reconciled with the view, standard in French historiography, that the two world wars and particularly the Vichy episode were formative eras during which most elements constitutive of French modernity were laid down? In other words, are the origins of the French modern to be found in colonies and imperial rule, or in wartime governmentality and European centers of power? Second, the scholar needs to turn his or her attention to colonial officers who experimented with new modes of coercion and subjectification of populations. Most of them came from the higher layers of French society, and had received their education and training prior to their assignments to the empire's outposts. If there was indeed an enormous amount of knowledge produced in and for the colonies, these ideas and techniques did not come fully armed from the minds of almighty colonial administrators. They had their origins in metropolitan France, where they were first conceived and made intelligible in a certain social and intellectual context. Third, techniques of government tested in the colonies were not directly applicable to metropolitan France. In order to apply to the French context, they had to undergo a profound transformation that made them fit the domestic social environment. Empires employed raw force abroad but were subject to democratic rule domestically. Consequently, the modalities of power used by imperial rule in the colonies were very different from Foucault's own definition of power, which consists of very subtle forms of interrelation that do not always follow hierarchical patterns. Scholars who apply Foucault to the colonial context therefore need first to clarify and adapt his conceptual tools, which were designed with a different domain in mind. This being said, Rabinow's French Modern is a valuable study of the origins of French modernity from the 1830s to the 1930s that applies the intellectual method pioneered by Michel Foucault (as the book shows, this method owes much to Foucault's own teacher Georges Canguilhem). The author takes as his starting point the triumph of urban planning in postwar France. 'Villes nouvelles' sprang up, housing projects were built, and there was--at least until 1968--a remarkable consensus among professionals on how French cities should be remodeled. As a later chapter makes it clear, it was in Morocco, under Hubert Lyautey's leadership around the time of the First World War, that France's first comprehensive experiment with urban planning took place. According to Rabinow, "the modernity of Casablanca and Rabat in terms of equipment, specialization of quarters, and circulation planning surpassed anything in France." And "even the harshest critics of Lyautey's colonial aims concede that Rabat's extension was an aesthetic success." Lyautey's other, more contentious achievement was the military pacification of Morocco. He spelled out his doctrine as follows: "Vex not tradition, leave custom be. Never forget that in every society there is a class to be governed, and a natural-born ruling class upon whom all depends. Link their interests to ours." It is important to remind here that colonialism was first and foremost a military enterprise, and therefore combined the two laboratories of modernity--colonial exploitation and the war economy--identified in the first half of the twentieth century. According to Rabinow, the theory of pacification and the rise of modern planning share a common perspective: the shift from the moral to the social, and the realization that the management of social antagonisms rested not on the cultivation of virtue among the protagonists, but on the manipulation of social norms that could be scientifically derived. The author find this shift' starting point in the cholera epidemic of 1832: housing and social conditions, not topographic proximity, proved to be the primary variable in the localization of the disease. Rabinow tracks this emergence of social norms in a number of fields, with architecture and the birth of urban planning providing a common thread. The emergence of norms as the privileged means of understanding and defining society was reflected in new scientific discourses, new administrative practices, and new conceptions of social order, ushering in a long period of experimentation with what would later form welfare policies. New concepts emerged, such as 'amenagement', 'equipement', 'milieux', 'conditions de vie', 'agglomerations', etc. Empirically quite disparate, they nonetheless reveal a certain commonality, and together they formed the discursive space which would be filled during and after World War II in a more substantial and enduring manner. The book's narrative turns in part around a series of individuals, some well-known like Saint-Simon, Le Play and Lyautey, others long forgotten like the architects Tony Garnier and Henri Prost. Described successively as "technicians of general ideas", "specific intellectuals" and "unbureaucratic bureaucrats", they were the forerunners of the technocratic society which emerged in France after the Second World War. Echoing Barres' call for "Experimentation--that is what all Frenchmen of good faith should demand--social laboratories", members of one of these key circles said of themselves: "we tried to be irreproachable technicians." These figures were the real heroes of the laboratories where modern France was conceived.

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