James Ferguson

Many contemporary uses of Foucauldian modes of analysis to ‘critique power’ (as it is often put) today lead to a rather sterile form of political engagement, in which denunciation (the politics of the ‘anti’) takes the place of positive political programs, and the strategies of government that such positive programs necessarily entail. Attention to some of Foucault’s own remarks about politics hints at a different political sensibility, in which empirical experimentation rather than moralistic denunciation takes center place. This article identifies some examples of such experimentation that come out of recent research on the politics of social assistance in southern Africa, and draws conclusions regarding the prospects for developing a ‘left art of government’

Key contemporary mechanisms of distribution are routed through the ‘social assistance’ programmes provided by states. While we still often think of such programmes on the model of the well-known ‘welfare states’ of the global North, new forms of state and international transfers to the poor suggest a need to rethink the question of social assistance from a less Eurocentric perspective. With a special focus on southern Africa, this chapter reviews the meaning of ‘social assistance’ in a region where the domain of ‘the social’ was never securely established in the first place. It reflects on the possibility that new rationalities and techniques of social assistance may be calling into question the assumed dependence of social service provision on traditional forms of population registration and documentation.