Government and modernity: An essay in thinking governmentality

Since the 1970s the fabric of relations between the state and civil society, knitted to a liberal-Keynesian pattern in the 1940s, has been unravelled and extensively rewoven. It has been a period of intense political transformation and cultural anxiety, possibly without parallel since the 1930s. Among the many theorists struggling to reflect and interpret this new moment in the trajectory of modernity, Michael Pusey in 1991 offered an account of how one ‘nationbuilding state changes its mind’. Pusey asks how Australian policymakers came to abandon the once-dominant Keynesian, liberalinterventionist state and to embrace ‘economic rationalism’. His now-famous account is laced with a foreboding about the threat posed: ‘by an economic steering mechanism which violates the adaptive capacities of ordinary social life and threatens the social reproduction of culture and individual identity’. Pusey rightly insists that this case-study points to the question of ‘the social meaning of modernisation, culture and public morality in a supposedly “post-modern” world’. Yet, ultimately, Pusey leaves us with many questions and even more puzzles. He does not tell us how or why it is that particular policy ‘paradigms’ or discourses come to exercise dominion or lose their hold. Worse, there are too many issues left begging in Pusey’s argument: when run by an increasingly large-scale Keynesian technocracy, the state was not a problem; however it is a problem when run by an ‘economic rationalist’ technocracy. Why, for example, should we accept Pusey’s claim that modernity in Australia was vested in the ‘knowledge and conviction that the state would be the most likely protector of individual rights against other agencies of social coercion’? Finally, Pusey’s claim that changes were taking place ‘in the relations between state and civil society’, whilst shared by many other theorists, leaves unanswered the questions of how and why we should construe rhe problem in these terms.