Sean Donaghue-Johnston

In ''Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault suggests that genealogy is a sort of "curative science." The genealogist must be a physiologist and a pathologist as well as an historian, for his task is to decipher the marks that power relations and historical events leave on the subjugated body; "he must be able to diagnose the illnesses of the body, its conditions of weakness and strength, its breakdowns and resistances, to be in a position to judge philosophical discourse." But this claim seems to be incongruent with another major task of genealogy. After all, genealogy is supposed to show us that the things we take to be absolute are in fact discontinuous and historically situated: "Nothing in man-not even his body-is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men." If this is true, then the subjugated body can never be restored to a healthy state because it has no essential or original nature. There are no universal standards by which we can even distinguish between healthy and unhealthy bodies. So in what sense is genealogy to be a "curative science"? In my thesis, I try to elucidate the complex relationship between genealogy and the body. I argue that genealogy can be a curative science even while it "multiplies our body and sets it against itself." Ifwe place a special emphasis on the role that transgression plays in Foucault's genealogical works, then the healthy body is precisely the body that resists universal standards and classifications. If genealogy is to be a curative science, then it must restore to the subjugated body an "identity" that transgresses its own limits and that constitutes itself, paradoxically, in the very effacement of identity. In the first chapter of my thesis, I examine the body's role as "surface of the inscription of events." Power relations inscribe on and around the body an identity or subjectivity that appears to be unified and universal, but which is in fact disparate and historically situated. The "subjected" body is the sick and pathologically weak body. In Chapters 2 and 3, I describe how it is possible for the unhealthy body to become healthy by resisting the subjectivity that has been inscribed upon it. Chapter 4 explains how Foucault's later works fit into this characterization of genealogy

This article argues that Henry Mayhew and other Victorian moralists, who visited penny gaffs or penny theaters in the slums of London and recorded their observations for middle-class readers, were engaged in discursive practices that can be properly described as ethological. Ethology, in this context, is the science of the formation of character, as sketched out by John Stuart Mill in 1843. Mill’s claim was that human character was something that could be made into an object of scientific observation and that, if the process of the formation of character could be understood, it could also be more effectively controlled. As this article argues, Victorian moralists viewed the penny gaff as a sort of ethological observatory, a place to which one could go to observe the character of the poor in the process of its formation and development. They also considered the penny gaff to be an educational apparatus, an institution that shaped the moral character of the poor and would therefore need to be taken in hand and controlled in order to produce a “better,” more bourgeois character among the London street folk. To describe this ethological discourse, Michel Foucault’s archaeological method is employed.

In this essay, I explore John Stuart Mill’s theory of government and its application to the issue of health care reform. In particular, I ask whether Mill’s theory of government would justify or condemn the creation of a public health-insurance option. Although Mill’s deep distrust of governmental authority would seem to align him with Republicans, Tea Partiers, libertarians, and others, who cast the public option as a “government takeover” of “our” health care system, I argue that Mill offers good reasons for seriously considering some form of government-operated health insurance. For Mill theorizes government as having a positive as well as a negative role to play in people’s lives, and he explicitly endorses “public options” in different areas of life. According to his theory of government, a public health-insurance option would be just as long as it would meet the following two conditions: (1) it would not invade the “reserved territory” of individual liberty; and (2) “the case of expediency is strong.” I argue that a public option would in fact meet both of these conditions, and that Mill would have likely endorsed it as an effective solution to the current health care crisis in the United States.

According to John Rawls, the liberalism of John Stuart Mill is “comprehensive” and not “political” because it promotes the idea of individuality as a more or less universal conception of the good. Rawls’s political liberalism, in contrast, does not promote any one particular conception of the good over others. Instead, it aims to guarantee for citizens the capacity for a conception of the good. I argue, however, that Mill’s liberalism is “comprehensive” because power is ubiquitous, i.e., because there are social and “nonpolitical” forms of power that political liberalism is not equipped to deal with. It is impossible to guarantee the capacity fora conception of the good without providing a point of resistance to the social and nonpolitical deployment of power. Thus, if liberalism is going to be able to guarantee the capacity for a conception of the good, it must become “political” in aim but “comprehensive” in scope.