The Will

to Empower
Democratic
Citizens
and
Other Subjects

Barbara Cruikshank >

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA A N D LONDON
Copyright © 1999 by Cornell University

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First published 1999 by Cornell University Press

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the United States of America

Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cruikshank, Barbara.
The will to empower : democratic citizens and other subjects / Barbara Cruikshank.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 - 8 0 1 4 - 3 4 8 0 - 7 (cloth : alk. paper), ISBN 0 - 8 0 1 4 - 8 5 9 9 - 1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Political participation — United States. 2. Democracy — United States.
3. Power (Social sciences)—United States. I. Title.
JK1764.C78 1999 98-46489

324.6'3'o973 — dc2i

CLOTH PRINTING

IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

PAPERBACK P R I N T I N G

IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Small Things i

1 Democratic Subjects 19
Subjects 20
Citizens and Subjects 24
Homo Politicus and Homo Civicus: Democracy
and Power 28
Producing the Poor, or Making Subjects 34
Making Citizens: Bio-Power 38

2 The Liberal Arts of Governance 43

Society as a Whole 44
Governing the Poor: Reform Movements
and Self-Help 48
Society as a Whole and Political Freedom 54
"Governing and Guiding Women" 58
The Crisis of Governability 62

3 The Will to Empower: Technologies

of Citizenship and the War on Poverty 67
The Political Logic of Empowerment 7o
The Political Economy of Empowerment 72
Modeling the Poor 76
Operationalizing Power 81
Arming the Poor 84
The Subjects of Power 85
 4 Revolutions Within: Self-Government
and Self-Esteem 8j
Liberation Therapy 89
Constituting a State of Esteem 92
A New Science of Politics 96
Recovery of the Will 101

5 Welfare Queens: Ruling by Number 104

Policing Democracy 108
Mythical Queens no
The Terms of Poor Womerfs Citizenship 113
The Terms of Resistance iiy

Conclusion: Iteration 122

Notes 127

Index

vi Contents
 Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to Peter Schwartz, who told me I could be
a political theorist. I believed him.
During its production I incurred a great many personal debts which are
a pleasure to bear. The first is to Judith Halberstam, whose faith and finan-
cial support sustained my earliest efforts, even when she wasn't sure what I
had to say. I am most grateful to Judith for teaching me how to live well.
For friendship, camaraderie, and her intelligence, I owe Carla Bates more
respect and gratitude than my prose could ever muster. I rely upon Janet
Lukehart and Marta Schultz for all good things; without them I could not
have written this book. I am grateful to Beth Jones for her bravura, research
assistance, and last-minute rescues. Jenny Robertson put her muscle into
the later stages of the production. Lisa Henderson and Janice Irvine helped
to keep it all in perspective week by week. Linda Rahm gave me something
to look forward to after the book was finished.
Thomas Dumm read the entire manuscript and gave critical advice at
many turns; my intellectual debt to his own work is enormous. Diane
Brooks, Neta Crawford, Louis Howe, Sue Hyatt, Shane Phelan, Jenny
Robertson, Nikolas Rose, Sanford Schram, Jackie Urla, and Mariana
Valverde read chapters, offered criticism, and encouraged my labors. Also,
many thanks to Nikolas Rose and the others who sustain the History of the
Present Research Network.
Under the tutelage of Mary G. Dietz I learned what it meant to be taken
seriously and that intellectual rigor does not mean sacrificing what one has
to say. Thanks also to Sara Evans, Edwin Fogelman, Lawrence Jacobs, and
Paula Rabinowitz for criticism and encouragement. The University of
Minnesota Graduate School Wallace Fellowship provided early research
support.
Women, Work and Welfare, a welfare rights organization in Minneapo-
lis, offered me and many other women the opportunity to cut our political
teeth. For their political savvy, for all our infighting, and especially for
teaching me to suspect my own will to empower, I am grateful to Betty
Christenson, Kelly Pitts, Barbara Jones, Cheri Honkala, and Carla Bates.
 Finally, to Alison Shonkwiler, a generous editor and a patient reader,
many thanks.
Permission has been granted to use in revised versions the following
three previously published articles: "Revolutions Within: Self-Government
and Self-Esteem," Economy and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 327-344; "The
Will to Empower: Technologies of Citizenship and the War on Poverty,"
Socialist Review 23, no. 4 (1994): 29-55; "Welfare Queens: Policing by the
Numbers," in Tales of the State: Readings on the Legendary Character of Public
Policy, ed. Sanford Schram and Phillip Neisser, (Lanham, M D : Rowman &
Littlefield, 1997), 1 1 3 - 1 2 4 .

viii Acknowledgments
The Will
to Empower
k
Introduction
Small Things

A meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political aware-

ness of these small things, for the control and use of man, emerge through
the classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole cor-
pus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans, and data. And from
such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born.
MICHEL FOUCAULT

The popular mind in fact doubles the deed: it posits the same event as
cause and then a second time as its effect.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

For my part, I should be inclined to think that liberty is less necessary in

great matters than in tiny ones if I imagined that one could ever be safe
in the enjoyment of one sort of freedom without the other.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

In reformist and democratic discourses, citizenship and self-gov-

ernment are tirelessly put forward as solutions to poverty, political apathy,
powerlessness, crime, and innumerable other problems. But that stance
obscures any political awareness of how citizens are brought into being; it
obscures the will to empower embedded in posing democracy as a solution.
I argue that democratic citizenship is less a solution to political problems
than a strategy of government.
Individual subjects are transformed into citizens by what I call tech-
nologies of citizenship: discourses, programs, and other tactics aimed at
making individuals politically active and capable of self-government. Ex-
amples might include a neighborhood organizing campaign, an empower-
 ment program, safe-sex education, a shelter for battered women, social ser-
vice programs promoting self-help, self-sufficiency, or self-esteem, or a
radically democratic social movement.
I see these technologies of citizenship, however well intentioned, as
modes of constituting and regulating citizens: that is, strategies for govern-
ing the very subjects whose problems they seek to redress — the powerless,
the apathetic, or those at risk. Although I am deeply sympathetic to the
project of radical or participatory democracy, I am skeptical that such a
project presents an answer to questions of power, inequality, and political
participation. Like any mode of government, democracy both enables and
constrains the possibilities for political action. Democratic modes of gov-
ernance are not necessarily more or less dangerous, free, or idealistic than
any other. Even democratic self-government is still a mode of exercising
power.— in this case, over oneself. Like government more generally, self-
government can swing between the poles of tyranny and absolute liberty.
One can govern one's own or others' lives well or badly.
The only sure thing, in my somewhat Machiavellian view, is that solu-
tions to the problems of politics will not be found in a particular form of
government, in a theory, in human reason, or in some truth; they will be
found, for better or worse, in more politics. If poststructural political the-
ory has a hidden foundation, it is that power and political conflict are as
ubiquitous, as commonplace, as dangerous and as productive behind the
bedroom door as they are in the legislature. Conflict and struggle are a per-
manent historical condition. Or, as Michel Foucault so famously put it,
"everything is dangerous," even democracy.1
I investigate the familiar problematics of democratic theory — inequal-
ities of power, participation, resistance, knowledge, and citizenship —
through the insights of feminist and poststructural political theory. Two
notions, that power relations are ubiquitous and that subjectivity is both
enabled and constrained by relations of power, help to make these prob-
lematics thinkable in new ways attuned to the contingencies of politics.
Democratic theories,^ argue, are best understood as constitutive^dis-
courses that contribute to solidifying what it is possible to think, say, do,
• and be democratically.
I want neither to overstate nor to neglect the dangers of democracy. I do
not seek to disclose some evil hidden away in democratic discourses; they
are both enabling and constraining. TJlie will to empower others and one-
j self is neither a bad nor a good thing. It is political; the will to empower
1 contains the twin possibilities of domination and freedom. In Chapter 2 I

2 Introduction
trace the origins of the will to empower to the shift from Christian charity
to social work as a guiding principle of philanthropy in the nineteenth
century; in Chapters 2 and 3 I explain that the will to empower is expressed
in peculiar^nds^ o£,goyem relationships which byjlefinition^ erase jthe
traces of th^philanthro self-help and,, self-
empowerment. My goal, however, is not to indict the will to empower buf
to show that even the most democratic modes of government entail power
relationships that are both voluntary and coercive. _
Two questions drive the discussion that follows. The first is, what are the
problems to which democratic participation is posed as the solution? Most
consistently, what I have found is that democratic participation and self-
government are regarded as solutions to the lack of something: for ex-
ample, a lack of power, of self-esteem, of coherent self-interest, or of polit-
ical consciousness. Along with social service programs, philanthropy, and
some kinds of political associations, participatory democratic discourse is
preoccupied with the subjects who do not rebel against their own exploita-
tion and inequality, who fail to act in their own interests, and who do not
participate politically even though free to do so. Indeed, the analytical and
normative vocabularies of democratic theory are replete with formulations
expressing what is not there: "powerlessness," "non-participation," "non-
decision," and "counterfactuals."
The second question is, by what means is the capacity, power, con-
sciousness, or subjectivity proper to democratic participation and self-
government infused into citizens? How does the will to empower work;
how are individuals empowered, transformed from apathetic and power-
less subjects into active, participatory citizens? How is subjugation trans-
formed into subjectivity? Are the means by which citizens are constituted
themselves democratic?
The first of my two main arguments is that democratic modes of gover-
nance and social scientific ways of knowing (re)produce citizens who are
capable of governing themselves, of acting in their own interests and in
solidarity with others. Citizens are not born; they are made. I explain the
political significance of the ways social scientific knowledge is operational-
ized in techniques, programs, and strategies for governing, shaping, and
guiding those who are held to exhibit some specified lack. Throughout the
book I use examples of the practical role played by social science in apply-
ing the liberal arts of government.
To be clear, I do not mean that citizens are socially constructed by the
government. My argument turns on distinguishing between the state and

3 Introduction
 governance. By "the state" I mean the liberal, representative, electoral, ad-
ministrative, legislative, and judicial institutions and practices articulated
within the confines of a liberal constitutional framework. By "governance,"
I mean what Michel Foucault called "the conduct of conduct" or "govern-
mentality," forms of action and relations of power that aim to guide and
' shape (rather than force, control, or dominate) the actions of others. In this
/ broad sense, governance includes any program, discourse, or strategy that
) attempts to alter or shape the actions of others or onesel£ It includes but
> is not limited to programs conducted by the liberal state, for governance
can also involve internal and voluntary relations of rule, the ways we act
upon ourselves.
Liberal democratic governance is premised not so much upon the au-
. tonomy or the rights of individuals as upon their social fabricatian_as citi-
zens, a fact that is obscured when citizenship is regarded as a solution. The
two normative trajectories of liberal democratic thought diverge on the
question of whether or not the citizen is inherently rational and self-
interested or self-realizing. In either case, however, the liberty of the citi-
zens is understood to be the limit of liberal governance. It is in those cases
where individuals do not act in their own self-interest or appear indifferent
to their own development as full-fledged citizens that the limit of the lib-
eral state at the threshold of individual rights, liberty, and pursuits must be
crossed.
I find that participatory and democratic schemes—what I am calling
technologies of citizenship — for correcting the deficiencies of citizens are
endemic within liberal-democratic societies. Technologies of citizenship
operate according to a political rationality for governing people in ways
that promote their autonomy, self-sufficiency, and political engagement; in
the classic phrase of early philanthropists, they are intended to "help people
toJheljD themselves." This is a manner of governing that relies not on insti-
tutions, organized violence or state power but on [securing the voluntary
compliance of citizens; I argue, however, that the autonomy, interests, and
'"•si
wills of citizens are shaped as well as enlisted. Technologies of citizenship
do not cancel out the autonomy and independence of citizens but are
modes of governance that work upon and through the capacities of citizens
to act on their own. Technologies of citizenship are voluntary and coercive
at the same time; the actions of citizens are regulated, but only after the
capacity to act as a certain kind of citizen with certain jrijxis-4s4rfstilled.
Democratic citizens, in short, are both the effects and the instruments of
liberal governance. ^ ^

4 Introduction
 Three relatively recent technologies of citizenship are fully treated here
in Chapters 3, 4, and 5: Community Action Programs under the Johnson
administration; the self-esteem movement; and the reorganization of wel-
fare accounting practices under President Carter which resulted in the
emergence of a new kind of citizen — the welfare queen. Below and in
Chapter 2, garbage reform and nineteenth-century self-help schemes illus-
trate the extent to which social reform movements aim at accomplishing
through volunteerism and gentle coercion what the liberal state cannot do
without using force or violating its limits. Although the scope and impact
of a given social reform movement may be short-lived, its techniques for
making citizens do not disappear but are reformed or carried over into new
programs.
My second overarching argument is that the political itself is continu-
ally transformed and reconstituted at the micro-levels of everyday life
where citizens are constituted. If power is ubiquitous, as I assert through-
out, then it makes no sense to speak of"the political," "the social," "the
private," and "the public" as separate domains. The political cannot be
clearly demarcated from other domains without excluding some relations
of power.2 Instead of reconceptualizing the political per se, I try to under-
stand how the social transformation of the political opens new possibilities
for political action.
I resist the temptation to locate the political only where there is contes-
tation or overt relationships of power. First, I want to avoid the presump-
tion that there is an inside and an outside to politics. Second, in Chapters 1
and 5 , 1 argue that to say something is political only once it is contested is a
strategical move that masks the will to empower. For example, in Chapter 5
I find it troubling to say with Nancy Fraser that where there is no overt
political resistance, relations of power and inequality have been "depoliti-
cized." To say that welfare and bureaucratic modes of government "de-
politicize" the political exclusion of welfare recipients is to mistake^the
absence of resistance for an absence of politics.
It is not enough to say that recipients are excluded from politics, be-
cause, as Judith Butler put a related argument, that "misses the point that
the subject is an accomplishment regulated and produced in advance. And
as such is fully political; indeed, perhaps most political at the point in which
it is claimed to be prior to politics itself." 3 The citizen is an effect and an
instrument of political power rather than simply a participant in politics.
The measure of democracy is not the extent to which citizens participate in
politics rather than stand back in fear or apathy. That is to mistake power

5 Introduction
 for what it excludes rather than what it produces. /The critical question for
democratic theory is how citizens are constituted by politics and powerjlo
answer that question, one must recognize the contingency of the political
itself.
For example, in Chapter 4 on the self-esteem movement, I explain how
the self is made into a terrain of political action, a terrain that carries new
political possibilities for self-government. In that case, acting upon the self
is also a manner of acting politically which self-esteem advocates believe
can transform society as a whole. One might be tempted to say that the
self-esteem movement "politicizes" the self. To "politicize" self-esteem,
however, to bring it into the domain of politics, is to leave politics as it was
and simply add something new to it.
I understand social reform movements to do something more profound
than carry new issues into the political domain. Social movements trans-
form the political itself; that is, they transform the terrain of political ac-
tion. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe make a similar claim about the
unprecedented politicization of the social by new social movements since
the 1960s: "What has been exploded is the idea and the reality itself of a
unique space of the political. What we are witnessing is a politicization far
more radical than any we have known in the past, because it tends to dis-
solve the distinction between the public and the private."4 I trace their in-
sight to reform movements in the nineteenth century and so call into ques-
tion the "newness" of new social movements.
There are two points of departure for this book. The first is democratic
theory. The second is the idea of the social —"society as a whole" and "so-
cial government"—that developed over the course of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The social emerged as (1) an object of scientific knowledge (statistics,
surveys, the census, and political economy), (2) a set of techniques for in-
directly intervening in the lives of the dispossessed (social work, social ser-
vice, social welfare, economy), and (3) the object of reform movements. A
brief account of the historical emergence of the social is given in Chapter 2.
What is most important for my purposes is not the history of the social it-
self but the unique modes of reform and government it made possible.
Once more, to be clear, "the social" is not the space traversed between
citizens and the state; it is neither the space of uncoerced association (as in
"civil society") nor the space of conformity and domination (as in "social
control"). Rather, the social confuses and reconstitutes the boundaries be-
tween the personal and the political, the economy and the state, the volun-
tary and the coercive.

6 Introduction
 For example, "social problems," given their first systematic treatments
at the turn of the twentieth century, define an abstract field of intervention.
As Gilles Deleuze put it, the social is a "hybrid domain" made consistent
not by its institutions but by its techniques.5 The novelty of social tech-
niques of government was that they made it possible to target individuals
and society as a whole in a single aim. Social government had a new object,
to govern what J. A. Hobson in The Social Problem (1901) described as "man
in society."6
The key to understanding the political possibilities that emerged with
the social in the nineteenth century is that the term was used both to des-
ignate "the whole of society" and to distinguish the poor from the body of
society. Mary Poovey suggests that this double usage "allowed social ana-
lysts to treat one segment of the population as a special problem at the
same time that they could gesture toward the mutual interests that (theo-
retically) united all parts of the social whole." 7 As Hobson put it in, the "so-
cial problem may be set in terms of wealth or terms of want." 8 In either
case, any impediment to harmony and progress, including class conflict,
needed to be calculated, known, and acted upon. The welfare and progress
of society as a whole were linked to solving the poverty of some of its mem-
bers. Any solution had to be "applied alike to the individual and the social
organism, so as to yield a scientific harmony of the claims of Socialism and
Individualism."9
To extend the reach of power to both at the same time, the political it-
self had to be reconstituted at the social level, where the individual's liberty
was brought into harmony, with social progress. That is to say, once the so-
cial became the object of reform, agitation, and science, the political lost
its spatial association with sovereign power and the state. What mattered
most was that "the form of the solution," in Hobson's phrase, be resolved
so that it might provide the principles needed by social reformers of all
kinds. The form of Hobsoh's solution to the social problem was "the art of
social conduct": /

A satisfactory answer cannot consist in the theoretical solution of a prob-

lem; it must lie in the region of social conduct. Not merely saying what
should be done, but the doing, is the solution. The reins of Science and
Practice are drawn together; a theory of social conduct which shall take
cognizance of all the factors will be likewise the art of social conduct.10

The theory and the art of social conduct provided reformers with a ra-
tionality of government that they carefully distinguished from the state.

7 Introduction
 The art of social conduct, wrote Hobson, required "marking clearly the
operation of those industrial and social forces which make for the larger
and more various activities of the state in politics and industry, and those
which, on the other hand, directly tend to enlarge the bounds of individual
liberty and enterprise."1 Applying the art of social conduct at the level on
which the individual was constituted and regulated meant that power had
to find a way into the minute and mundane reaches of the habits, desires,
interests, and daily lives of individuals.; The art of social conduct was ap-
plied to secure the "social cooperation^ necessary to keep state interven-
tion to a minimum; in the same step, the sphere of individual liberty was
enlarged.
With the advent of the social as the principle of governing individual
conduct, power was articulated through the constitution and regulation of
individual liberty. Even, or most especially, the smallest details of life came
under the terrain of social intervention. Although Hobson argued for the
unity of the "Social Question," he also recognized its practical components:.
"The practical reformer has narrowed the phrase to connote Drink, Sex,
Relations, Population, or even Money"; 12 he added labor, class conflict,
education, and consumption to the list. The unity of the social question,
however, was provided by the laws of progress. "'The history of progress
is the record of a gradual diminution of Waste.' From this standpoint the
Social Question will find its essential unity in the problem of how to deal
with human waste." 13
Waste, taken perhaps more literally than Hobson intended, provides the
perfect illustration of how citizens are constituted and regulated and how
the political is reconstituted by the arts of social conduct.
George Edwin Waring, a Civil War colonel who became the street-
cleaning commissioner of New York City, created the Juvenile Street
Cleaning League in the 1890s in order to encourage the public to feel re-
sponsible for the disposal of waste. The league — a voluntary association of
working class-children that was formed despite the initial suspicion that
the children were being used as an informal army of garbage police —was
a great success and spread from New York to other cities shortly after the
turn of the century. The children, Waring claimed, "are being taught that
government does not mean merely a policeman to be run away from, but
an influence that touches the life of the people at every point" 14 Another way
to say the same thing is that government is not merely the activity of
the state officials and institutions. For Waring, governance was a way of

8 Introduction
exercising power that touched people as individuals and as "the people" in
a single reach.
The goal was to create civic pride, Colonel Waring argued, and if "noth-
ing is gained to the city except in a negative way, at least the neutrality of
thousands of children has been purchased and the streets are cleaner from
the fact that so many are kept from making them dirty." 15 In other words,
Waring sought to link each volunteer to the resolution of collective social
problems (including the lack of municipal power to enforce the sanitary
code). The league encouraged the people to carry out the purpose of gov-
ernment. For sanitation reform to succeed, according to a report in Engi-
neering News, "every citizen would be an inspector." 16
The league employed what I am calling a technology of citizenship: it
sought to make good citizens out of poor and recent immigrants, to expand
the limits and maximize the powers of city government by making the
people self-governing. It was voluntary, but it practiced an art of coer-
cion that made children at once subject to government and subjects of self-
government. "This profession [sanitary engineering] is neither that of
physician, nor engineer, nor educator, but smacks of all three. It levies
autocratic powers, kin to those of ancient tyrants, but at the same time
depends upon the sheerest democracy of information and co-operation to
give its work effect." 17 To be sure, this social government took place
largely outside the government in voluntary associations and special com-
missions, but it was expressly political.
For progressives such as Colonel Waring and J. A. Hobson, the object
of "the new social profession" was life, its conditions and health, and its
civic or p"oIiticarengagement. (Readers will recognize in the Juvenile Street
Cleaning League the contours of Foucault's concept of "bio-power," which
is elaborated in Chapters i and 2.) Colonel Waring saw political as well as
commodity value in garbage: "Dickens' 'Golden Dustman' and the ac-
counts of the rag-pickers of Paris have made us familiar with the fact that
there is an available value in the ordinary rejectanenta of human life. We
learn by the work of the dock Italian of New York that to regain this value
is a matter of minute detail; it calls for the recovery of unconsidered trifles
from a mass of valueless wastes, and the conversion of these into a saleable
commodity." 18 Waring learned from scavengers and immigrants that recy-
cling is profitable, but he sought to render that commodity value of politi-
cal use to the municipal government of New York City. Government, to be
effective, must concern itself and its citizens with "minute detail," "trifles,"

9 Introduction
 and "valueless waste," for the smallest things were the means of transform-
ing waste into political capital. Waring devised a classically liberal and
democratic technology to get the people to police themselves so that the
street-cleaning commissioner did not have to. The city was cleaner and the
citizens more active and civically minded; all this without the government
being directly involved. Today garbage is still linked to government, but
the link is evermore indirect and minute.
Around 1989 the garbage bins in my neighborhood were locked. A
minor and local reform, it shaped my own understanding of how power
works and how the political is constituted. The story — a set of anecdotes
loosely based on my memories and some research on the history of garbage
reform — goes something like this:
Walking to the bus stop, I noticed that Dumpsters in my Minneapolis
neighborhood had new locks. Among the many consequences of the
lockup, the most significant, it seemed to me, was that people who survived
on Dumpster-diving — recyclers and homeless people—were now much
less free to live on their own terms. Those struggling to stay out of the arms
of the poverty industry now had no recourse but to steal their subsistence
or submit to case management in one or another shelter or social service
program. It seemed obvious to me that the space of freedom was shrinking,
that the very means of subsistence were being enclosed behind the bars of
criminal justice and "helping."
I began to search for the authority, official, reason, or interest behind
the Dumpster lockup. I intended to protest, to badger that authority, to try
to reverse the decision. In a manner of speaking, I took up the cause. Much
later, I figured out that the effect rather than the cause was, if not the whole
story, the more important part.
First, I asked the cashier at a local convenience store why the Dumpster
in the parking lot was locked. He said that the store was liable if anyone get-
ting into the bin was injured or made sick from ingesting its contents. I
doubted that it was a question of that particular store's liability, because
many stores had locked up their bins at about the same time. Certainly
people do get sick and injured from the contents of garbage containers. In
his memoir about living homeless, Lars Eighner reports that Dumpster-
diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life, "including dysentery about
once a month." 19 For a store to be sued by the sick and injured, though, is
extremely unlikely. When I inquired why the other stores locked their
Dumpsters as well, the cashier shrugged; the conversation was over.
Later on, I asked a neighborhood activist about the lockup. She said that

10 Introduction
residents living near the parking lot where one Dumpster sat complained
about the drunks who congregated there on weekends. The noise, the nui-
sance, and the occasional fights spilled over from the parking lot into
nearby yards. (She assumed, and I accepted at the time, that it was the trash
bin that attracted the drinkers, even though the store sold no alcohol. Later f
I found out that because residents are obliged to arrange with the city in
advance — and pay for — the collection of large objects such as furniture
and appliances, some would covertly drop off such items near commercial
Dumpsters. Drinkers congregated in those spots, then, because there were
accommodations, couches and chairs.) She also mentioned that residents
were concerned about children's safety because they were attracted to
Dumpsters for treasure hunts and sometimes used them as a hideaways.
Still, I couldn't believe that the neighborhood association had that kind
of clout with local businesses. Even after a protracted fight, the association
had failed to prevent a garbage incinerator from going up on the edge of
that inner-city neighborhood. Lest it begin to sound as if I am inventing
this remarkable confluence of events having to do with garbage (which I
have only begun to list), all these things happened during the three years I
lived on the south side of Minneapolis while attending graduate school.
Only the chain of events is hypothesized from my memory.
Around this time I heard about a homeless man who was killed while
sleeping in a downtown Dumpster; a garbage truck emptied him into its
crusher. Also, I learned that Dumpster-diving college students were mak-
ing maps of local bins with timetables for the freshest spoils. In response to
the fad, a bagel shop and a pizza place near campus stopped putting out
their trash at night before eventually locking their bins.20
Somewhat confounded by this time, I still had faith that I could find and
confront the real cause of the lockup. I went back to the convenience store
and asked for the owner who was not in. I spoke to a manager, who claimed
that people were dumping their household garbage, as well as washing ma-
chines and old couches, in or near the Dumpster. Since the store paid for
garbage pickup by weight, he explained, the lockup was a cost-saving mea-
sure. Although there were fines for illegal dumping, the manager claimed
that no one enforced the rules.21 Grocers' associations as well as neighbor-
hood associations do attempt to police the system themselves in more or
less organized ways.22
Thus, the manager's explanation was plausible, based as it was on the bot-
tom line, and it fit within the broader context of garbage reform. Through-
out many states garbage disposal became more expensive in the 1980's be-

11 Introduction
 cause of environmental concerns and privatization. Landfills were closed or
restricted from accepting lawn waste and large objects. Municipal garbage
contracts for residences and the imposition of fees for disposing of motor
oil, tires, refrigerators, and the like made the efforts to regulate garbage
more vigilant. Illegal dumping, privatization, health, safety and environ-
mental concerns, liability — all these were plausible reasons for locking
garbage containers in the 1980s. Yet I still wanted to know who was re-
sponsible for devising and enacting the solutions"
For a number of reasons I doubted that the manager's explanation was
the whole story. First, the local stores were not associated; moreover, it was
not only convenience or grocery stores that locked their Dumpsters but
also nonprofits, clinics, and schools. Second, the reason he gave was exclu-
sively based upon his private interest, but the context in which his interests
were defined was not of his own making. His self-interest was an effect,
then, rather than a cause of the changes. Third, despite the privatization of
garbage contracts and the changes in environmental laws, lots of different
people articulated their interest in the lock up; they often gave answers that
coincided with other broad changes in the 1980s, such as the rise in the
number of homeless people and the imperative to take personal responsi-
bility for recycling. So many people I spoke with had perfectly good rea-
sons for the lock up, and so many claimed responsibility, that I began to
doubt that there was any one cause, one doer behind the deed. Was there
more to the story?
I continued looking. Officials of the company that owned and emptied
the Dumpsters could (or would) not tell me who instituted the lockup or
whether there was a law they were complying with. Calls to their insurance
company and to the city got the run-around but never an answer to my
question. I was none too persistent in this aspect of my search because bu-
reaucrats and company officials were less than forthcoming over the phone
and I had no appeal: I could not claim to represent a large group or hire an
attorney tp represent me; I didn't want to pose as a journalist. Approaching
individuals in person was a more successful tactic.
At a nearby grocery chain store, I asked a manager about the lockup. He
thought I was asking him about salvageable food and assured me that the
chain did not throw away anything edible, but passed items beyond their
prime to local food shelves and soup kitchens (and, someone told me later,
to school lunch programs).23 His store's garbage and recycling facilities
were behind a fence, he assured me, not to keep people out but to keep the

12 Introduction
garbage in and prevent its littering the parking lot and surrounding neigh-
borhood.
I asked several people who worked in or around food banks and soup
kitchens about the lockup. Each of them assured me that there was no need
for anyone to eat out of garbage bins because free food was available — if not
all the time, at least often enough to get by. Kent Beittel, executive director
of the Open Shelter in Ohio, claimed that Dumpster-diving for food was
unnecessary. According to the Columbus Dispatch, he said that "because of
the city's generous donations to food pantries and soup kitchens, 'it is im-
possible to starve in this town.'" He added, however, that the "real question
is what is happening with our social-service agencies that causes people to
run these kinds of health risks instead of using resources available through
the system."24 A very good question, which I take up in Chapter i.
No one I spoke to. in the helping industries was particularly concerned
about the lockup, tending to see it as a public health matter rather than a
question of freedom. One food bank administrator did express disgust at
the locked bins and at corporate food retailers. She acknowledged that re-
cycling and scavenging could be marginally profitable, but she could not
answer why people might avoid soup kitchens and charities if they could.
"They're afraid, schizophrenic, paranoid, abused," she offered, but not be-
cause of anything in particular that the charities were doing. She suggested
that Ronald Reagan was the real culprit because he was responsible for de-
institutionalizing so many mentally ill people, leaving them to fend for
themselves.
As a welfare rights activist at the tirae, working in coalition with other
groups involved in antipoverty movements, I mistrusted most social service
workers and "helping" professionals myself. I asked homeless and formerly
homeless people I organized with, mainly but not exclusively from a group
called Up & Out of Poverty Now, about the Dumpsters. The overwhelm-
ing response was that the lockup was a way for "them" or "the system" to
control people. When asked to be more specific, most said, "capitalists,"
"Reagan," "rich people," or "the city," indicating that, like me, other
activists tended to believe that the powers-that-be made things happen
and that their power insulated them from being held accountable for their
power. Power did double duty for us as a "real" or "actual" cause and as that
which rendered itself invisible or unaccountable; power was, tau to logically,
both cause and effect.
When I asked these same people if they would like to take up the cause,

13 Introduction
 they said that the Dumpster matter was small potatoes and not the "real"
issue for homeless people or the impoverished. Again, there was a tautology
at work. The "real" object of resistance was against those who had power,
but because their power insulated them, it was the principal of power —
rather than the powerful themselves or their specific actions — that was to
be the object of resistance. In other words, acts of power and powerful ac-
tors are caused by power. (I discuss the tautological conception of power
and the question of resistance at length in Chapters 1 , 3 , and 5.)
My confusion with all this competing and seemingly trivial information
about Dumpsters turned to utter stupefaction when a short time later the
city instituted a set of "incentives" for encouraging residential recycling.
Households were to pay by the pound for garbage hauling, whereas recy-
cling was to be free and curbside. Was there no end to reform, to new plans,
fads and events, interests, and purposes surrounding the disposal of garbage?
Was my own concern about freedom merely idiosyncratic? Was there no
one in charge of or accountable for these reforms? No one voted on them;
there was no general public discussion. So who was responsible?
I finally resolved to go with what I had. I sorted over all the different rea-
sons that were given for the lockup which I had initially discounted because
they were contradictory and seemed irrelevant to my goal of finding the
doer of the deed. Strangely, all these interests-at-odds never clashed. In-
surance companies, the city, garbage contractors, neighborhood activists,
store owners, all found that their (different) interests were served by the
lockup. Either most were seriously deluded, and only one or two coincid-
ing interests were in fact served, or I was deluded in thinking that a partic-
ular set of interests had to be served for an act of power like the lockup to
occur. No common interest was articulated, only particular and local in-
terests, yet collective action was taken. Was some invisible hand at work?
A happy coincidence for all but the excluded Dumpster-divers?
In short, I found that I had no cause. Compared with the search for
Roger in Michael Moore's documentary film, Roger and Me, my search had
no clear object but ended in similar frustration.25 Whereas Roger was some-
where behind closed doors, waiting to be exposed like Oz for the coward
that he was, perhaps the object of my search wasn't hidden away, but sim-
ply didn't exist apart from local folklore and the innumerable new plans,
schemes, local and national trends affecting garbage. No law, no decree,
no contracting parties had determined the outcome of locked Dumpsters.
Worse yet, I realized I had no strategy for cohtesting an act of power if I
could not find, let alone confront, the powerful.

14 Introduction
 The task for democratic theory, faced with the facelessness of power,
could be understood as the effort to give power a face or a name, to make
it visible and accountable. During the postwar period democratic theorists
on the left did attempt to reveal the hidden countenance of power even, or
especially, when the powerful did not visibly act on their interest. Invisible
acts such as "nondecisions," "nonparticipation" or political apathy, and in-
visible truths such as "objective interests" (as opposed to manifest interests)
were conceptualized to reveal the interests and powers that operated pre-
cisely by making themselves invisible and thereby subverting the otherwise
inevitable conflict with those upon whom they acted. On the right, in that
school of democratic theory named by the apparent oxymoron "democratic
elitism," or "democratic pluralism," political scientists such as Robert Dahl
pursued the assumption that where there was no overt conflict, no power
could have been exercised. Without visible conflict, he argued, there was
no act of power, no exclusion, no oppression. What was invisible was not
an act of power or the interest of the powerful but the silent consent of un-
equal parties to their inequality and to the system of government more
broadly.
In either case, democratic theory was driven by what was not there. Each
party to what came to be known as the "three faces of power debate" ex-
plained that what was not visible was really there, either objective interests
and latent resistance or an implicit consensus. Though not visible or intel-
ligible,[a face was surely lurking behind the shadow appearance of political-
apathy and inactiomiBoth sides assumed that a face-to-face confrontation
with power was both a possibility and a measure of democratic freedom.
This had been my assumption, too, until I took up the cause of Dumpster-
diving.
Once I realized that my desire to act on the level of the macro-
political— to confront the sovereign decision-makers—was thwarted by
the micro-political, then the profusion of those small and confusing events,
interests, and acts became the real story to tell. New questions arose. What
makes it possible for so many contradictory interests to be served without
clashing with one another? If acts of power are anonymous, how can we say
they are still democratic? Why did so many different people articulate their
responsibility and interests in such small things as locking up garbage? Why
did I? In what sense are reforms—whether small changes with no grand
structural impact or large changes of whole systems—with no clear cau-
sality, no clear line of authority, democratic? Absent an actual cause, in
what sense can reforms be resisted?

15 Introduction
 Oddly enough, the League of Women Voters promised to answer my
questions with the publication of a pamphlet, The Garbage Primer, in 1993. 26
In the name of citizen education and active participation, the primer sets
out to educate citizens like me on the forms and tactics of participation for
everyone with a stake in garbage reform (according to the primer, that in-
cludes just about everyone). The primer is limited, however, to concerns of
the environment, disposal methods, hazardous waste, and cost. It does not
answer the questions listed above or my concern for freedom but repeats
Colonel Waring's faith that the citizen is sovereign and the most effective
politically because each one carries the responsibility for how garbage is
handled. To get the average citizen to act, the primer insists, all that is
necessary is to provide information about the technical aspects of disposal,
a list of alternative methods of disposal, and tips for getting involved in de-
cision-making processes. Of course, the Socratic assumption that citizens
fail to act only out of ignorance assumes that all those I talked to knew the
same thing. In fact, they each knew what the real problem was, but in no
sense could they have come to agree.
But the people I spoke to, with the possible exception of the neighbor-
hood activist, did take responsibility for the garbage lockup without ever
having involved themselves in public or political decision-making. In fact,
the terrain I traveled in search of a cause was not "the political" in any
traditional sense, nor were the interests involved necessarily those of or-
ganized interest groups. Yet everyone seemed to have an interest. I came
to suspect that all the individuals who took responsibility for the lockup,
though not engaged in a conspiracy, were the points of articulation for a
kind of power I didn't understand and a form of politics I could see no
way into.
The impetus for this book was a blindness that seeing clearly could not
cure.father than another theory or an alternative vision of democracy and
citizenship, I needed to understand the mode of government by which in-
dividuals take responsibility for small things .1
That same impetus only grew stronger when I found myself in an activ-
ist's version of the welfare trap. For several years I was steeped in the inade-
quacies, petty humiliations, and crushing poverty of A F D C (Aid to Fami-
lies with Dependent Children). As a welfare rights activist I was deeply
opposed to A F D C because the sums of money meted out were so small that
no one could live decently, let alone well, on welfare. As a system of power,
welfare seemed designed to hold single mothers down. Then again, it was

16 Introduction
impossible to be against welfare because it was the only stable source of in-
come and health benefits for so many women and children. -/ö
Proponents and critics of welfare have changed sides over the last ten
years, but the possible positions on welfare have not changed.27 It is a po-
litical trap: I cannot be for or against welfare; there is no way to win. I hope
to draw others into the same trap in order that ^Lmay^thjnk.an£w about^ up f k
welfare and s o c i a L s e m c ^ ways...(they are tied to freedom, power, >-^
justice, and politics: that is, the ways in which small and contingent things J " 5
connect up to the grand scheme of things.
The practices of welfare do not lend themselves to analytical precision.
If a juvenile court official orders a mother to graduate from a self-esteem ^
program because she failed to protect or to discipline her child (a program
operated, say, by an explicitly feminist organization combatting domestic ^
violence), is that act political, judicial, or administrative? If Wisconsin t ^
docks a family's welfare check for a child's truancy, a program called "learn-
fare," what kind of punishment or justice is it? Social, civil, familial? If a
private, nonprofit organization incarcerates an allegedly drug-addicted
pregnant woman, is it usurping the jurisdiction of the courts, or is it creat-
ing a new political jurisdiction?
To take up any of these questions as a cause, whether the garbage lockup
or the protection of poor women from overly zealous "help," means an
endless search for a sovereign power that is not there. To take up these
questions as effects of the changing configuration of the political, however,
would be to refigure the terri tory of politics itself rather than to wrestle the
causes.
At first, I sought to politicize the Dumpster lockup by holding whoever
caused it politically accountable. That is, I sought to bring the issue into the
political realm of contestation, thus leaving the structure of the political as
it was, yet adding to it. Even if every small thing is political, they cannot all
be drawn into the political. As William Connolly points out, words and
things are not essentially contested but contingently contested.28 Nor is it
the case that if every little thing is political, politics is everywhere — even
if power may be. What is required of democratic theory is less a solution to ^
the conundrum of the political than a way to articulate the contingency of
the political that neither exhausts nor determines any efforts to reconsti-
tute political order and the space of politics.
Although my themes are large and include an examination of the bound- \
aries between subjectivity and subjection, democracy and despotism, social \

17 Introduction
 intervention and the limited liberal state, the social and the political, wel-
fare and citizenship, I trace those boundaries through the minute practices
of self-government in the history of democratic and social reform. I ana-
lyze each of these boundaries more in terms of its details than as philo-
sophical questions of difference in nature or meaning. Instead of saying
what democracy — or any of the boundaries just listed — should be, I at-
tempt to explain how it is done, how it is thought and practiced.
Again, rather than envisioning democracy differently, my goal is to un-
dermine the self-evidence of the notion that democracy is a good thing,
pure and simple, the best form of government; the assumption that we all
know what it is; the conviction that democratic forms of government are
more free than any other form. Democratic relations are still relations of
power and as such are continually recreated, which requires that demo-
cratic theory never presuppose its subject but persistently inquire into the
constitution of that subject.

18 Introduction
I
Democratic Subjects

However, if you take power and independence from a municipality, you

may have docile subjects but you will not have citizens.
A L E X I S DE TOCQUEVILLE

A t least since Tocqueville drew his famous contrast between cit-

izens and subjects in the 1830s, it has served as a critical measuring stick,
albeit a contested one, for distinguishing the activities and qualities of
democratic citizenship from other modes of political action.1 To be subject
to the power or authority of another is taken to be the antithesis of demo-
cratic citizenship. Tocqueville held that self-governing citizens have the
capacity and the power to participate in politics, to act on their collective
interests, desires, and goals. Whereas subjects behave themselves because
an external force exerts power over them, citizens have the power to act for
themselves; they are their own masters.
After a brief caveat on the title, "democratic subjects," this chapter ex-
plains why it is misleading to separate the terms of subjectivity, agency, and
citizenship from those of subjection, domination, and powerlessness in
 democratic theory. Against the grain of democratic theory, I argue that the
democratic citizen is not a species apart from the subject, from the welfare
recipient, the bureaucratic client, the exploited worker, or the therapeutic
patient. Being "just another number," "dependent," or "in need of help" is
not the antithesis of being an active citizen. Rather, it is to be in a tangled
field of power and knowledge that both enables and constrains the possi-
bilities of citizenship.
My argument that citizens and subjects are not opposites, that citizens
are made and therefore subject to power even as they become citizens, is
not intended to undermine democratic theory. I understand democratic
theory as a constitutive discourse that helps to solidify what it is possible to
think, do, say, be, and feel as a citizen. Recognizing that democratic theory
is a constitutive discourse means also attending to the ways in which it is
constitutive of any attempt to change it. The contrast between citizens and
subjects will continue to shape democratic discourses, even those such as
my own that are critical of the contrast. For instance, I do not read against
Tocqueville. I am reading Democracy in America as it is usually read, as an
exemplary text of democratic theory.
First, I examine several of the subjects that drive contemporary demo-
cratic theory: citizenship, political apathy, and powerlessness; another, the
social, is examined in the next chapter. I find that radical democrats and
pluralists alike reproduce the citizen/subject dichotomy and so continue to
obscure the ways in which citizens are made. As a case in point, I show how
that dichotomy works to undermine the radically democratic objectives of
small "d" democrats such as Sheldon Wolin. Second, I rehearse the "three
faces of power" debate in political science and situate the problems that
shaped normative democratic theory into a positive science of citizenship,
giving concrete expression to the will to empower. The operationalization
of democratic theories of power are linked here and in Chapter 3 to tech-
nologies of citizenship. Third, I link the operationalization of social scien-
tific knowledge to what Theresa Funiciello calls "the professionalization of
being human" or what Foucualt called "bio-power." Using welfare reform,
I illustrate what I mean by the claim that citizens are made.

Subjects

A caveat: I will not, for the sake of consistency, fix the meanings of
the terms "subject" and "subjectivity" in advance for the reader. Ana-
lytical precision is neither possible nor desirable at the moment; I have

20 The Will to Empower

neither the desire nor the ability to bring an end to what has been an
enormously productive, if seriously destabilizing, case of what Ludwig
Wittgenstein called "conceptual puzzlement."2 In this predicament, one
cannot say what a word means apart from how it is used, or what it is
used tosay. 3
Such uses might productively confound meaning, for example, when a
single word is uttered to say two things at once. Foucault used the word
"subject" in a double sense, not to confuse things with doubletalk but to
articulate a form of power that simultaneously "subjugates and makes
subject to." 4 That is, he means to say that modern forms of power tie the
subjectivity (conscience, identity, self-laiowledge)ali^ to that
individual's subjection (control by another)./The subject is one who is both
under the authority of another and the author of her or his own actions.
Foucault means to undermine the perspective from which power can be per-
ceived only as the antithesis of freedom, a perspective from which it would
be possible to recognize Foucault's claim only as a contradiction or a para-
dox. In other words, he uses the term to change what it is possible to say.
According to Wittgenstein, to change what it is possible to say is also to
change what it is possible to do, to think, or to be. From that perspective,
the varied uses of "subject" and "subjectivity" are expressions of the
struggle to define ourselves. For example, "subject" and "subjectivity" have
undergone a rigorous interrogation in feminist theory. At stake is the pos-
sibility of living life differently as a woman, or for women perhaps to live
not as "women" but as subjects capable of constituting their own gender.
By and in the large, debates over the subject in feminist and poststructural
theory are over questions of strategy and the possibilities for resistance.
Like poststructural feminists, Foucault hoped to "promote new forms of
subjectivity" in part by changing what it is possible to say. To insist on a
definition of "subject" or "woman" at this juncture would be to close down
the possibility of becoming a new kind of subject.
To avoid confusion, then, insofar as that is possible concerning a word
with many and varied usages, I offer the following list of the senses to which
I put the word "subject"—though no entry is entirely exclusive of any
other.
First, in the terms laid out by Tocqueville, a subject is "one who is sub-
ject to the power and authority of a another," usually a sovereign power
such as a king, a majority, or the law. To be subject, in other words, is to be
subjugated, to be powerless, passive, the opposite of a democratic citizen.
This meaning of "subject" survives in social scientific uses of "power" as

Democratic Subjects 21
 the possession of one party over and above another. On this view, the world
can be divided into citizens and subjects, those who have power and those
who do not. These senses of both "subject" and "power" are endemic to the
"three faces of power" debate in democratic theory, which is treated further
on. For the moment, it is enough to emphasize that here the "subject" is
defined against the "citizen." ^
Second, in the title of this chapter, "democratic subjects" is meant to in-
dicate the subject matter of democratic theory, all that is deemed appro-
priate to the field of inquiry traversed by democratic theorists and all that
is deemed relevant to the study of democracy. This sense of "subject" is
confounded by the fact that we also refer to the subject matter of any dis-
cipline as "objects of inquiry," or things that are perceptible. "Democratic
subjects" is also meant to signify that democracy is a form-of government
that requires a new kind of subject rather than, a. formof government that
liberates the subject from under the sovereign.
The third sense of "subject," related to the second, also contravenes
"object." Today we might refer to Tocqueville's subject as an "object" of
power.5 A subject, after Kant, has possession of him- or herself and is no
longer the object of another's will or knowledge but now the subject of
consciousness and self-motivation. In this modern sense, the subject is one
in possession of the power to command oneself, a "subject of power" rather
than a mere "object of power." The "subject" in this sense is often used as
a synonym for "individual," "knower," "agent," or "actor."
Fourth, I use "citizen-subject" to hold together the first and the third
usages but not to conflate them. "Citizen-subject" is not used here to indi-
cate a contradiction or a dichotomy but to indicate that although demo-
cratic citizens are formally free, their freedom is a condition of the opera-
tionalization of powerSjln the third sense as developed by Marx, the subject
is the source of desire and is a subject only so long as that desire is a prod-
uct of his or her own consciousness. To say that any persons are no longer
subjects is to say that their consciousness, and so their desire, has been al-
tered or fabricated in some way. For Marx, the first sense of "subject" is the
antithesis of the third.
Finally, I use the hyphenated "citizen-subject" to indicate that neither
the first nor the third sense of "subject" is the antithesis of the-other.
Neither can stand for an ontological being. My concern is to focus atten-
tion on the mutually constitutive relations between these two senses of
"subject." To see the citizen-subject in this way is potentially to recon-

22 The Will to Empower

figure ways of being and thinking about citizens, of acting politically and
governing ourselves.
Again, it is my hope that if I critically articulate the structure of demo-
cratic discourse, citizens and subjects will no longer appear to be the only
political creatures inhabiting the world of democracy. The normative defi-
nitions of citizen/subject are, variously and in deeply contested ways, in-
sinuated within the critical vocabularies of postwar political struggles:
participation versus exclusion, equality versus difference, ideology versus
reality, the political versus the social, freedom versus domination, power
versus powerlessness, autonomy versus dependency, public versus private,
among others. Each of these binaries separates the terms of agency and
freedom from the terms of repression and domination, the terms of sub-
jectivity from the terms of subjection.
Of course, the binary citizen/subject is not set in stone. It is unstable,
contested, and inseparable from what Eve Sedgewick describes as "the
context of an entire cultural network of normative definitions, definitions
themselves equally unstable but responding to different sets of contingen-
cies and often at a different rate."6 I animost interested in how "citizen/ i
subject" is embedded within the terms of welfare and social reform.
In Tocqueville's understanding, the citizen has the autonomy and the
power to act; the subject does not. Although power is available for use by
the citizen, Tocqueville does not understand it to be a property of the cit-
izen per se. If the possession and use of power is what determines the dif-
ference between citizens and subjects, however, then power is not external
to but constitutive of their difference.
In short, I am suggesting that if power is not external to the state of
being citizen or subject, if to be self-governing is to be both citizen and
subject, both subject to and the subject of government, then a welfare re-
cipient, for example, is not the antithesis of an active citizen. She will un-
doubtedly be the subject of bureaucratic control but will also have plenty
of opportunities to resist — individually and collectively — the definitions
and regulations imposed upon her. It is significant that welfare and most
social programs are voluntary. Even when they are overtly coercive, they
work by getting the recipient to see her own interests in those control
strategies.[Discourse structures a field of possible actions rather than de- •
termined outcomes. She is, then, both the subject of and subject to welfare
discourses, not merely their object.
It is to indicate that citizens are both subjected to power and subjects in

Democratic Subjects 23
 their own right that I replace the dichotomizing slash in citizen/subject
with a hyphen: citizen-subject. Of course, it would be in vain to suggest
that replacing a slash with a hyphen actually confers upon subjects a place in
the politics of citizenship. Discourse works by telling us in advance of any
perception what it is we can see and what is or is not important.7 Discourse
continues its work even after its structure is recognized (for example, even
after it is recognized that heterosexuals are a recent invention of scientific
and popular discourses, the difference between hetero- and homosexuals
does not disappear).8 Still, by incorporating citizen-subjects into democratic
discourse, I hope to promote a political awareness of how citizen-subjects
are made.

Citizens and Subjects

When citizenship is measured in this way, citizen against subject, it is

almost impossible for the mass of citizens not to fall short. Paradoxically,
the demos cannot measure up to the standard of autonomous citizenship
v,- and self-definition if t h ^ y ^ y d e ^ advance
of their engagement in politics. As a critical measure, citizen/subject sep-
arates the state of subjection from that of autonomous agency. But it does
so only by presuming in advance of any analysis that the categories of mea-
surement are self-evident, that there are in fact two distinct kinds of indi-
viduals: the citizen and the subject.9
The ways that citizens are rendered as subjects of democratic discourse
has critical implications for democratic politics. When we say today that
someone is subject, acquiescent, dependent, or apathetic, we are measuring
that person against a normative ideal of citizenship.10 As a result, the dis-
. courses of democratic citizenship tend to foreclose the ways in which it is
possible to be a citizen rather than seeking to place the question of citi-
zenship within the reach of ordinary citizens.11
What is most important, undergirding the contests about what citizen-
ship means, is that the self-evidence of critical categories such as citizen/
subject makes it unnecessary to inquire into how power works to make sub-
jects out of citizens and citizens out of subjects. If we fail to scrutinize the
ways that citizens are made, we may completely overlook the constitutive
discourses of citizenship that are characteristic of liberal democracies.'
For example, in "What Revolutionary Action Means Today," an essay
first published in 1982, Sheldon Wolin objects to the silence he hears on the
subject of citizenship: "While there are many voices, with varying degrees

24 The Will to Empower

of good faith, ready to testify for democracy . . . there is virtually no one
who is given to reflecting about the democratic citizen, to asking what it is
to be one, or why, if each of us is one and there are so many of us, the so-
ciety seems to have so many anti-democratic tendencies."12 The "signifi-
cant silence" that Wolin hears is to my ears a veritable roar. As I document
throughout this book, it seems that everybody has a scheme, a social pro-
gram, an organizing strategy, or an issue campaign for turning political
subjects into democratic citizens, for transforming the apathetic into the
politically active, the indolent into the productive, and the dependent into
the self-sufficient (recall Colonel Waring's scheme from the introduction).
There are, in fact, innumerable programs and strategies devised by so-
cial reformers, feminists, neighborhood activists, policymakers and legisla-
tors, entrepreneurs and social scientists, all in a state of seemingly perpet-
ual reform. Sometimes such fabrications are obvious, such as when the
Freedmen's Bureau sought to make citizens out of former slaves, "enter-
prise zones" to make entrepreneurs who would improve the economies and
reduce crime in poor neighborhoods, and the Community Action Pro-
grams (studied in Chapter 3) to promote "maximum feasible participation."
Even when such programs fail, the strategies they invent are re-formed and
continue to shape efforts to make citizens. More often, strategies for mak-
ing citizens are subtle or not expressly "political," such as the accounting
methods in large welfare bureaucracies (examined in Chapter 5) and the
self-esteem movement (Chapter 4).
In order to hear the abundance of discourse on citizenship, however,
Wolin would have to alter several of the presumptions that drive his radi-
cally democratic criticism of the liberal order. I focus on Wolin's argu-
ments here in part because his influence on the radical democratic tradition
is so profound. 13 Understanding itself as an antiliberal alternative to state
socialism, one strand of radical democracy has taken a pluralist turn away
from the kinds of presumptions that I am interrogating in Wolin's work. 14
His presumptions about citizenship, however, are representative of those
that continue to shape democratic discourse in general; in particular, they
shape the rationalities of neoliberal and neoconservative reform efforts,
from empowerment zones and workfare to volunteerism.
First, according to Wolin, a citizen who is recognizably constructed is
by definition no longer an authentically democratic citizen but a bureau-
cratic subject or merely a bearer of a prepolitical interests or identity: "In-
terest group politics dissolves the idea of the citizen as one for whom it is
natural to join together with other citizens to act for purposes related to a

Democratic Subjects 25
 general community and substitutes the idea of individuals who are grouped
according to conflicting interests. . . . He or she is instead [of a citizen] a
business executive, a teamster, a feminist, office worker, farmer, or homo-
sexual whose immediate identity naturally divides him or her from others." 15
Wolin uses the citizen/subject antithesis as a critical wedge into the
antidemocratic forces of modernity, including the modes of resistance
adopted by social movements. For Wolin, if we choose to differentiate our-
selves as particular kinds of citizens — feminist, union member, Chicano,
black, welfare recipient, or queer — rather than as citizens of the polity, we
are no longer bearers of a properly political identity. He takes human dif-
ferences of race, gender, and class to be prepolitical, yet social movements
since the 1960s were organized on the principle of politicizing those cate-
gories. If human differences were not natural but constructed, social move-
ments argued, it was possible to change them through political means.
Against the politicizations of power in sexual, familial, educational, racial,
and economic relations which characterized new social movements, Wolin
argues that those who were politically engaged in resistance in the 1960s
and 1970s were acting in the capacity of "depoliticized" subjects.16 Wolin
calls those who engaged in new social movements "groupies": "The citizen,
unlike the groupie, has to acquire a perspective of commonality, to think
integrally and comprehensively rather than exclusively. The groupie never
gets beyond 'politics,' the stage of unreflective self interest." 17 Caught up
in politics, then, the groupie cannot join citizens in collective efforts con-
fined in the "the political." Perhaps another way to say this is that Wolin's
proper citizens do not choose their own conceptions of themselves as
citizens or act to transform the boundaries of the political.18 Both those
boundaries and the standard of democratic citizenship are fixed prior to the
political action of citizens.19
Why does a committed democratic theorist so sharply chastise those who
demand to participate in setting the terms of their own citizenship? Wolin
insists that any politicial action that does not conform to a communal stan-
dard of democratic citizenship is "depoliticized." For example, he holds
that the grassroots movements flourishing in the Reagan years were "polit-
ically incomplete. There are major problems in our society that are general
in nature and necessitate modes of vision and action that are comprehen-
sive rather than parochial."20 Social movements and grassroots politics
were merely prerequisites to real and authentic democratic action aimed at
the state. "These developments are suggestive because they represent the
first steps ever toward systematic popular intervention in the sacrosanct

26 The Will to Empower

domain of state secrets and national security. This [the state] is new terrain
for democratic politics and it is genuinely political."21 Somehow, both the
actions and the inactions of citizens provide Wolin with evidence for the
claim that we are "depoliticized."
Wolin revised his argument somewhat in the mid-1980s, suggesting that
through grassroots activism "the political can become incorporated in the
everyday lives of countless people." 22 Nevertheless, by referring back to a
premodern standard of the political in order to comprehend the present, he
rules out the possibilities for a democratic politics in the present: "It is
clearly impossible to impose a democratic conception of the citizen upon
the political realities of the megastate. . . . The democratic conception of
the citizen must be preserved as an ideal form, the measuring rod of what
it means to be a citizen."23 Yet, to measure citizens against that standard is
to negate the possibility of being or becoming democratic citizens in the
present, a conclusion confirming his initial claim that there is silence on the
subject of citizenship.
In Wolin's lexicon, both the ideal of democracy and "the political" are
critical standards against which he measures all eventualities.24 But they are
one and the same standard, since he uses the two ideal concepts synony-
mously: "Democracy stands for an alternative conception of politics, even
a standing criticism of and a living opposition to the megastate and media
politics."25 If politics, conflict, and action are not "genuinely democratic"—
that is, communal — they are by definition depoliticized, antipolitical, or
prepolitical. It is not possible that the borders of the political might be set
democratically because they define that which is democratic or not, politi-
cal or not. By reducing "the political" to a particular form of democracy
that we do not practice, Wolin abandons us to the megastate.
If political action cannot aim at differentiating citizens from one an-
other or at reconstituting the political, then there is no reason to inquire
into how democratic government works. In its ideal form, Wolin argues,
the relationship between citizen and democratic polity is entirely transpar-
ent. In a truly democratic polity there is no need to fashion democratic
modes of governance. All that is necessary is for democratic theory to
sweepingly dismiss the megastate and hold out for an ideal alternative.
(Wolin defies his own conclusions in his later examination of governmen-
tal practices in welfare states.)26
In the sweep of Wolin's critical definitions, most of the forms of mod-
ern government that are constitutive of citizenship gather under the head-
ings of "the social" and "the depoliticized." He writes, for example, "there

Democratic Subjects 27
 are, of course, many reasons for the political passivity of the unemployed
and the permanently poor, but one of the most important is the depoliti-
cization to which they have been subjected."27 Wolin is arguing that de-
politicization is both a cause and an effect of political passivity. When we
do not act politically, we are subject to a kind of power that operates to
mask its own exercise. According to Wolin, if citizens do not participate in
politics, the task of a critical democratic theory is to investigate how their
natures have been tampered with, to uncover the powers that have "de-
politicized" the naturally political citizen. The critical standard of "the
genuinely political" effectively reduces the subject matter appropriate to
democratic theory to the judgment of this or that according to the critical
standards of citizenship and the political.
To back up his claim that citizenship is "depoliticized," Wolin follows
Hannah Arendt in suggesting that the premodern political is replaced in
modernity by the social. "Depoliticization is more extreme among the poor
and racial minorities because they are the most helpless of all groups in the
political economy, the new social form that is replacing the older form of
the political order."28 Under these same circumstances, social movements
contested what was to count as politics (as in "the personal is political"). In
contrast, Wolin's presumption is that the "genuinely political" is timeless.
The politics of feminists and others, including "politics" in the sense of
conflict of interest, the exercise of rights, the struggle for power, social
movements, and protest, are not properly political. The question Wolin
asks—what is "genuinely" political and what is not? — is as misguided as
Robert DahPs question: "Who governs?" (treated below).
Democratic theory, with important exceptions, counts voting and open
rebellion as "political" actions, for example, but neglects or dismisses the
constitution of citizens in the therapeutic, disciplinary, programmatic, in-
stitutional, and associational activites of everyday life. Dismissing these ac-
tivities and their locations as administrative, social, "prepolitical" or "de-
politicizing" reduces democratic criticism to documenting the exclusion of
certain subjects from the homogeneous sphere of the political, from the
places and powers of citizenship.

Homo Politicus and Homo Civicus:

Democracy and Power

The juxtaposition of citizen and subject is consistent with a way of think-

ing about power that was common to theories of pluralist democracy in the

28 The Will to Empower

post-World War II period.29 The political problematic driving those de-
bates concerned the rise of the civil rights and other social movements and
the mounting sociological evidence that liberal democratic regimes pro-
duced economic, social, racial, and political inequality. Does the presence
of inequality signify that capitalist liberal democracies (measured against
socialism during the Cold War) are not the best possible system of govern-
ment? If we are formally equal in the eyes of the law, at the ballot box, and
as parties to a contract, why does inequality persist? If the people do not
have the power, who does? These questions shaped a debate over power
that was never resolved, despite which, I discover in them the constitutive
aspects of democratic discourse.
Democratic theorists sought to make the persistence of inequality intel-
ligible by problematizing democracy in terms of the lack of political par-
ticipation and powerlessness. In the process, as I argue in Chapter 3, the
ideological debates over power rendered the lack of power and jjarticipa-
tion amenable to governmental intervention. The ideological debates be-
tween liberal and Marxist social scientists were transformed into a positive
science of politics for knowing and intervening in reality, for operational-
izing the various theories of power. What emerged out of those debates
was not any agreement on the truth about power but a positive discourse of
power, a method for contesting power in the shape of what was not there,
a method for ordering and intervening in what had no prior existence.
For the moment, let me rehearse the debates over power in order to show
that they exhibit a will to empower, a will to represent and speak for the in-
terests of others. The most influential pluralist in the immediate postwar
era was Robert Dahl. He posed the question, "Who governs?" (As I point
out below, much the same question guided critics of pluralism, C. Wright
Mills in particular, to answer, "The power elite.")
Pluralism — or as it was also called, "empirical democratic theory" and
"democratic elitism"—claimed that the relative absence of political con-
flict in the United States, despite blatant and visible inequalities, signaled
the deliberate if inarticulate consent of people who chose not to act politi-
cally. Pluralists claimed that direct political participation was not an essen-
tial or desirable feature of democracy. Consider Dahl's famous dismissal of
the "classical" view: "It would clear the air of a good deal of cant if instead
of assuming that politics is a normal and natural concern of human beings,
one were to make the contrary assumption that whatever lip service citi-
zens pay to conventional attitudes, politics is a remote, alien, and unre-
warding activity."30 The logic of pluralism indicated that if the mass of

Democratic Subjects 29
 people did not participate directly in democratic political life it was be-
cause, as rational actors, citizens could achieve what they wanted through
economic and private activity and had little time for or interest in politics.
In Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City, a study of
New Haven, Dahl distinguished between the natures of homo politicus, the
citizen actively engaged in governmental processes, and homo civicus, whose
identities and interests are shaped and met in the ungoverned and nonpo-
litical realm of civil society.31 Homo civicus designated the vast majority of
potential voters, who rarely pursued their interests by engaging in politics.
Homo politicus—the elected representative, interest-group advocate, and
policy activist — actively participated in the process of government (nar-
rowing the definition of political action to the electoral arena). At the same
time Dahl argued that the political process is a completely open one. Since
in his line of vision there were no persons or groups clamoring to engage
at the level of government, he concluded that no citizens in New Haven
were being excluded from participating. Significantly, less than six years af-
ter Who Governs? was published in 1961, clashes between the police force
and black residents of New Haven made state violence daily news.32
Radical democrats such as Sheldon Wolin and the New Left generally
despised the pluralist assumption that "man is by nature an a-political ani-
mal." To them, American pluralism seemed a thinly veiled apology for the
inequality and elitism that characterized American politics. Critics of plu-
ralism sought to disclose the invisible operation of power that excluded the
masses from participation (for example, the media manipulation of mass in-
terpretations; the bureaucratic domination that pervaded and depoliticized
political and economic inequality; control of the state by economic elites).
Democratic critics generally took political participation to be an essential
feature of democracy; nonparticipation revealed that power was in the hands
of elites and that the political participation of the masses was repressed or
controlled. If people did not rebel against their oppression and political ex-
clusion, then there must be some invisible coercion or threat hidden behind
their acquiescence. That was, of course, power. What lurked in the shadow
of homo civicus was power, not consent. Radical democrats believed that to
reveal the truth of power, to assign it a face, would be to transform quies-
cence into a confrontation.
For example, in Regulating the Poor, Frances Fox Piven and Richard
Cloward explained that welfare provision in the modern state was a re-
sponse to the political rebellion of the destitute during periods of contrac-
tion in the capitalist economy and a mode of regulating labor in times of

30 The Will to Empower

political quietude. During periods of mass unrest the expansion of welfare
provision aimed at restoring political order not by "buying off" the poor
but by bolsteringjthe social control mechanisms of the market. "The trig-
ger that sets off disorder is not economic distress itself, but the deteriora-
tion of social control. To restore order, the society must create the means
to reassert its authority. Because the market is unable to control men's be-
havior, at least for a time, a surrogate system of social control must be
evolved, at least for a time." 33 For Piven and Cloward, welfare was a system
of social control for maintaining political and economic order.34 Once such
social control mechanisms succeeded in restoring order, the function of
welfare turned to regulating labor by enforcing low-wage work.
Welfare, then, was an expression of capitalist class interests. The exclu-
sion of the masses from participation was one effect of the organization of
those interests in the state. Against the pluralist thesis that the political pro-
cess is an open one, Piven and Cloward argued that even those modes of
participation available to the masses — the vote and protest—were "de-
limited by the social structure." That is, the class structure of capitalism en-
sured that poor people's political organizations could not effectively chal-
lenge that structure.35 Following Marx, Piven and Cloward argued that
formal political equality was little more than a liberal myth that masked the
real workings of power.36 They challenged the pluralist thesis that the in-
articulate consent of the masses accounted for their lack of participation.
What appeared to be consent, they argued, was in fact a festering discon-
tent held back only W the invisible operation of power. The race riots of
the 1960s and scattered throughout the 1970s marked those moments
when social control was weak.
The social control thesis is that power works coercively and secretly to
prevent resistance and rebellion./The pluralist thesis is that consent is the
secret behind the failure of the mass of citizens to rebel. Despite their ide-
ological differences, theorists of democracy on the left and the right shared
a basic conceptualization of power. As Steven Lukes wrote, summarizing
the debates among proponents of the elitist, reformist, and radical theories
of power: "The three views we have been considering can be seen as alter-
native interpretations and applications of one and the same underlying con-
cept of power, according to which A exercises power over B when A affects
B in a manner contrary to B's interests."37 Their common object of analy-
sis was to locate power by identifying instances in which A's interests were
served and B's were not— or to prove that there were no such instances.
The expectation behind the formulaic hypotheses of each "face" of power

Democratic Subjects 31
 was the possibility of proving or disproving the truth of power: either some
people were excluded from power and from the pursuit of happiness (ac-
cording to the first and second faces), or they were quite happy and there-
fore apathetic about being unequal, (according to the third).
Each "face" assumed that power can be rationally and intentionally used
by someone to affect (influence) other people. In other words, power is ex-
ercised unitarily, not as a struggle or in the relations between two or more
parties, but in the causal effect of one upon another. Radical theorists
sought to locate power after the fact, when B failed to protest against the
power of A over conditions of inequality. Reformists asked whether agen-
das were set in advance in such a way that conflicts were diverted from
erupting by the "mobilization of bias." Why look before and after the fact?
Because the concern was with the lack of political participation: the prob-
lem was to explain what was not there. "Latent" dissent, "nondecisions,"
and "nonparticipation" on the part of the powerless were taken on the left
as (invisible) signs of the domination that led to the "decision" not to par-
ticipate.38 Another way to say this is that citizens may or may not take a cer-
tain action: if they do so as a matter of their own interest, no power is in-
volved; if they do so against their interest, then power is present and they
act not as citizens but as the subjects of another.
In any case, there was general agreement that power could not be vol-
untary and coercive at the same time.39 An action taken could not be an ef-
fect (caused by or taken under the influence) of power if it was voluntary.
Lukes ruled out the possibility that B's real interests or desires could be
shaped by power and still belong to B. If B voluntarily acts one way rather
than another then no power is present, since power is considered only as an
external and repressive force before or after the fact with no constitutive
role in action. The possibility that power might be a positive force revealed
in action is ruled out.
Lukes came very close to admitting that an action could be voluntary
and coerced at the same time when he suggested that desire could be a
product of power: "The radical, however, maintains that men's wants may
themselves be a product of a system which works against their intersts, and,
in such cases, relates the latter to what they would want and prefer, were
they able to make the choice."40 Lukes's neo-Marxist or Gramscian view of
power depends upon the a priori counterfactual of "real" or "objective" in-,
terests to explain what does not happen, conflicts that do not erupt, and the
possibility that people can be wrong about their own interests. To be "ob-
jective," however, desires must have their origin in the actor, never in

32 The Will to Empower

power. Desires that are the products of power, Lukes held, should be seen
not as material consequences of the exercise of power or a part of reality
but as ideological falsehoods superimposed upon reality.
By ruling out the possibility that power relations could be simultane-
ously voluntary and coercive, that one's desire could be both one's own and
a product of power, Lukes implied that the only authentically democratic
polity would be one in which there are no relations of rule — one could be
only self-ruling but never ruled in turn. Like Wolin, Lukes argued that the
condition of freedom is the complete transparency of power relations. The
critical evaluation of power relationships and inequality rested on the imagi-
nation of a democratic politics without power and a political subjectivity
untouched by it. In addition to ruling out the possibility that real desires
and interests may be shaped by power, Lukes dismissed the possibility
that one could take real pleasure or have something to gain in submitting
to power. His strategy was to give power a "face," to give B a face to replace
the anonymous A, in order to hold the powerful accountable. (Recall the
failure of my own attempt to do the same in the case of the dumpster
lockup).
Holding B responsible for inaction was beside the point. B, in his or her
innocence of power, was purely its object. The point was to transform B
into a participatory, democratic actor.41 The lack of political resistance was
posed as a problem to be solved by producing the truth of power. Presum-
ably, armed with the truth, the apathetic would realize the need for action
to depose the powerful. For example, we ask why a battered woman does
not leave the batterer, or why relatively few recipients, during the disman-
tling of the welfare state, organized any resistance? Faith in the truth of
power — that is, that if only people knew the facts and ignored the news-
papers, they would act — also shaped our expectations of democratic and
feminist scholarship (which the debates over poststructuralism have amply
illustrated).42 The truth of power was never revealed in the "three faces"
debate. Why does this way of posing the question of power persist, given
how long the answer has been deferred and how long the face-to-face con-
frontation with power has been deferred? What can account for the persis-
tent questioning of power in terms of the truth or falsity of domination and
political exclusion?
Though I cannot answer these questions in full, I want to point out that
both pluralists and radical theorists of democracy sought to represent those
who did not speak out on their own behalf. In both cases, the truth of
power was intended to speak in the voice of those who did not represent

Democratic Subjects 33
 themselves. The will to speak the truth of power was in effect the will to
speak on behalf of those whose silence placed a strain upon the legitimacy
of liberal democratic government. (Of course, it is impossible to speak in
the voice of the voiceless without first constituting their inability to speak
for themselves.)
Further, both sides accepted that the measure of democratic freedom is
the transparency of power and the openness of political processes.43 If plu-
ralists argued that power was transparent in the present despite inequality,
then the left argued that invisible powers prevented the promise of open-
ness from being realized. On all sides, "power" admitted into political analy-
sis was seen to operate through the repression of the essential subjectivity
of citizens and to result in their exclusion. So long as the transparency of
power was accepted as the measure of democratic freedom, the question
of how power actually works was displaced.
If we are to understand how democratic modes of government work, it
is essential to ask not who has power and who does not, but how does power
operate? If power relationships cannot be made wholly transparent, how
can they be made democratic?

Producing the Poor, or Making Subjects

To understand how welfare provision contributes to the making of citi-

zens, one must first refute the (currently) common wisdom that the welfare
state is a system of social control, that the state literally produces the poor.
Two recent books, one from the left and one from the right, suggest that a
welfare system produces dependents (subjects) rather than citizens. Both
books advance arguments that tie the subordination of welfare recipients to
the powers and interests of elites. Each proposes the dismantling of the
welfare state as a solution to poverty and the subjugation of poor people. A
brief review of these proposals will show how commonplace understandings
about the social construction of welfare recipients have become. Whereas
both books, from opposed ideological perspectives, advance the thesis that
the powers and interests of elites cause the subjection of poor people,11 ar-
gue that neither explains why so many welfare recipients comply with a sys-
terti that works against their qwn interests because the authors of the books
mistake the production of subjectivity for its repression!
In Losing Ground, a book famously held to account for the welfare cuts
made during the Reagan administration, Charles Murray argues that the
Great Society programs "produced more poor." 44 Murray asserts that social

34 The Will to Empower

policies in the 1960s actually brought about the dependence of the poor
and solidified the impoverished into a permanent class of dependents. Those
results were inadvertent, he believes, and the Great Society's attempt to
eradicate poverty was noble, if tragically wrongheaded and elitist. When
policy-making elites responded to the civil rights movement with an ex-
panded welfare system, according to Murray, their interests were not in im-
proving the lives of blacks but in remedying their own white guilt. Through
aiming to end poverty, social policy in fact developed a paternalistic system
governed by liberal whites that encouraged the dependence of blacks. In
short, the newly expanded welfare system did not end poverty but pro-
duced more poor people: "Theoretically, any program that mounts an in-
tervention with sufficient rewards to sustain participation andean effective
result will generate so much of the unwanted behavior (in order to become
eligible for the program's rewards) that the net effect will be to increase the
incidence of the unwanted behavior."45
In Murray's argument the problem boils down to the fact that liberal
democratic programs are voluntary and so cannot demand or force their
clients to make the sacrifices necessary to better their condition. So long as
the success of programmatic aims is dependent upon people's voluntary
participation, the program will be unable to demand that recipients do
whatever is necessary to become self-sufficient. Following from his com-
putation of the carrots and sticks delivered by the system of welfare, Mur-
ray advocates the complete dismantling of the welfare system in order to
allow the market to determine and coerce the desired behavior.
Democratic government cannot force people to become self-sufficient,
but, according to Murray, the market can. For example, "the technology of
changing human behavior depends heavily on the use of negative reinforce-
ment in conjunction with positive reinforcement."46 In other words, moti-
vations are always the same (self-interest), but behavior in pursuit of those
interests is changeable. Behavior, then, can be determined by the organi-
zation of the social and structural order of incentives and disincentives. But
only a free market structure can actually promote self-sufficiency. Murray's
conception of social construction is remarkable for its determinism.
Despite its influence, Murray's book did not inaugurate the complete
dismantling of welfare. Although A F D C is now all but dismantled, recipi-
ents have not been turned directly out into the cold of the market but
turned over to a new system of perpetual job training. Still, Murray does
not really answer why recipients complied with a system that produced
their poverty. If all behavior is self-interested, why wouldn't rational people

Democratic Subjects 35
 choose to subject themselves to the dictates of the market? His attempted
answer is that welfare produced irrational behavior by overriding market
incentives, especially among young black males. The labor market did not
disappear, however, and if human beings are rationally self-interested, as
Murray maintains, then they would choose to discipline themselves in the
market rather than in the system of welfare. (Of course, Murray followed
up Losing Ground with a book that undermined his own claim that all be-
havior is rational; in The Bell Curve, he argued that black male poverty is
related to low IQ!)47
From the left, in The Tyranny of Kindness, Theresa Funiciello makes a
different argument for dismantling the welfare system, but one that has the
same basic structure as Murray's. According to her detailed and carefully
documented indictment of the poverty industry, welfare works to create
punitive, discretionary, and stigmatizing bureaucratic structures. More im-
portant, welfare works to enrich middle-class social service providers, cor-
porations, and nonprofit foundations. Funiciello identifies the causes of
poverty and the political exclusion of poor women, first, in the economic
interests of the rich and of service providers and, second, in their ability
to mask their prejudices and their economic interests in the ideology of
helping. The bulk of most welfare budgets, she argues — including philan-
thropic, for-profit, state, county, and federal expenditures — goes into the
pockets of the middle-class service providers, leaving poor women poor.
Funiciello claims that the emphasis on service over direct income redis-
tribution to the poor masks the massive redistribution of wealth to middle-
class poverty pimps. The poverty industry expanded so much during the
1980s that social service agencies and programs actually had to compete
for clients. But that was not the only reason that clients were scarce. Ac-
cording to Funiciello, service providers and recipients were engaged in a
struggle over the right to represent the interests'of the poor:

The toughest adversaries of welfare mothers who organized for their rights
were often those in the "not for profit" charity organizations. These func-
tioned in a kind of vulterine relation to poor people. Their very survival de-
pended upon the existence of poor people. In theory, they were "allies." In
fact, as agents of the status quo, they couldn't sell poor women out fast
enough. (Or buy some, advertise them in their promotional literature, and
parade them around like tamed savages, living testimony to the power of so-
cial work.) Sometimes they were even well-intentioned. Class and cultural
barriers combined with their paychecks made it all but impossible for them

36 The Will to Empower

 to understand poor women at all, much less represent their interests. Active
[activist] welfare mothers who tried to hold on to their own agendas with-
out getting walloped by "helping hands" were universally skeptical of the
do-good agencies. They had been all been "helped" at least once too often.48

Contra Murray, Funiciello argues that recipients are well aware that
welfare does not serve their interests. In fact, her book is filled with anec-
dotes about women who did not act as the system expected them to.
The Tyranny of Kindness opens with the story of Fatima Ali, who threw her
children out the window rather than face a life of impoverished single-
motherhood. From the morbid to the heroic, the devious to the courageous,
the range of resistance that Funiciello documents inadvertently demon-
strates that the powers of the powerful depend not so much on the exclu-
sion of the poor as on recruiting and retaining the voluntary compliance of
their clients in punitive and coercive programs.
But Funiciello does not account for why so many seek and continue to
receive "help" that in all actuality, as she herselfjrgues, is no help at all. Al-
though she writes from the perspective of those who suffer the conse-
quences of the poverty industry, the combined causes of ruling-class inter-
ests and ideology fail to account for the possibility that a recipient might-
either refuse or demand "help." Nevertheless, in arguing that power works
to serve the interests of the rich by producing the acquiescence and exclu-
sion of the poor, as well as their condition of poverty, she gives evidence in
countless examples that refute the social control thesis. When she argues
that welfare recipients are excluded, intimidated, and impoverished by the
system of welfare and social services, Funiciello fails to recognize the po-
litical significance of the fact that welfare programs operate to promote au-
tonomy, self-sufficiency, and participation. In her eyes, those objectives are
merely an ideological justification for enriching the middle-class poverty
pimps, not a rationale for governing the poor, h t
For example, poverty pimps cannot force a pregnant woman into a pre-
natal health-care program. Attempts in the 1980s to incarcerate drug addicts
during the term of their pregnancy proved unpopular and unsuccessful.49
Methods to induce women to enter programs voluntarily included gifts of
diapers, toys, and cosmetics, all donated by local businesses and offered as
inducements to participate in prenatal care. Another was the "Tupperware"
model of home parties, where one invites friends to participate in plans to
earn free goods.50 But because such programs operated under intense su-
pervision and control, recruitment was a constant problem.

Democratic Subjects 37
 Funiciello fails to look beyond the (hypothetical) clash of economic in-
terests between recipients and service providers to the political effects of
"help." Just the fact that there are poverty pimps does not explain how
poor people are governed. Moreover, in her single-minded focus on fol-
lowing the money trail, Funiciello fails to investigate the links between the
agencies, the professionals who staff them, and knowledge: in other words,
the links between representing the poor, helping the poor, and knowing
the poor.
While it is true that those who benefit most from welfare are middle-
class service providers, they do so by instrumentalizing the needs of others.
I mean to say not that their actions are instrumental in securing their own
interests but that they instrumentalize the voice of "the poor." Any claim
to know what is best for poor people, to know what it takes to get out of
poverty and what needs must be met in order to be fully human, is also a
claim to power. Even the silence of the poor can be instrumentalized to
represent the poor, as Funiciello herself documents; silence can be heard as
a call for new programs to ensure that the voice of "the poor" is heard.
In other words, service providers and caseworkers not only wield power
in their own interest; they also act upon the interests of those they "help."
In Funiciello's account of the poverty industry, programs are designed in
the name of "the poor" without ever so much as consulting poor people
about their needs —yet her own evidence suggests that every conceivable
effort is made to document poor women's desires and needs in order to turn
those desires into an instrument for recruiting. Funiciello aptly uses the
vocabulary of market research: "the creation and marketing of homeless
people," for example.51 Recipients do have to be created, however, their
social construction is founded not on the abnegation of their real interests
but on the production of their interest in helping themsleves.

Making Citizens: Bio-Power

By neglecting the question of how power works and focusing solely

on the question of who has the "real" power, Murray and Funiciello miss
what I take to be the political significance of welfare: it is a form of gov-
ernment that is both voluntary and coercive. jMuch more than a way of
organizing interests, it is also a way of organizing power, a way of acting
on people's actions rather than procuring their apathy^ Welfare, bureau-
cracy, and administration are not modes of governance that cancel out

38 The Will to Empower

citizenship by producing subjects, dependence, and quiescence. They are
modes of government that work upon the capacities of citizens to act on
their own behalf.52
Democratic governance cannot force its interests but must enlist the
willing participation of individuals in the pursuit of its objects. Interven-
tion aims, for example, at transforming the aspirations of drug addicts to
those of being good mothers and maintaining custody of their children —
for their own good and for the good of all of society. Intervention and pre-
vention work as a kind of recruitment. Even when an economic rationality
is brought to bear on a social problem (drug addicts must be made over into
self-governing agents in order to spare the state the expense of foster care
and treating drug-addicted infants), its method is to govern people by get-
ting them to govern themselves.
To be sure, legislation in several locales would charge those who give
birth to addicted babies with criminal neglect. The strategy to prevent
harm, however, has so far won out over the strategy of punishment. De-
spite the fact that many people caught between a drug conviction and a re-
hab program for pregnant mothers are coerced into participating, the pro-
gram is still one option of more than one. If they were not voluntary,
programs could not claim to represent the interests of those they serve.
A program might attempt to invest a young mother in "parenting." She
is encouraged to understand herself as a parent, to prioritize her relation-
ship with her child, and to understand that relationship as a field of action
in which she and her child can become empowered. In social programs, co-
ercion can, by definition, never be in anyone's interest.53 The interests to be
served are the autonomy, the well-being, the very life of mother and child.
I am describing here a mode of exercising power, a mode of govern-
ment, that only rarely resorts to violence. Foucault called the exercise of
such power in liberal democratic regimes "bio-power." Bio-power, he
wrote, "brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calcula-
tions and made knowledge-power an agent of the transformation of human
life." 54 The political rationality of bio-power turns human needs, welfare,
and desires into the terrain of governance. Bio-power renders life itself
governable, making it possible to act not only upon the body, by force, but
also upon the subjectivity (soul) of human being.55
"The professionalization of being human," as Funiciello put it, does not
pit the interests of the experts against the interests and self-knowledge of
the people. Rather, bio-power, through the administration and regulation

Democratic Subjects 39
 of life and its needs, enacts the good of all society upon the antisocial bod-
ies of the poor, deviant, and unhealthy. It seeks to unite the interests of the
individual with the interests of society as a whole (a strategy I described in
the introduction).
The health, education, and welfare of the people constitute a territory
upon which it is possible to act. Solutions to the problems of poverty and
need can be tried out only after the problem of poverty is transformed into
a set of possible actions. For example, to declare a war on poverty, drugs,
or garbage is to say that these fields are open to action, places upon which
it is possible to act, and where government might intervene. To wage a war
on human need is to extend the reach of bio-power, to mobilize knowledge
and power on the terrain of poverty, hunger, violence, or drugs.
As I have noted, Foucault defined government broadly as "the conduct of
conduct," an "ensemble formed by the institutions, analyses and reflections,
the calculations and tactics, that allow the exercise of this very specific al-
beit complex form of power." 56^A11 those experts and agencies that are au-
thorized to intervene in the life of a pregnant crack addict, for example —;
doctors, police, therapists, judges, child protection officials—are involved
in making up the ensemble^j The ways poor people are governed very of-
ten have little to do with state power except when, for example, the national
guard is brought in. More often, poor people are governed at the level of
the social through case management, empowerment programs, parenting
classes, and work training. Again, constituting the needs and interests of
others to fulfill their human potential is a mode of governing people.58
For social problems to be territorialized, they must be known. For gov-
ernment to solve the "social problems" of poverty, delinquency, depen-
dency, crime, self-esteem, and so on, it must have a certain kind of knowl-
edge that is measurable, specific, and calculable, knowledge that can be
organized into governmental solutions. Social scientific knowledge is cen-
tral to the government of the poor, to the very formation ofthe.poor as an
identifiable group (see Chapter 3), and to the formation of the domain of
social government. Foucault suggests that the beginning of modern forms
of government is marked by "new methods of power whose operation is
not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not
by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and
in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus."59
Following Foucault, I argue that the subjectivity of the citizen is the ob-
ject and the outcome of government. That is not to say that no subjectiv-

40 The Will to Empower

ity exists prior to government, for that would be to say that government
produces subjects, not citizens. I am concerned here with a form of power
that promotes rather than represses subjectivity, power J^hat produces and
relies upon active subjects rather than absolute subjugation. Instead of ex-
cluding participation or repressing subjectivity, bio-power operates to in-
vest the citizen with a set of goals and self-understandings, and gives the
citizen-subject an investment in participating voluntarily in programs,
projects, and institutions set up to "help" them.
Acquiescence and rebellion are not antithetical but can take place in the
same breath. I originally began writing in a vein similar to Funiciello's, de-
claring that poor women on welfare are excluded from meaningful partic-
ipation and explaining how undemocratic, racist, and punitive welfare is,
particularly AFDC. It took me many years of activism to realize that the
blatant injustice of welfare is just that — blatant, obvious. There is no con-
tradiction, no set of facts to marshal against the pervasive myths, no un-
derlying and liberating truths to expose. My vantage point has changed:
welfarejrecipients are not excluded or controlled by power so much as
constituted and put into action by power.
Murray and Funiciello, although they hope to transform welfare recip-
ients from subjects into citizens, simply repeat the "truth" that they are
subjects — socially constructed, controlled, and manipulated. Yet revealing
the "true" causes of their subordination cannot help to treat recipients as
citizens. I am arguing that welfare does not cause citizens to behave in one
way or another. Rather, as Foucault puts it, welfare "structures the possible
field of action by others."60 Which is to say that welfare recipients are al-
ready citizens, fully capable of action.
This is a messy argument to make. No one says this better than John
Marr, the fictional narrator of Samuel Delany's novel The Mad Man, in his
account of the life of Timothy Hasler, a fictional philosopher:

But what is inchoate in Hasler's work, from beginning to end —what he best
represents — is the realization that large-scale, messy, informal systems are
necessary in order to develop, on top of them, precise, hard-edged, tractable
systems; more accurately, structures that are so informal it's questionable
whether they can be called systematic at all are prerequisites for those
structures that can, indeed, be recognized as systems in the first place. . . .
For Hasler, the messy is what provides the energy which holds any system
within it coherent and stable.61

Democratic Subjects 41
 Hasler, then, subverts the causal order found in Funiciello and Murray's
arguments for the abolition of welfare. He also suggests to me that welfare
is not the cause of dependence and poverty but the effect of messy, non-
generalizable, and contingent practices, institutions, and discourses — not
whole systems. Social construction is just not that simple or straightfor-
ward. /The system and its makers do not create order from above; rather,
the messiness of small things makes possible a large system like welfare^

42 The Will to Empower

I
The Liberal Arts of Governance

The social is an enigmatic and worrying figure of which no one wants to

take stock for fear of losing one's way or one's Lenin.
JACQUES DONZELOT

But society equalizes under all circumstances, and the victory of equality
in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact
that society has conquered the public realm, and that distinction and dif-
ference have become private matters of the individual.
HANNAH ARENDT

It is along the same line that the points of authoritarianism, the points of
reform, the points of resistance and revolution, come face to face around
this new stake, "the social."
GILLES DELEUZE

In the associations between the political liberty of all (citizenship)

and the subjection of some (the "unfit," "residuum," "dependent," "under-
class"), between the self-acting and those who fail to act, and in their solu-
tions to "social problems," nineteenth-century reform societies devised
the practical arts of liberal government. The principles guiding the liberal
arts of government, as shown in the example of J. A. Hobson, were laid out
against utilitarian and rights-based political doctrines. They were derived
from political and social theory as much as from the political problems
facing liberal states, as the example of T. H. Green (below) illustrates. The
practical arts of liberal government, however, were not invented in their
totality or centrally administered by the state. It was the invention of "so-
ciety as a whole" that gave scope to a multitude of particular and localized
social programs, to the development of the social sciences and professional
 social work. The practical arts of government, I argue, gave material form
to the abstract space of the social. By illustrating both the principles and
the practical arts of government (philanthropy and self-help in particular)
and the strategies and techniques of social reform movements, I hope to il-
luminate both the origins and the limits of the will to empower.
If the advent of the social is the condition that enabled universal citizen-
ship it is also the condition under which democratic citizenship is con-
strained. Liberal rationalities had their origin long before the nineteenth
century, yet it was then that they took on a democratic form. With the grad-
ual granting of citizenship to the population as a whole over the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, exceptions to the rule of the individual's inviola-
bility were still glaringly obvious (slavery, the exclusion of women, age and
property restrictions), if less quietly tolerated. Yet with democratic citizen-
ship the people, not the state, were sovereign. A means of democratic gov-
ernment, one that did not violate the will of the people, had to be invented.
Against the grain of totalizing histories of social control and the liberal
presumption of voluntarism, I argue that the abstraction "society as a
whole" signals a mode of politics that is always in doubt, a politics that is
best expressed in oxymora such as voluntary servitude, regulated freedom,
and involuntary accord. My aim is to introduce into democratic theory
a conception of the social neither as the domain of autonomy and un-
coerced association (civil society) nor as the space of domination (social
control).1 Each of those two interpretations of the social tends to situate the
sources of citizenship outside the political, whereas I attempt to resituate
politics on the level at which citizens are constituted as free and politically active
subjects.
In the preceding chapter I argued against the idea that welfare is an
institution of social control. Here, I argue against two related arguments
that social modes of government, administration, and bureaucracy ei-
ther "politicize" or "depoliticize" relationships of power. Against the anti-
modernism of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the advent of the social did
not displace the political but did refigurethe political. I conclude by reinter-
preting the political significance of what Laclau and Mouffe call the "politi-
cization" of the social by "new social movements" in the 1960s. •<

Society as a Whole

Adam Ferguson, a figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, held that "man"

did not emerge from 1 state of nature and invent society. Against Rousseau,

44 The Will to Empower

he argued that the history of civil society was a natural one. Spontaneous
relations of authority, growing from the different capacities and strengths
of persons, developed into forms of political order and government. To
Ferguson, the self-regulation of civil society meant that political power was
not consensual but was the ongoing result of forming and re-forming au-
thority in civil society. The history of civil society was its own making and
re-making.2 To progress (a development that for Ferguson was not as in-
evitable as his contemporaries, David Hume and Adam Smith, seemed to
imply), civil society must be re-formed continually.3
Self-government and civic virtue were values for Ferguson, to be sure,
but they could not safely be the ends of intentional re-formation: "Corrupt
and vicious men, assembled in great bodies, cannot have a greater curse be-
stowed upon them, than the power of governing themselves."4 Any new de-
velopment of civil society was likely to be unplanned. Ferguson's vision of
social re-formation was not given a positive design until social reform and
change were rationalized and governmentalized in the nineteenth century.
What the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers did, according to Michel
Foucault, was to establish society as an order distinct from the political.5
Before this, John Locke, for example, had used "civil society" as a synonym
for political society, and governmental authority was modeled on the fam-
ily. After the autonomy of civil society was established, Foucault points out,
society became both the limit and terrain of liberal government. The prob-
lem for liberal government was to ensure the self-regulation of society
without interfering in its progress. To govern an already existing society,
government had to become the art of governing indirectly.
By the nineteenth century the preoccupation of social and political the-
ory with the origins of the social had fallen to the social scientific assump-
tion that society was always already there in total. Auguste Comte and
Emile Dürkheim, for example, treated the social as a causal force with its
own natural laws. Bruno Latour, among others, has made this point before:
"Sociology had become a positive science only once it stopped bickering
about the origins of society and instead started with the notion of an all-
embracing society that could then be used to explain various phenomena
of interest."6 The positive sum of those explanations was the social itself.
Latour, among others, argues that the social is an effect rather than a cause;
it can exist only insofar as it is continually brought into being.
To bring citizens into society, to transform the apathetic into citizens
willing and able to govern themselves democratically, reformers reinvented
government at the level of the social. British idealists such as T. H. Green,

The Liberal Arts of Governance 45

 Bernard Bosanquet, and Helen Bosanquet, among others, theorized "posi-
tive liberalism," a method of indirect government that split the differ-
ence between positive and negative liberty.7 The "negative liberty" so dear
to J. S. Mill was to Green a manner of pitting the individual against the
state. On the negative liberty of individuals, Green wrote, "It is only when
this liberty is interfered with that any occasion arises for an explanation of
the compatibility of the sovereign's right with the natural right of the in-
dividual; and it is just then that the explanation of the supposition that the
right of the sovereign is founded on consent, fails." 8 Indeed, Green re-
jected natural rights as a "fiction" and believed that negative liberty under-
mined the very possibility of legitimate government. Instead, he grounded
positive rights in the prior existence of civil society.
Positive liberty was not the opposite of negative liberty. Green did not
assert the positive rights of individuals against the state but, rather, that the
positive right of the individual to act in a manner consistent with the com-
mon good served as a regulatory principle. Positive liberty did not entail a
paternalist state that could force the citizen to act for the common good.9
Far from it — for once an action was forced, it was no longer a matter of
the citizen's own will, no longer a free action.
The individual and the state could not be at odds if the will of each was
directed toward the good of all. How could the state ensure that individual
wills would go in the direction of the common good without coercion?
Green held that society was both the source and the result of positive rights.
He argued that the voluntary actions and desires of individuals formed so-
ciety. Society could never make a claim on individuals to act against their
own desire because that would undermine the sources of civil society. So
long as individuals acted in the interest of their own well-being, they would
be acting in the interest of society. Each one "must, in short, be capable of
conceiving and seeking a permanent well-being in which the permanent
well-being of others is included." 10
But what of the case where individuals do not act in the interest of their
own well-being? Habitual drunkenness, for example, said Green, could not
be in anyone's interest. If the state interfered with the desire to get drunk
by outlawing alcohol, the individual's desire would not change by being
restrained. In that case, the individual's right was pitted against the state:
any obedience to the state's law would be given not freely, but only out
of fear of sanction. The capacity for rights "is a capacity which cannot be
generated—which on the contrary is neutralized — by any influence that

46 The Will to Empower

interferes with the spontaneous action of social interests." 11 Such a law
would undermine the capacities of individuals to exercise their rights still
further.
States could and should make laws that might have the appearance of
constraint in such cases, but those laws must be administered in such a way
as to enhance the capacities of individuals to act voluntarily for the com-
mon good. The state could not legislate morality, but it could legislate in
order to prevent harm. Green developed several well-worn test scenarios.
For example, although it may be immoral for parents to fail to educate their
child, there is nothing that the state should do about that. The state can,
however, prevent the child from growing up without the capacity to act
freely, which would in part be due to a lack of education. To prevent harm
to the child, then, the state may enforce the education of children.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Green was not begging the ques-
tion. The parent could choose to have the child educated by the church or
by private tutor. The parent was not told what to do or not to do, or which
education the child must have. Rather, the parent was compelled to do
something. The law "is from the beginning only felt as compulsion by those
in whom, so far as this social function is concerned, there is no spontane-
ity to be interfered with." 12 In this case, the parent's will would not be di-
rectly acted upon; neither would the child feel compelled to go to school
against his or her will. But the parent who did not will anything at all was a
serious political problem. The failure to will, then, and the failure to act
marked the terrain of state intervention.
Green asserted that there is freedom in self-restraint but not in restraint
by others. Any obedience to the state or to the common good must be "free
obedience," voluntarily and actively given; cooperation must be active
rather than passive compliance.13 Green claimed the right of the state to
promote morality, but not the right of the state to determine the moral
course. The state must act only to strengthen the moral capacities of indi-
viduals, to make it possible for them to restrain themselves, never to deter-
mine their ends.
How could the state calculate such a subtle distinction? If all obedience
was to be self-imposed, if all moral restraint was to be self-restraint, from
what did this capable self derive? From society, of course, but not from the
state. The indirect administration of morality and society was not spelled
out in detail by Green, but its principles were. It took a regiment of women,
as we will see, to transform those principles into techniques of government.

The Liberal Arts of Governance 47

 Governing the Poor: Reform Movements and Self-Help

I take self-help to be emblematic of the liberal arts of government; it is

a technique for reforming both society and the individual by indirectly
harmonizing their interests.
For better or for worse, here and in Chapter 4 1 outline self-help as a mode
of government that works through the maximization of citizenship. In the
hands of nineteenth-century reformers, self-help presented a solution to
the "social problems" of poverty, dependence, charity, and immorality. Self-
help serves here as an example of how the individual citizen is instrumentally
linked to "society as a whole." Moreover, it is a philanthropic technique
that is exemplary of modern government; it is both voluntary and coercive.
Rather than giving a full account of Victorian philanthropy, I focus only
upon self-help and only in the middle- to late Victorian period. The first
object of reform for Octavia Hill and others of the Charity Organization
Society (COS) was to bring an end to Christian charity. Such charity en-
couraged the dependence of the poor upon the rich, Hill argued, as well as
confirming the status of the rich over and above the poor. The COS aimed
to coordinate and rationalize charity so that it was less random and would
no longer reproduce or ritualize class divisions.
Hill ardently believed that help was not what those in need needed, so
to speak; what they needed was to help themselves, "to be brought back to
independence." In her characteristically forbidding style, she explained to
an audience of "volunteer visitors among the poor" her reasoning on char-
ity and alms: "First of all, I think they really make them poorer. Then I think
they degrade them and make them less independent. Thirdly, I think they
destroy the possibility of really good relations between you and them. . . .
You want to know [the poor], to enter their lives, their thoughts; . . . you
might collect their savings; you might sing for and with them . . . and make
them cleaner.14 Hill had first to change the desire of the visitors to help
others as a matter of Christian duty which, she argued, was inspired by the
self-interested desire on the part of the rich to do good, to perform one's
duty before God. The act of Christian charity ritualized the class order; it
inspired awe and deference in the helped and arrogance in the helper. Hill
sought a means to incorporate the poor into society so that the power and
charity of the wealthy could no longer secure the acquiescence of the poor.
The motivations of middle-class Christian charity and duty to the poor had
the unintended and irrational effect of producing a permanent class of de-
pendent poor. Instead of helping the poor, middle-class women in partic-

48 The Will to Empower

ular should seek out ways to get the poor to help themselves. By displacing
the helper, self-help was a technique for helping others that could be un-
dertaken in the interests of the poor themselves.
Self-help displaced the ritual of power in interclass relationships and
obstructed the ruling-class desire to express power over others. In the
same act, Hill found a means to express the will to empower, to overcome
working-class resistance and hostility to middle-class home visitors, and to
transform the visitor from an intrusive do-gooder into a friend. Her goal was
to eradicate class prejudice on both sides. Self-help unified the will to em-
power and the interests of the poor in a seamless relationship. By conduct-
ing the conduct of the poor rather than repressing them, Hill found a means
for the will to empower to create social solidarity between the classes.
The methods of self-help were punitive and coercive, but they were now
undertaken in the interest of the helped. "In nearly every case requiring
help there is some such step of self-help which ought to be taken by the
family itself, or a member of it." 15 Hill listed some possibilities, including
putting a daughter out to service or a son out to "a place," or moving the
family to cheaper lodging. The isolation of individual members of a family,
in other words, was a method of self-help. The sacrifices that were de-
manded of poor people would be understood, Hill assured her audience, as
a sign of respect from visitors who believed in the capacity and will of the
poor to help themselves.
Again, they could not be made to help themselves, for then the results
would last only as long as the application of force. A genuine solution to the
social problems of poverty and class inequality must be sought in self-help.
"For I do not myself believe that we from above can help the people so
thoroughly and well in any other way as by helping them to help them-
selves. This I think they are meant to do — this I believe they can do by
association and by forethought." 16 (I discuss the "science of association"
in Chapter 4.) To get the poor to reason, to think of their long-term inter-
ests, and to moralize their actions, one must recruit rather than force them
into the activity of helping themselves. The art of liberal government
needed to be democratic.
Mary Poovey has written about the same logic as it was applied to sell-
ing, rather than giving away, Bibles as a means of engaging the poor in their
own evangelization. Techniques of self-help underwent constant revision
and contestation among reformers. Ellen Ranyard's Female Bible Mission
(1857) altered the methods of distributing Bibles and clothing in order to
get the poor to invest in their own well-being. She insisted that Bibles be

The Liberal Arts of Governance 49

 purchased rather than given as gifts; they must be sold by the poor to the
poor so that they might more effectively reach one another. Ranyard's tech-
nique of self-help, Poovey suggests, was distinguished from similar efforts
by "her recognition that the poor could best be encouraged to help them-
selves if they were initially helped by another like themselves."17 Hill, on
the other hand, believed that visitors should learn from the poor how to help
(much as Colonel Waring learned from the ragpickers). Visitors had to live
among and go among the poor, where they would learn to abstain from
helping: "Those who love the poor and know them individually will [ab-
stain] more and more in the time to come." Rather than giving money or
gifts, one must "give oneself" to the poor. 18 Clearly, relations of power were
not ultimately settled by self-help. Reformers continued to seek out new
techniques for altering the relationship between helpers and the helped.
Hill was determined to avoid giving help or charity in the wrong way; to
avoid doing harm, the home visitor must thoroughly know the poor. Their
different circumstances and their characters must be classified and counted.
"My people are numbered; not merely counted, but known, man, woman,
and child." 19 The relationship between those who help and those who are
helped to help themselves had to be intimate, and the knowledge derived
from that intimacy had to be carefully and faithfully "investigated" and
recorded in case records.
Hill had faith that the antisocial poor could be incorporated into society.
A given case of poverty, however, could be caused either by poor character
and habit or by poor circumstances and temporary bad luck, and to treat
both cases the same was to do more harm than good. It was not enough to
help others, to fulfill their needs or secure their living conditions. Their
capabilities had to be thoroughly investigated in order to make a decision
about what should be done. Through social investigation, home visiting,
and surveillance, reformers attempted to reach that delicate balance be-
tween governing too little and too much, to govern by maximizing the will
of the governed rather than determining it.
To unite knowledge of the poor with action, Hill suggested that a sec-
retary be assigned to coordinate and systematize volunteers' efforts to help.
The secretary would not visit the poor; her task would be to keep case
records and make them available to volunteers. She would also consult
with various authorities — police, church officials, school board officers —
on particular cases. She would not only supply a record of past decisions
regarding a case "but afterwards, when the decision was made and relief
granted or withheld, through succeeding years she would get the people

50 The Will to Empower

watched over with that continuous care without which right decisions at
any particular crisis of life lose half their efficacy; indeed, she might often
avert such a crisis altogether."20 The surveillance of the poor, then, was to
be ongoing, even without their application for assistance; prevention soon
replaced intervention as the watchword of reform. In other words, knowl-
edge was continually gathered but indirectly applied. No appeal for help
was necessary, since the interests and needs of the poor were represented
in their case records.
This activity was not directed in the interest of forming a permanent
profession for middle-class women or of giving free reign to the will to em-
power. Although those were two effects of the development of social work,
Hill herself made a case against forming a profession or bureaucracy for
helping the poor: "If we establish a system of professed workers, we shall
quickly begin to hug our system, and perhaps to want to perpetuate it even
to the extent of making work for it." 21 There were no general rules for
helping; the details of each case carried the information necessary for de-
termining the best course of help, and each case must be treated individu-
ally and systematically.22 The system of relief could not be generalized or
governed by principles, only by direct intervention and personal knowl-
edge of case histories.
Still, the detailed knowledge of individuals and families held in case rec-
ords did eventually displace the home visitor altogether, once statistical
projections of the needs and failings of the poor were generated without
physical contact. Moreover, self-help was designed to lift the people out of
themselves, to get them to objectify their own selves so that they would
have no further need to be the objects of help. The displacement of the
home visitor was a logical development in the rationalization of self-help.
Yet however indirect the relationship of power between the helper and the
helped, it was still a relationship of power that took two to enter, and resis-
tance and reticence on the part of the poor did not disappear.
The resistance of poor people to home visitors and Poor Law officials
and any class resentment of "do-gooders" had to be overcome somehow.
Even harder to surmount than their discontent and rebellion was the in-
difference of the poor. Helen Bosanquet, whose tenure in COS followed
Hill's and who oversaw the professionalization of social work that Hill had
resisted, sought a new solution: "It is to the discontented that the would-
be innovator of every description addresses himself — the socialist, the an-
archist, the vegetarian, the atheist, and all the multitude who have a favorite
social remedy to push. But discontent is only another form of living in the

The Liberal Arts of Governance 51

 present. . . . The one interest which has power to carry them out of them-
selves is politics."23
To lift the people out of the present, to get them to use foresight and aim
high, required that their discontent and their indolence be turned to "use-
ful citizenship."24 What was the method by which the discontent of the
people could be made useful without force or manipulation and without
determining its direction? That is, how could the people be governed with-
out state action? How was it possible to instrumentalize the interests and
actions of individuals without turning them into mere instruments?
For Bosanquet, what was needed was a means of harnessing individual
wills to the wheel of social progress that did not entail the political repres-
sion of the working classes. It was their action that she was concerned to
corral, not their quiescence. "I like to picture humanity as a great army
pressing onwards towards an invisible goal, and guided by a wisdom not its
own." 25 Whose wisdom? The anonymous wisdom of social conventions
that led society spontaneously toward progress. But where was all this "so-
cial progress" headed? By what principle was it to be guided?
Bosanquet's solution, the "Standard of Life," would seem to offer a fixed
and rigidly middle-class standard by which the poor should be measured
and governed, but it was in fact a standard set against the aristocratic ten-
dency to judge and to rule the poor by their own class standards. Because
the occupations of the poor were different from their own, the higher classes
perceived the very nature of the poor as different. The prejudice that there
was more than one class and therefore more than one society led tradi-
tionalists to assert a permanent antagonism between the classes. Bosanquet
objected; despite the fact that different people followed different standards,
there was still only one Standard of Life in the sense that all strove to fulfill
some standard. "We may of course allow that the working classes have dis-
advantages to contend against. . . but we must in common justice recog-
nize this power of determining their own standard of life and of working
toward it in their own way." 26 It was necessary to overcome resistance on
the part of all classes in order to practice the art of self-help.
The Standard of Life was not a fixed moral standard; in fact, it was "in-
capable of exact definition; in other words, its significance is inexhaustible,
for it has not yet become stereotyped into one narrow usage."27 The prob-
lem for Bosanquet was not that the poor lacked conformity to one true
standard but that they were judged too often by bourgeois standards.
Bosanquet told a story about how the standard of life works by compar-
ing it to a unit of measurement. On a stone wall in Trafalgar Square, she

52 The Will to Empower

said, is "something so important that it is hardly ever looked at," and few
even know it is there.28 It is the standard of measurements — furlong, yard,
foot, and inch — carved in the stone, determining what would be called "a
foot," "a yard," and so on. It is a standard that is used every day without
thought, anonymously guiding relations of exchange. It just is. Few won-
der where it came from, and fewer still would think to challenge it or re-
vise it. But it is there, and normal daily activities and progress would be
impossible without it. Indeed, agreement on the standard is implicit in
its use; otherwise measurement would be an infinite source of conflict.
When we measure, we concern ourselves not with the accuracy of "a foot"
but with whatever it is we are measuring against the standard. Such is the
case with the Standard of Life. We do not pursue our standard blindly so
much as we have no need to examine it. The Standard of Life works to
make the actions of individuals, despite their lack of conformity, move in
the same way.
This is consistent with how Foucault characterized normalization and
bio-power, which depend upon the operationalization of an illusive norm
that is nowhere actually defined. Because it is an illusive good, the Standard
of Life unites the diverse interests of individuals with the uniform interest
of society as a whole. It is at once, in Foucault's framing, individualizing
and totalizing. Class interests and pursuits need not conflict if each is di-
rected toward the progress of society as a whole. If each self, regardless of
class, pursued his or her own Standard of Life, then the class-divided soci-
ety could be transformed into a classless society, and, needless to say, that
would be progress.
Self-interest could work as an instrument of social progress only if it was
understood as the pursuit, rather than the restraint, of desire and differ-
ence. Echoing the words of T. H. Green, Bosanquet wrote: "We cannot
force interests of occupations or benefits of any kind upon men from with-
out, however desirable we may think them; they must grow out of their
own strivings and desires, their own planning and progress. The best we
can do for each other is to remove unnecessary obstacles, and the worst —
to weaken any of the motives which urge us to strive."29 Only the most "in-
direct" forms of governance could avoid making things worse.30 To change
the social order and to quiet class conflicts, then, it was necessary that gov-
ernment operate in such a way as to maximize the strivings of each and all.
There was one important social distinction to be made, however. Be-
tween the people that strive and those that do not, Bosanquet saw a vast di-
vide. Even in a classless society, those in the "Residuum," a kind of small

The Liberal Arts of Governance 53

 underclass, could not be helped because they simply had no desires beyond
mere survival or the next drink. They had no selves, so to speak, to help, no
Standard of Life to reach for; they were indifferent to their own lives.
"The Residuum" was certainly a moral designation, but any attempt to
redeem that class would be dangerous: "After all is said and done, organi-
zation is only one among many means of self-help; it is impossible to or-
ganize dead matter from the outside, and the true Residuum is economi-
cally dead. It may be possible to galvanize it into a temporary appearance
of life, to raise up a social monster that will be the terror of the communi ty;
but the best that can really be hoped for is that it should gradually wear it-
self away." 31 The existence of the Residuum was a threat to progress. Yet,
Bosanquet was quite sure it posed no lasting threat so long as it was not
acted upon. Because those in the Residuum had no desires, it would fail to
progress and would wither away. What positioned them outside society as
a whole was not that they had the wrong values but that they had no values.
The rest of the poor could be incorporated into society so long as they
strove for something, whatever it might be.
Rather than merely producing desired behavior and conformity or "de-
politicizing" class inequality, the technique of self-help relies upon action
and difference. Without the different standards held by individuals, the
progress of society would grind to a halt. And still, those differences of in-
terest and desire need not produce conflict so long as they are all directed
by a Standard of Life. Self-help is not a technique of government that can
be adequately described in terms of either positive or negative liberty, ac-
tion or behavior, citizenship or subjection. It aims to make the poor into
citizens through their voluntary subjection to their own interests and to
the Standard of Life.

Society as a Whole and Political Freedom

Rather than a technique of social control, I am arguing, self-help is a

means of instrumentalizing and maximizing the self-interest of the poor.
While it excludes those held to have no self-interest, it works to incorpo-
rate the rest. Individual freedom was both a premise and a limit of self-help
schemes. The danger was to encroach upon individual freedom by acting
too much or too little. Hence, self-help schemes underwent constant revi-
sion and reform.
The necessity of reform reveals that political order changes not only

54 The Will to Empower

during exceptional times of political upheaval but as a matter of course.32
The political importance of reform societies follows from their continual
re-forming of the relationships between public and private, personal and
political, political and social. Self-help is not strictly a social or a personal
relationship but one that changes the nature of society and the person. Self-
help is a political relationship, a technique for solving political problems
such as poverty and class conflict. Rather than negating the autonomy and
action of citizens, social government is a means of promoting and instru-
mentalizing citizenship and autonomy.
The liberal arts of government are applied not only to the administra-
tion of the state but to the management of the economy, the population,
children, the poor, and the sick. Liberal "rationalities of government," as
Foucault said, are methods for "the conduct of the conduct" of others and
oneself.33 Under liberalism, the inviolability of the economy and the indi-
vidual mean that the state can not directly govern their domains, the eco-
nomic and the private. The most typical manifestation of liberal rationali-
ties, of course, is an argument for limiting the size and number of the state's
interventions into society, e.g., self-government.
Self-help provides a solution to political problems that do not require
state action, conformity to society, or the repression of dissent. In fact, by
enlarging the scope and reign of individuals, self-help is a technique that
works to limit the need for state action — not by "depoliticizing" class re-
lations or excluding the poor from politics but by getting them to act.
Quite another view of the social, in the enormously influential work of
Hannah Arendt, is as a homogeneous and homogenizing "blob." 34 Arendt's
condemnation of the social as a scourge upon the political is an important
source of the failure of democratic theory to see the social as a source of the
transformation of the political in modernity. In her view, the political can-
not be resituated vis-ä-vis the social and the private without losing its char-
acter altogether. She treated each as a distinctive sphere locked in a zero-
sum game with the others. Arendt, whose writings have provoked several
critical oppositions leveled by democratic theorists, argues that the "rise of
the social" meant the decline of public life. When the elements of the so-
cial, especially the economy and the family, became public, private inter-
ests and personal differences crowded out a purely political concern for the
political order. Indeed, she suggests, the fact that the family ceased to serve
as a model for political rule "may also be due to a development in which so-
ciety devoured the family unit until it became a full-fledged substitute for

The Liberal Arts of Governance 55

 it." 35 "Social housekeeping" supplanted political rule as well as the private
rule of the family. The political disappeared and along with it the possibil-
ity of freedom.
Arendt argues that the social was the space of a tyrannical mode of gov-
ernment, the social was a realm of "Rule by Nobody." But this nobody
"does not cease for having lost its personality. As we know from the most
social form of government, that is, from bureaucracy, . . . the rule by no-
body is not necessarily no-rule; it may indeed, under certain circumstances,
even turn out to be one of its cruelest and most tyrannical versions."36 To
be sure, Arendt had cause for alarm. In her mind, totalitarianism was the
result of the thoughtlessness of bureaucratic rule. She believed that "rule
by nobody" signaled the complete domination of homo politicus, a kind of
tyranny exercised not by a tyrant but by the encroachment of the social into
the one possible space of freedom and action: the political.
Arendt draws the line between the social and the political to mark off the
realms of behavior and action, respectively. Behavior, the outcome of dis-
cipline and "normalization," is opposed to the freedom possible only in the
public realm: "It is decisive that society, on all its levels, excludes the pos-
sibility of action. . . . Instead, society expects from each of its members a
kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend
to 'normalize' its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous
or outstanding achievement."37 Whereas the public is the realm of action
and individual plurality, the social is a realm of behavior and individual con-
formity. The separate character of these realms, for Arendt, permanently
fixed the potentials for human-being in each one. The political could not
be re-formed or even refigured without losing the space of freedom.
Arendt goes so far as to present conflict in the terms of whole "realms" at
war: "The social realm, where the life process has established its own pub-
lic domain, has let loose an unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural;
and it is against this growth, not merely against society but against the con-
stantly growing social realm, that the private and the intimate, on the one
hand, and the political (in the narrower sense of the word), on the other,
have proved incapable of defending themselves."38
Such passages read as if the social realm were a pernicious weed rather
than a "hybrid." 39 But these organic metaphors foreclose discussion of the
possibility that politics itself sets the borders of the political. As I have been
arguing, the social and the political, like subjectivity, cannot be properly
understood outside the conditions of their own production. Arendt cannot
see that the social is a product of human action, not simply a realm of be-

56 The Will to Empower

havior, because she sets in absolute opposition the political capacity to act
and the behavior produced in the social realm.
For Arendt, politics is an external field occupied by the citizen engaged
in creating reality, what she calls "worldliness." For the creature of the so-
cial and the private, reality is a dead weight, unalterable and therefore such
a creature has no place and no politics but merely inhabits "worldlessness."
The political excludes those aspects of life that are private, natural, bodily,
habitual, social, economic, or familial. The social, Arendt argues, is neither
public nor private. The advent of the social "brought about the simultane-
ous decline of the public as well as the private realm."40 Arendt despised
this development and mourned the loss of the one authentically political
creation of "man": a truly political public sphere of action and freedom.
Like Tocqueville before her, Arendt sees the possibility of a completely
new and terrible tyranny in democratic equality, in a "rule by nobody" that
blurs the lines between the public and the private: "Society equalizes under
all circumstances, and the victory of equality in the modern world is only
the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the
public realm, and that distinction and difference have become the private
matters of the individual."41 Rather than a measure of progress, equality is a
measure of how far a society has devolved from the ideal of the Greek polis.
Arendt imagines that without a truly political public sphere of action,
human plurality will disappear or devolve further into mere difference —
what we call "diversity" today.
The loss of "the political" operates for Arendt as a critical mark of mo-
dernity. Democratic theory will not be reconciled to mass democracy,
however, so long as the Greek standards of the political are used to judge
contemporary politics. Arendt equates the rise of the social with the loss of
political reality altogether rather than with a new mode of constituting po-
litical reality. In other words, she assumes that there is a unity conferred by
one or another of these regimes, the political or the social-bureaucratic.
It is a misnomer to classify Arendt as a democrat, in part because for her
the existence of the political has no necessary relation to democratic gov-
ernment 42 Rather, the political precedes any particular form of govern-
ment. The political itself cannot survive the institutionalization of the space
of appearance. In the political, there is no place for government, only for
action.43
The critical distinction between the political and the social leaves no
room for the possibility that the political might be reinvented, relocated
or re-formed. Indeed, in her view, the political can not be reinvented, be-

The Liberal Arts of Governance 57

 cause it is itself the condition of possibility for political invention. In other
words, the political is not just the sphere of politics but the origin of gen-
uine politics. Once again, to see either the social or political as anything
other than an effect of human action is to foreclose the possibility of new
re-formations.
Arendt refuses to entertain the possibility that political action might be
taken to relocate the political in new relationships to the social and the pri-
vate. In fact, however, the unity of the social assumed by Arendt is the out-
come of innumerable changes in the techniques and strategies of govern-
ment. Her critical opposition of the political and the social is misleading;
to understand the possibilities for democracy, we need to call the assump-
tion of separate spheres — public and private, state and civil society — into
question.
There are other means by which democratic antiliberalism might criti-
cally confront the subjective aspects of citizenship under liberal govern-
ment. The liberal arts of government do act upon the subjective capacities
of citizens, not in any sinister way but through governmental techniques
grounded in the social. The individual's will and freedom to act are brought
into line with the social good not through their negation but through the
activation and maximization of the individual's will. These techniques are
changeable and within reach politically without recourse to "the political."
The rise of the social does not necessarily signal the end of difference and
distinction or total conformity; it may even signify a new means of consti-
tuting human plurality.44 Indeed, one of the reasons Arendt deplores the
rise of "social housekeeping" is that women (unequals) have found their
way into public life through the arts of liberal government.

Governing and Guiding Women

The social was and is the province of women and feminist reformers in
particular. "The new breed of governing and guiding women," in Beatrice
Webb's phrase, organized and entered social life through philanthropy.45
Indeed, the phrase "municipal housekeeping" was applied to sanitary re-
form in part because of the large number of female reformers who took re-
sponsibility for cleaning up the garbage and pollution in their cities. One
report from 1897 explains why women involved themselves in indirect
forms of government: "Every attempt on the part of women to benefit the
public is necessarily somewhat indirect. They do not hold the ballot, nor sit
in legislative halls. . . . Their part in public reforms is chiefly suggestive or

58 The Will to Empower

cooperative."46 The exclusion of women from politics does not entirely ex-
plain their social activism, however.
Denise Riley, to whose account of the social my own work is deeply in-
debted, suggests that middle-class women emerged as collective subjects of
politics alongside the invention of the social as a field of intervention into
the lives of poor women.47 It was not only because women (meaning then
middle-class women) were excluded from the political that they acted within
the social. It was also the case that middle-class women and other excluded
populations "lacked a stake in maintaining the status quo."48 Among the ex-
cluded, however, the stakes of middle-class women were uniquely invested
in the will to empower.49
Feminist and social historians have documented middle-class women's
entry into public-political life as social reformers, philanthropists, and
charity workers.50 Of course, prostitutes and working-class women had
appeared in public long before there was woman suffrage. As Riley argues,
the social enabled women's activism even as it limited the political soli-
darity of "women" to the claim that women are naturally more benevo-
lent helpers than men. What seems of great significance here is that femi-
nism was caught up at the outset in the development of the liberal arts of
government.
Feminists today need not construct an alternative vision of the welfare
state so much as to confront the feminist and feminine legacy of social gov-
ernment. The feminist problem with government is still caught within
the basic dilemma of liberal government. It is most familiar in its philan-
thropic guise: how can feminists help poor and disenfranchised women
when those women cannot or will not articulate their own needs in the
form of political demands? And when they do, how is it possible to meet
those needs without constituting poor women as needful? What should
be done when women refuse to act politically to represent themselves?
The feminist problem with governance can be posed in many different
ways, most notably in terms of "the man in the state" or the public sphere,
as Wendy Brown and Nancy Fraser do, respectively.51 It can also be posed
in terms of the will to empower embedded in practical relations of help.
It is much too common in democratic and feminist theory to shirk the
question of governing by insisting upon the centrality of politics. For ex-
ample, Nancy Fraser describes the professionalization of the movement to
aid battered women, but she does not critically assess the techniques that
feminists have invented to compel battered women to act in their own self-
interest.52 She skirts the question of feminist government when she opposes

The Liberal Arts of Governance 59

 "the tendency for the politics of need interpretation to devolve into the ad-
ministration of need satisfaction."53 The trade-off, as Fraser sees it, is be-
tween two interpretations of need; battered women's expression of their own
needs and political demands, and the professional interpretation of those
needs. By dichotomizing "politics" and "administration," Fraser conceives
of administration as the antithesis of a genuine feminist politics. Perma-
nently deferring the problem of government, she calls for an alternative vi-
sion of a future and more nearly perfect (radically democratic, socialist, or
feminist) welfare state; she does not call for new techniques of government,
just new principles of government.
If feminists are to counter the successes of neoliberal reforms effectively,
we cannot choose between defending and attacking the welfare state. Recall
from the introduction my account of the activist's version of the welfare
trap. Feminists must critically assess our own methods, in Beatrice Webb's
phrase, of "governing and guiding" other women. Another way to say this
is that feminism's will to empower other women must undergo some in-
tense scrutiny. The problem for feminists is not whether to help other women
but how, what form should helping take? The question is not whether fem-
inists should defend the welfare state or come up with an alternative vision
of it, but how feminists can reinvent the mode of government we call
"help" and "welfare." 54
Wendy Brown points out that the feminist left once attacked the dis-
ciplinary and constitutive relationship of women to the state. She calls
the recent turn in feminism to defending the welfare state, particularly by
Frances Fox Piven and Barbara Ehrenreich, a "retreat from the politics of
domination within capitalism."55 Brown poses the question to Piven, "Do
these expanding relationships [of women to the state] produce only active
political subjects, or do they produce regulated, subordinated, and disci-
plined state subjects?"56
Piven indirectly answers Brown's question: "I think it is an undiscrimi-
nating antipathy to the state that is wrong, for it is based on a series of mis-
leading and simplistic alternatives. On the one hand, there is the possibil-
ity of power and autonomy; on the other, dependence and a controlling
state. But these polarities are unreal: All social relationships involve ele-
ments of social control, and yet there is no possibility for power except in
social relationships."57 It would seem that in this answer, Piven is the more
Foucaultian. That matters only in the sense that although Piven agrees
with Brown that women's subjectivities are constrained by the conditions

60 The Will to Empower

of their production in the welfare state, Piven holds — as do I — that the
constitutive powers of the state do not determine women's subjectivity.
The feminist turn from an anti-statist to a defensive posture vis-ä-vis the
state is not new. When the left first rejected Nixon's plan for a national
guaranteed income, the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), it did so in the name
of an inarticulate rebellion on the part of the masses. The National Wel-
fare Rights Organization (NWRO) joined unions in lobbying hard against
FAP because it included work requirements, the minimum income was
set too low, and the plan jeopardized administrative due process. N W R O
leader George Wiley, with the grassroots membership fading, led the fight
against FAP, a position many welfare activists later came to regret. Cur-
rently, the call for a guaranteed income nearly defines the left position on
welfare reform.
As another example, consider the transformation of the women's move-
ment in the Victorian era to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act. The re-
peal movement defended the political liberty of prostitutes against the
British government's plan to adopt the "French" system whereby doctors
and police were empowered to examine prostitutes medically and to keep
public records on them. Judith Walkowitz's history of the repeal move-
ment illustrates that the act transformed prostitution from a seasonal and
temporary occupation into a profession that divided prostitutes from the
working class and from alternative occupations.58 Soon after feminists won
the repeal, the movement was itself transformed into the Social Purity
Movement, which called for the protection of women and the prevention
of prostitution by the state.
Finally, consider the recent transformation of feminist sexual politics.
From the demand for women's control over their own bodies and women's
sexual autonomy, second-wave feminism divided into sectarian camps: "pro-
sex" on one hand, on the other the "anti-pornography" demand for state
censorship and the state regulation of sexuality.59
These examples illustrate that there is more at stake for feminists in the
politics of welfare reform than the left's betrayal of itself or of working-
class women. The enigma for feminism is not the state but the arts of
government practiced therein. As Gilles Delueze noted (see the epigraph
above), the left's anti-statism is of one piece with the strong statism it
switched to. Liberal democratic society is not wholly the realm of domina-
tion and discipline, nor does it contain the promise captured in the slogan
"civil society against the state." The critical oppositions between the state

The Liberal Arts of Governance 61

 and civil society, politics, and administration are misleading. The social is
a field of government, a field of possible actions rather than determined
outcomes.

The Crisis of Governability

The indeterminism of the social is obvious in the variety of interpre-

tations given to the rise of "new social movements" in the 1960s and the
"crisis of governability." The "crisis" was declared by the Trilateral Com-
mission in 1975. By that time, the "democratic surge," as Samuel Hunt-
ington labeled the increase in political protest and social movements of the
1960s, had grown into nothing less than a "crisis of democracy." Accord-
ing to Huntington, American democracy is prone to cyclical surges rooted
"in the basic American value system and the degree of commitment which
groups in society feel toward that value system."60 In effect, democratic
surges realign the relationship between civil society and the state. Hunt-
ington suggests that cyclical surges, including those in the Jacksonian and
progressive eras, caused a "deepening" of democracy and the expansion of
suffrage.
But the 1960s surge was different. It threatened to abolish the distinc-
tions between the state and civil society altogether by calling for democracy
in the family, the church, universities, even the military. In other words,
following the "democratization" or "politicization" of civil institutions, the
sources of citizenship would dry up because they flow only from stable and
uncontested institutional authority. With no clear borders protecting civil
institutions from political contests, they could no longer supply democratic
government with a predictable, reliable, and stable citizenry.
Ironically, Huntington argued, too much democracy spread to civil
institutions was bad for democracy. "The vitality of democracy in the
United States in the 1960s produced a substantial increase in governmental
activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority."61 Strong
democracy, then, leads to weak democratic government. Put another way,
democracy works best when it does not have to "work." "There are," Hunt-
ington advised, "potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of
political democracy. Democracy will have a longer life if it has a more bal-
anced existence."62
To restore the necessary balance, Huntington advanced two arguments
for limiting democracy. First, the problem of who demanded to participate

62 The Will to Empower

had to be addressed: "The effective operation of a democratic political sys-
tem usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the
part of some individuals and some groups."63 "Some" individuals and
"some" groups turned out, of course, to be very specific individuals and
groups. Huntington argued that "in the past" the politically active (white
elites) were those who had a high regard for the authority of government,
and those with "low trust" in government (students, blacks, women) were
generally apathetic. The tables hadn't turned, but "democratic distemper"
was the result of mixing the two groups in an increasingly polarized politi-
cal confrontation.64

Marginal social groups, as in the case of blacks, are now becoming full par-
ticipants in the political system. Yet the danger of overloading the political
system with demands which extend its function and undermine its author-
ity still remains. Less marginality on the part of some groups thus needs to
be replaced by more self-restraint on the part of all groups.65

Thus, a special responsibility fell on the shoulders of blacks to restrain

themselves in order to protect democratic stability. Huntington disregarded
the fact that the political system was, from the perspective of blacks, not a
democratic one in the first place. What was important to him was that the
civil rights movement threatened to destabilize the entire political order.
Second, and related, the extension of political participation to students,
women, and blacks was a dangerous thing not because those groups over-
ran the political realm but because they threatened to take politics out of
the public realm and into previously "nonpolitical" institutions. The prob-
lem was no longer to explain the low levels of democratic participation in
politics but to explain the increasing demands, particularly on the part of
women, ethnic groups, and students, for the democratization of all social
institutions: "the family, the university, business, public and private associ-
ations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services."66
"Democratic distemper," then, threatened to spread throughout society.
Huntington's response was unequivocal: "The arenas where democratic
procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited."67
The authority crisis of democracy originated not in the realm of gov-
ernment, according to Huntington, but in those institutions that governed
effectively because they governed undemocratically — including the family,
the university, and so on. (Huntington did not mention apartheid or Jim
Crow.) These now threatened institutions had once provided the uncon-

The Liberal Arts of Governance 63

 tested traditional authority that neutralized whatever instabilities erupted
from the democratic participation of white elites. "More precisely, in Amer-
ican society, authority had been commonly based on: organizational posi-
tion, economic wealth, specialized expertise, legal competence, or electoral
representativeness."68 The social sources of authority threatened to "over-
ride the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority."69
The stability of democracy, then, depended upon the nondemocratic or-
ganization of power and authority to govern outside the realm of govern-
ment. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former director of the Trilateral Commission,
proposed to "increasingly separate the political system from society and to
begin to conceive of the two as separate entities."70 Society could thus re-
turn to a sphere of autonomously formed authority, allowing the state to
restore its authority over a restricted public sphere. It was precisely in the
arena of the social that the "crisis of governability" was declared.
Whereas Huntington read the signs of crisis to indicate that the United
States suffered from too much democracy and participation, Sheldon
Wolin read the same signs to indicate a distemper caused by too little
(see Chapter i). Where Huntington saw the dangerous politicization of
social institutions and social authority, Wolin saw the "depoliticization" of
public-political life. As politics spread throughout social life, the state was
abandoned as a source of anything but entitlements. Wolin read these
changes as signaling not more democracy but less.
Huntington understood the political implications of the fact that the
disciplinary and constitutive functions of social institutions were undergo-
ing an intense transformation. But in Wolin's eyes, the political realm was
undergoing an intense depoliticization (or socialization), and the reliance
on discipline to govern — as opposed to democratic participation—was
growing. But although the two authors disagreed on the details of the
crisis, they did agree on its cause: an overflow of politics out of the realm
of the state and into the realm of the social.71
The debate over the crisis of democracy was, then, over the proper re-
lationship between the state and the social or civil society. Whereas the
only form of critique open to Huntington or Wolin was to insist on the
specificity of the political and the social, I later explore the possibility that
the political and the social have taken on new forms. I understand that
historical moment of "crisis" as a missed opportunity for the left to rein-
vent the liberal arts of government and to reconfigure citizenship by re-
configuring knowledge.72

64 The Will to Empower

 Arendt understood the disciplinary mechanisms of society, such as the
Standard of Life and self-help, as means to enforce conformity. The size of
mass democracy, along with equality, signaled to her a social form of rule
demanding "conformism, behaviorism, and automatism." Indeed, the rise
of the social also gave rise to the behavioral, social and statistical sciences
which Arendt took as evidence that the social had overgrown the political.
"If economics is the science of society in [the social's] early stages . . . the
rise of the 'behavioral sciences' indicates clearly the final stage of its devel-
opment, when mass society has devoured all strata of the nation and 4social
behavior' has become the standard for all regions of life." 73 But Arendt as-
sumed that the success of the social sciences and statistics in particular fol-
lowed from the uniformity and conformity that already existed in the realm
of the social, as if the categories of behavior were facts independent of the
ability of social scientists and statisticians to count them.
Ian Hacking, inspired by Foucault, suggests quite other relationships
between politics and numbers, difference and conformity, than those sug-
gested by Arendt. He dates the "avalanche of printed numbers" to around
1820 and argues that the behaviors counted never existed before the prac-
tice of counting them brought them into being: "New slots were created in
which to fit and enumerate people. Even the national and provincial cen-
suses amazingly show that the categories into which people fall change
every ten years. Social change creates new categories of people, but the
counting is no mere report of developments. It elaborately, often philan-
thropically, creates new ways for people to be." 74
Hacking numbers the statistical sciences as among the productive sci-
ences that link new knowledge to new ways of being. These links signal not
the end of action but new possibilities for action on new fields of social life
constituted by numbers. The links between behavior and numbers are not
links that merely dominate the preexisting capacity of the citizen to act but
links that constitute the ability to act.
In Chapter 5 I examine how "governing by numbers" produced the
racist and sexist figure of the black welfare queen. Here, I merely seek to
underline my argument that the subjectivities of democratic citizens are
shaped by social science and governing practices such as self-help. Calcu-
lation and categories do not displace or "depoliticize" power so much as
put power into operation. I read into the history of social reform and the
formation of a "wholly new kind of being" not any "depoliticization" of
that being but its very constitution as a political being. The effects of the

The Liberal Arts of Governance 65

 social organization of power are not repression, exclusion, depoliticization,
and domination; the effects of power are embodied in certain kinds of citi-
zens, ways of acting and knowing.
Also, the argument that democratic citizenship depends upon the abil-
ity of citizens to keep government at bay are untenable. As I have shown,
democratic theorists who pit society against the state prevent citizens from
acting upon the very definition of citizenship. If we want a new kind of
democratic citizen, then we must reinvent the means by which democratic
citizens are known and produced. This is not to say that revolution is out
of the question, just that a revolutionary subject, like a democratic subject,
must be made. That the techniques of Octavia Hill's COS were draconian
does not decree that all techniques for making citizens must be Victorian.
It is just as possible to produce sex radicals as to make good workers, to
produce cyborgs rather than "useful" citizens. The rise of the social sig-
naled a new scope for freedom as well as a new scope for power. The point
is, citizens are always already subject to power even in the "free space" of
civil society.

66 The Will to Empower

3
The Will to Empower:
Technologies of Citizenship
and the War on Poverty

Empowerment" emerged out of the 1960s as a strategy with near

universal appeal, a strategy that links, but does not necessarily unite, the
urban poor with feminists, A C T UP with civil rights movements, undocu-
mented labor with gang truce organizers, welfare rights activists with en-
vironmentalists. Social movements and radical activists share little in the
way of solidarity across the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality, but
they do share a method, a strategy for "empowerment." The political logic
and techniques of empowerment developed in social programs and reform
movements produced a technology of citizenship — a method for con-
stituting citizens out of subjects and maximizing their political participa-
tion. Technologies of citizenship, such as those aimed at empowering "the
poor," 1 link the subjectivity of citizens to their subjection, and link ac-
tivism to discipline.
 My argument here poses a challenge to the readiness with which we
use "empowerment" to signify an unquestionably noble or radical political
strategy. My suspicions probably became a bit more widespread once Jack
Kemp and Bill Clinton have equated "empowerment" with the privatization
of public services and with market solutions to the problems of urban pov-
erty and racism ("empowerment zones"). Since the 1980s the logic of em-
powerment has been mobilized as often by neoconservatives as by feminists
and the left. Activist neoconservatives Jack Kemp and Richard Darman de-
light in "stealing one of the Left's words," aiming to "empower" the poor
by allowing them to govern their own housing — or, in other words, by
privatizing public housing projects. In Kemp's formulation, public housing
residents could become self-governing, relieving the government of its
obligation to govern.
The neoconservative variety of empowerment, in fact, takes on questions
of legitimacy that heretofore preoccupied those on the left. Peter Berger
and Richard Neuhaus, neoconservatives financed by the American Enter-
prise Institute for Public Policy Research, argue that neighborhood, fam-
ily, church, and voluntary associations can be refashioned to mediate be-
tween citizen and state in a way that works to relegitimize a political order
in crisis. "The proposal is that, if these institutions could be more imagi-
natively recognized in public policy, individuals would be more 'at home'
in society, and the political order would be more 'meaningful.'" 2 The au-
thors acknowledge that they derive their understanding of alienation from
the Marxist tradition.
What is the relationship between neoconservative attempts at "em-
powering the poor" and the attempts to organize and mobilize the poor by
the New Left and the antipoverty movements that began in the 1960s
and continue to mobilize today?3 Distinguishing the intentions of the left
from those of the neo-conservatives is a simple matter: the left uses em-
powerment to generate political resistance; the right, to produce rational
economic and entrepreneurial actors. Yet the tactics for empowerment
mobilized in innumerable programs — to help battered women, to fight
red-lining, to fight gangs, to reform prostitutes, to govern public housing
projects, prisons, and workfare (to name only a few)—share a political
strategy: to act upon others by getting them to act in their own interest. It
is the content of powerless people's interests over which the right and the
left disagree.
From any ideological perspective, those interests must be constituted in
order to be acted upon. The will to empower may be well intentioned, but

68 The Will to Empower

it is a strategy for constituting and regulating the political subjectivities of
the "empowered." Whether inspired by the market or by the promise of
self-government and autonomy, the object of empowerment is to act upon
another's interests and desires in order to conduct their actions toward an
appropriate end; thus "empowerment" is itself a power relationship and
one deserving of careful scrutiny.
The relationship between political power and the poor I am concerned
with here does not reveal the forceful repression (visible or invisible) of the
poor or their exclusion from politics, nor does it reveal their muted con-
sent. Rather, I focus on the productive effects of power which promote,
transform, and act upon the capacities of the poor. Technologies of citi-
zenship are the means by which government works through rather than
against the subjectivities of citizens. The logic of empowerment targets
the capacities of the "powerless," measures and seeks to maximize their
actions, motivations, interests, and economic and political involvements.
Here power works by soliciting the active participation of the poor in
dozens of programs on the local level, programs that aim at the transfor-
mation of the poor into self-sufficient, active, productive, and participatory
citizens. The liberal arts of government, as I have been arguing, are action-
able only on the condition that citizens carry out the purposes of govern-
ment. Again, I do not mean the purposes of the state; "the poor" are gov-
erned, so to speak, but not strictly by the government or the state.
The history of the present will to empower can be traced back to the
nineteenth-century reform movements discussed in previous chapters.
More immediately, contemporary techniques and rationalities of empow-
erment can be traced back to the War on Poverty and the antipoverty
movements of the 1960s. Empowerment is associated both with the inno-
vations devised by Great Society reformers and with the New Left and civil
rights emphases on self-government and community power. Although the
War on Poverty failed to empower "the poor" permanently or to secure
their solidarity, it did succeed in developing the strategy of empowerment
as a solution to the problems of poverty. I offer not a new explanation of
political apathy or powerlessness but a new look at how the conception of
powerlessness was mobilized by radicals, reformers, and social scientists. I
show how the antipoverty movement defined and constructed "the poor"
as "powerless" and how social scientific knowledge of the poor was then
tied to their "empowerment" and eventual self-government. The history
of Community Action Programs (CAP)—just one episode in the history
of the present will to empower — illustrates the intimate relationship be-

69 The Will to Empower

 tween subjectivity and subjection which is embedded in technologies of
citizenship, in efforts to combat poverty and powerlessness, and in strate-
gies for empowering "the poor."

The Political Logic of Empowerment

Although subjectivity can be and all too often is brutally repressed, the
operations of power which promote subjectivity are neither benign nor neu-
tral. Critically examining the will to empower requires recognizing that
despite the good, even radical, intentions of those who seek to empower
others, relations of empowerment are in fact relations of power in and of
themselves. The ordinary use of "empowerment" is illustrated in the fol-
lowing passage from Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen in a book called
Women and the Politics of Empowerment-.

We use the term empowerment to connote a spectrum of political activity

ranging from acts of individual resistance to mass political mobilizations
that challenge the basic power relations in our society.... For these women,
empowerment begins when they change their ideas about the causes of their
powerlessness, when they recognize the systemic forces that oppress them,
and when they act to change the conditions of their lives.4

Note that the three parts to empowerment — consciousness, knowledge,

action — connote the transition from powerlessness to full citizenship,
from subjection to subjectivity.
First, it is typical of the logic of empowerment to dichotomize power
and powerlessness. For example, Jacqueline Pope, a welfare rights activist
and scholar, asserts that state intrusion destroys the capacities of African
Americans to govern themselves: "These bureaucracies are responsible
for blocking and defusing any restlessness or activities that might point to-
wards a Black cultural reawakening, self-help, or political empowerment."5
Pope argues that political participation would occur spontaneously were it
not for the intrusion of the state and the colonization of black communities
by public service bureaucracies. She carefully distinguishes her intentions
for empowerment from the market-driven strategies of neoconservatives;
rather than privatization, Pope seeks public and democratic control over
public services. The problem and the strategy are the same, however: to
limit government intervention by getting people to govern themselves.
According to Pope, black communities, once they are colonized, become
"depoliticized," making it necessary for organizers, public programs and

70 The Will to Empower

activists to refashion the poor into active citizens who are willing to hold
public service providers accountable and capable of doing so. "Public as-
sistance can grind away all semblance of dignity and self-worth, leaving its
recipients to hate themselves and conclude, albeit falsely, that they have no
alternatives to provide for themselves and their children."6 The problem,
then, is how to act upon the subjective self-understandings or the conscious-
ness of citizens, and so to empower.
Second, just as the politics of empowerment on the left and right are not
distinguishable by their tactics and targets, neither can they be adequately
distinguished by claiming that the object of one is progressive political
change and of the other, political conformity to the economic rationality
of capitalism. At first glance, on the left empowerment is political empow-
erment, to be measured by political participation and political resistance.
But it is important to recognize and call into question the exceptional sta-
tus granted in the passage quoted above to relations of empowerment. The
authors go on to argue that empowerment itself is not a power relationship
but a "process" not a political-power relationship but "a social relationship"
(my emphasis). This formulation of empowerment is typical in making the
assumption that relations of empowerment are not relations of power, and
not sites of resistance and participation in and of themselves. Yet how is the
subjectivity of the "empowered" woman so transformed? How is it that the
authors so clearly distinguish themselves from "these women"? Who in-
fuses the powerless with power? And is that not an exercise of power? How
is an "empowered" woman fabricated out of a "powerless" woman?
Third, empowerment is typically treated as a simple quantitative in-
crease in the amount of power possessed by an individual. Technologies of
citizenship — the organizer's "issue campaign," the radical's "revolution-
ary consciousness," the social worker's "plan for self-sufficiency," the social
scientist's "theory of power," the neoconservative's "empowerment zone,"
the feminist's "self-esteem"—all seek to mobilize and maximize the sub-
jectivities of those perceived to lack the power, hope, consciousness, and
initiative to act on behalf of their own interests. Understood as a means of
combatting exclusion and powerlessness, relations of empowerment are, in
fact, akin to relations of government that both constitute and fundamen-
tally transform the subject's capacity to act; rather than merely increasing
that capacity, empowerment alters and shapes it. During the War on Pov-
erty, "the poor" were not excluded by power from participating in the defi-
nition and provision of their own needs so much as they were transformed
by that definition and provision. I work from the assumption, then, that the

71 The Will to Empower

 "powerless" do not exist as such prior to the application of technologies of
citizenship; the "powerless" are the object and the outcome of the will to
empower.
The object of my inquiry here is not empowerment per se, nor is it my
intention to judge the will to empower as inevitably corrupt. The will to
empower is neither clearly liberatory nor clearly repressive; rather, it is typi-
cal of the liberal arts of conduct and the political rationality of the welfare
state. The focus here is on relations of empowerment, which include the fol-
lowing four characteristics.
First, empowerment is a relationship established by expertise, although
expertise is constantly contested. Not only the expertise of the "experts"
but also the expertise of the poor as the "real" experts on poverty, as well
as the authority of representatives of subordinated groups — all are con-
tested, routinely consulted, and documented. Second, it is a democrati-
cally unaccountable exercise of power in that the relationship is typically
initiated by one party seeking to empower another. Third, it is dependent
upon knowledge of those to be empowered, typically found in social sci-
entific models of power or powerlessness and often gained through the
self-description and self-disclosure of the subject to be empowered. The
will to empower ourselves and others has spread across academic disci-
plines, social services, neighborhood agencies, social movements, and po-
litical groups, forging new relationships of power alongside new conceptu-
alizations of power. Fourth, relations of empowerment are simultaneously
voluntary and coercive — a point that is made clear below.

The Political Economy of Empowerment

What is meant by the "powerlessness" of the poor? What kind of power,

exactly, leads to "empowerment"? What kind of power was distributed in
the War on Poverty?
The history of Community Action Programs, although extremely short,
tells much about how power (and empowerment) works in a democracy.
In the hope of solving once and for all the problems of poverty and
inequality in the American democratic system, the Johnson administra-
tion declared a War on Poverty. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964
openly acknowledged the existence of persistent inequality in "the other
America" and established several new programs to combat poverty and
create opportunity: Job Corps, Head Start, work-study, neighborhood
centers, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). To coordinate and

72 The Will to Empower

govern this range of new and existing services, the policy of "maximum fea-
sible participation" was adopted, and CAPs quickly became the controver-
sial centerpiece of the War on Poverty.7
The administration chose the strategy of redistributing power — not
just money and jobs and child care, not just goods and services, but power.
The War on Poverty was waged with the assumption that the powerless-
ness of the poor was the root cause of their poverty, not the actions of the
powerful. Even the most radical thinkers, though they identified capitalist-
class exploitation and racism as the causes of inequality, nonetheless traced
poverty (as Jacqueline Pope does) to the (in)actions, (in)capacities, and
powerlessness of the poor.
According to guidelines issued by the Office of Economic Opportunity
(OEO), "The long range objective of every community action program is
to effect a permanent increase in the capacity of individuals, groups, and
communities afflicted by poverty to deal effectively with their own prob-
lems so that they need no further assistance. Poverty is a condition of need,
helplessness and hopelessness."8 Defined by all that they lacked, the poor
needed help, but it was to be given in the form of a stimulus to act for them-
selves. In the model of powerlessness operationalized in antipoverty pro-
grams, power was clearly intended to work through, not against, the sub-
jectivity of the poor.
During the War on Poverty the powerlessness of the poor was posited
not as an objective fact, but as a subjective "sense of powerlessness." CAP
legislation acknowledged the objective causes of poverty — low wages, rac-
ism, unemployment, lack of child care — and the War on Poverty devised
several programs to ameliorate the objective circumstances of the poor.
But the subjective causes of powerlessness became the object of intense
governmentalization in these programs, primarily because the poor often
chose not to participate and failed to constitute themselves as a constitu-
ency for antipoverty policy. Their "apathy" and political inaction became
the central target of programs and was posited as the most significant cause
of poverty and later the cause of the failure of those programs.
George Brager, director of the militant Mobilization for Youth, a pro-
gram for the prevention of juvenile delinquency that was adapted as a
model for CAPs, asserted that the object of reform must be the subjectivi-
ties of the poor: "We believe the personal sense of powerlessness felt by low
income people is a major cause of their isolation and apathy. . . . To en-
courage education and social learning, therefore, it is necessary to decrease
the sense of powerlessness."9 Presumably, youth were so beaten down by

73 The Will to Empower

 poverty, racism, and inequality that a kind of hopelessness was the real
cause of poverty. The evidence for their "apathy" was found in their refusal
to help themselves and act in their own interest by joining the Ford Foun-
dation's antidelinquency effort.
The subjectivities of youth were made into objects of an extraordinary
research and programmatic effort that was adopted later as the strategy
to win the War on Poverty.10 If delinquent youth and the poor in general
simply were not willing to participate in voluntary programs, the first re-
quirement was to get them to take an interest in their own empowerment.
Reformers had to face the problem of "drawing people into the planning of
their own welfare." 11 In a 1962 prospectus for CAP funds, a New Haven
grant application asserted:

The city is the people. New jobs can be provided but some people are un-
willing or afraid to apply for them. New housing projects can be built but
some tenants will turn them into slums. New community centers can be
opened but only a few people may choose to use them. Exciting educational
programmes can be conceived but the people can let them die for lack of
participation. Therefore, attention must be paid to the underlying motiva-
tions, attitudes, and values of the people of the city.12

In confronting the unwillingness of poor citizens to engage in reform ef-

forts, even those efforts aimed at improving the lives of the poor them-
selves, reformers came up against the limit of democratic government. The
government could not govern and could not win the War on Poverty with-
out the voluntary participation of the poor.
The limit of democratic government was stretched by turning the em-
powerment and participation of the poor, the stimulation and exercise of
their subjectivity, into the object of governmentalization and intervention.
The will to empower, or the desire to help the poor, had to be balanced
against the imperative that the poor must help themselves. The subjectiv-
ity of the poor had to be balanced with their subjection. The goal became
to align the will to empower with the interests of the poor.
As Peter Bachrach and others summarized, "cooptative participation" is
"an effective means of rehabilitating groups of persons who lack the knowl-
edge or the built-in desire to help themselves." The limit of democratic gov-
ernment was to be overcome by transforming the poor into a constituency
for antipoverty programs. "The critical question . . . is whether the pro-
grams can engender among the poor a sense of vested interest in the pro-
grams and a growing preparedness to organize and struggle for the intro-

74 The Will to Empower

duction, improvement, and enlargement of anti-poverty projects." 13 This
is to say not that no subjectivity exists at all prior to government but that
the will to empower depends upon combining the capacities of the unem-
ployed, juveniles, and single mothers by turning them into one political
constituency.
Explicitly citing the nonparticipation of the poor, CAP legislation es-
tablished the purpose of "maximum feasible participation" as

the development and implementation of all programs and projects designed

to serve the poor or low-income areas with the maximum feasible partici-
pation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served, so as to
best stimulate and take full advantage of capabilities for self-advancement
and assure that those programs and projects are otherwise meaningful to
and widely utilized by their intended beneficiaries.14

In CAPs, the balance between "helping" the poor and the poor "helping
themselves" was a delicate one and the subject of much criticism and de-
bate.15 The participation of the poor was a key planning problem. Attempts
were made to "solicit" and to "motivate." Special committees were sug-
gested "to focus attention on problems and methods of involving the hard-
to-reach poor and to evaluate the effectiveness of the approaches adopted." 16
Peter Marris and Martin Rein, whose Dilemmas of Social Reform stands
as one of the best accounts of the War on Poverty, quote the following from
a juvenile delinquency program guideline: "When specific goals are prede-
termined, the project must face that actual danger or the charge of manip-
ulation of people. When goals are not predetermined, the project must face
the problem of lack of control and unanticipated directions, with which the
project may have difficulty living." 17 To balance the subjectivity of citizens
with their subjection required an innovation in political rationality. Only
certain innovations in democratic reform make it possible to overcome the
obstacles that nonparticipation places in the path of governmentalization.
During the War on Poverty at least three innovations surfaced. First,
"the poor" were isolated as a target of government intervention and their
capacities calculated and inscribed into a policy for their "empowerment."
Second, CAP set out to create a "community" for action by legislating the
decentralization of power relationships and the multiplication of power re-
lations between constituencies — the poor and juvenile delinquents, social
scientists, social service vendors, the executive branch of government —
which otherwise could not exercise power on one another. (Note that this
is much the same as the goal set by recent efforts to reform the police in

75 The Will to Empower

 "community policing.") Third, professional reformers emerged as the in-
struments for applying technologies of citizenship and new theories of
power and powerlessness.
I hasten to add that positing the powerlessness and apathy of the poor
was not simply a justification for an otherwise illegitimate government inter-
vention. Even those who were extremely suspicious of government inter-
vention among the poor — those who favored revolutionary action over
democratic reform, radicals such as Tom Hayden, who understood CAP as
"serving chiefly to sharpen the capacity of the system for manipulation and
oppression" 18 —regarded the subjectivities of the poor as obstructions in
the way of radical political involvement.19 As Hayden wrote in Dissent:
"There can be no poor people's movement in any form unless the poor can
overcome their fear and embarrassment. . . . All this means fostering in
everyone that sense of decision-making power which American society
works to destroy. Only in this way can a movement be built which the
Establishment can neither buy off nor manage, a movement too vital ever
to become a small clique of spokesmen."20 The lack of a sense of decision-
making power, in this radical formulation, kept the poor from organizing
politically on their own behalf and according to their own interests. The
"apathy" of the poor was for the New Left, as it was for liberal reformers,
the central and continuing cause of their poverty and unequal status. The
key to revolution and reform alike was understood to be in the independent
and voluntary participation of the poor in their own emancipation.

Modeling the Poor

How did "the poor" become a group with a shared set of problems and
interests? How did "the poor" become an object of governmental policy?
Why were people willing to define themselves and organize around being
"poor" rather than or in addition to race and class?21 To motivate "the poor"
to help themselves, they had to be known; however, the truth of the poor
could not be told before the poor were isolated as a group.22 Part of telling
the truth of the poor (especially the part that the poor were to tell about
themselves) was precisely to constitute the poor as a group by defining their
characteristics, capacities, and desires. During the War on Poverty the dis-
parate and diverse peoples that came to occupy the category of "the poor"
were transformed into a calculable, knowable grouping and made available
for government by forming a category that, as Nikolas Rose puts it, "could
be used in political arguments and administrative decisions."23

76 The Will to Empower

 The category of "the poor" was reintroduced as if it were a new and
shocking discovery within a political context deeply divided by region,
gender, race and class. It was a category (re)invented to cross social and
geographic divisions, such as urban and rural, and to include Appalachian
coal miners, black urban single-parent families, the working poor, juvenile
delinquents, alcoholics, and the elderly, among others. Moreover, the po-
litical context was one shaped by the civil rights movement, and free speech
and antiwar protests. Michael Harrington, a socialist from the Catholic
Worker movement, did more than anyone, perhaps, to identify and isolat-
ing the poor as a group and define their subjectivity. Harrington, whose
best-selling book The Other America is credited with spurring the War on
Poverty, argued that all the poor shared a culture: "Perhaps the most im-
portant analytic point to have emerged in this description of the other
America is the fact that poverty in America forms a culture, a way of life
and feeling, that makes it whole." 24 A subjectivity was thus posited for "the
Other America" on the basis of the "culture of poverty" thesis.25
The notion that the poor share a culture helped create an administrative
category of policy analysis out of a vast assortment of divided people whose
defining characteristic was said to be their subjective sense of powerless-
ness. Harrington wrote, "In a sense, one might define the contemporary
poor in the United States as those who, for reasons beyond their control,
cannot help themselves."26 The fact that the poor were not mobilized po-
litically in their own interest was the rationale behind planning and pro-
gram design in the War on Poverty. In sum, the demographic model of the
poor was based upon their lack of political participation, lack of shared in-
terest, and lack of motivation to solve the problems—their own prob-
lems — of poverty.
A crucial part of knowing the poor was knowing what the poor wanted
and how they defined the needs and conditions of poverty. Sargent Shriver,
director of OEO, argued that the components of CAP—"education and
training, experience and motivation, confidence and health, hope and self-
reliance"—were not reaching the poor because program designers did not
engage the poor themselves in defining their own needs. "It isn't reaching
the consumer — the poor themselves. And so, we have to engage in a new
kind of market research. We have to find out why the old product didn't
appeal to the consumer — to one-fifth of the market. And only the poor —
the consumer — can tell us." 27 The market research and consumer analogy
is still a bit misleading because, as Shriver so often pointed out, the poor
themselves have to be engaged not just in consuming the programs of the

77 The Will to Empower

 State but in stating their interests and desires as individuals and communi-
ties willing to engage in the antipoverty effort. Establishing the expertise
of the poor set a standard for including them in planning efforts — or, in
one of the antipoverty era's most popular phrases, "planning with and not
for the poor."
CAPs operated according to a political rationality geared to a calculated,
evaluated, and supervised "maximization" of the energies of the poor. The
willingness and the capacity of "the poor" to act in their own interest, then,
became the object of intense research, intervention, and governmentaliza-
tion. Even though the poor were divided by race, for example, their dif-
ferences added up to inclusion in the "other America," a single unit of ad-
ministration and policy debate. Harrington went on to advocate an all-out
assault on the culture of poverty. A campaign against poverty "should
think, not in terms of this or that aspect of poverty, but along the lines of
establishing new communities, of substituting a human environment for
the inhuman one that now exists."28 Harrington reinvented "the poor" as
a group of people who could be acted upon and who could become "hu-
man" themselves only by acting together to form "communities."
Harrington sought to mobilize the poor on their own behalf, to maxi-
mize their participation in the welfare state. The goal of "maximum feasible
participation" in CAPs was not for the poor to constitute antipoverty pro-
grams, but for the poor to be constituted as a group with interests and the
desire to act upon those interests. Others seeking a "political awakening
among the poverty population" argued that "the over-riding issue is not
whether participation of the poor contributes to the effectiveness of anti-
poverty programs. The critical question, rather, is whether the programs
can engender among the poor a sense of vested interest in the programs
and a growing preparedness to organize and struggle for the introduction,
improvement, and enlargement of anti-poverty projects." 29
Without actually initiating the actions of the poor or inhibiting their
freedom, anti-poverty programs stimulated the poor to act in concert as a
constituency. Reformers sought a strategy "that would transmute the insti-
tutionalized expression of a common purpose into ungoverned personal ac-
tion," and found it in Community Action. 30 In short, modeling the poor,
so to speak, was an essential aspect of government.
Community Action agencies were clearly designed to govern and ad-
minister the War on Poverty but were also, in and of themselves, distinct
governmental domains or small publics established "by and for the poor."

78 The Will to Empower

Though intended to be a public arena for the government of the poor,
CAPs were publics not directed by the government but by the voluntary
cooperation of all the public and private actors involved in the "local coali-
tion" fighting the War on Poverty.31 According to the OEO, "It is a pro-
cess of building bridges between the poor and non-poor, between govern-
ment officials and private groups, between professionals and laymen,
between agencies which operate related programs, between the poor and
the opportunities which could help them become self-sufficient, produc-
tive, respected citizens. Of great importance is the building of bridges be-
tween one poor person and another, so they can share the dignity of self-
help in escaping from poverty."32
Notice that even the relationships between poor people themselves were
to be matters of organization and government; no ties were left untouched.
"Self-help" did not mean that autonomous selves got together to help one
another. Rather, self-help meant that the government intervened to create
relations of help between selves. Even though the poor presumably shared
a culture of poverty, ties between the poor had to be fabricated and were
to be the outcome of government intervention. The poor were to indicate
their own needs and the causes of their impoverishment; in doing so, it was
hoped, they would enlist themselves in meeting those needs.
The terrain of government established in CAP legislation was, of course,
the "community," a set of relationships (or "bridges") legislated into exis-
tence to link the poor to programs, experts, agencies, and government. In
effect, relations of government were established outside the government in
"local" relationships. CAPs did not avoid the imposition of government
but extended government into new terrains by "maximizing" the partici-
pation of the poor. CAP legislation created multiple publics and decentral-
ized decision-making over what shape the antipoverty effort would take.
According to Marris and Rein, however, the delegation of power caused
an explosion of conflict that led directly to the rapid failure of the CAPs.
They had no clear constituency, and the "community" established by leg-
islation never materialized, in part because social scientists, local political
elites, and "the poor" were deeply divided over purpose: "The agency
was, in effect, trying to impose its own resolution of the rival claims of ex-
pert knowledge, political manoeuvre and the self-assertion of the poor to
determine the direction of social policy."33 The "community" of commu-
nity action was never adequately constituted or, rather, never adequately
brought to some common purpose. "As a quasi-public nonprofit corpora-

79 The Will to Empower

 tion," Ralph Kramer explained, "the CAPs were in a no-man's-land of le-
gitimacy. They needed a constituency for political reasons but were con-
strained in the development of one by the diverse character of their target
populations, their limited resources and organizational capabilities, and
their social service preoccupations."34
Part of the failure of CAP was surely in failing to unite a "community"
divided by race, class, expertise, and interests. Mayors were soon storming
Washington in protest against CAPs, and members of Congress were charg-
ing CAP organizers with agitating, demonstrating, and otherwise radically
threatening the very government that paid their salaries. Sargent Shriver,
head of the OEO, was attacked publicly by his own constituency. Although
a few of the antipoverty programs devised by the Great Society continue to
operate — most notably Head Start and work-study — the life span of CAPs
was short and extremely rocky. By 1967 support was waning, and by 1969
federal funding for the "maximum feasible participation" of the poor in the
War on Poverty had been pulled.
Still, CAP did not fail so much as it succeeded in creating a logic of em-
powerment and a model for overcoming or stretching the limits of demo-
cratic government. The logic of empowerment went well beyond interest-
group pluralism by extending and decentralizing relations of government
to terrains beyond the state or formal governmental apparatus, and those
relationships have lasted well beyond the demise of CAP. Moreover, con-
flict should not be taken for program failure. Relationships of power de-
pend upon the instability created by conflict between power and resistance;
in the case of CAPs, great care was taken to avoid helping the poor directly
because that would be to make the poor "dependent." Again, the subjection
of the poor had to be balanced against their subjectivity. As Foucault noted,
"It would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of in-
subordination which, by definition, are means of escape."35 The limits of
democratic government were tested in the War on Poverty in a way quite
possibly unprecedented, for the agency that was granted to street-level bu-
reaucrats, activists, and radicals at every point threatened to and often did
boil over into full-blown rebellion.
Government did not strive to repress the rival demands of the civil
rights movement, the anti-war movement, the experts, and the poor but
linked those demands — especially for the redistribution of power — to
the governing relationships established at the local level. Relations of gov-
ernment multiplied — between "the poor" and programs, "poor" people

80 The Will to Empower

and other "poor" people, "the poor" and their supposed "community," the
poor person and him- or herself. According to Kramer,

There is probably no turning back, even though there may not be any con-
tinuing mandate or sanction from OEO for the participation of the poor.
The idea is now abroad and has become linked with the growing demands
for Black Power or "Brown Power." . . . there is now an informed constitu-
ency of former nonprofessionals and participants, supportive caretakers,
and ethnic minority leaders who can be expected to invoke precedent and
exert pressure to sustain planning with and not for the poor.36

The precedent was set for the poor themselves to influence planning and
programs and to participate in decision-making. A link was established
between effective government and the self-government of the poor as a
means of overcoming the limits of democratic reform.

Operationalizing Power

In 1966, political scientist and pluralist Grant McConnell stated a prin-

ciple and limit of democratic reform: "Since there are too many people to
address individually, they must all get together in their own associations
and agree —voluntarily. Then government could put its stamp upon their
informal, cooperative, and free decisions. Government would thus have
achieved the purpose of a free people, and without coercion." 37 McConnell
recognized that liberal democratic government worked best when it worked
through, rather than against, the subjectivities of citizens.
There is an obvious resonance between the pluralist view of government
and power and Michel Foucault'^ conceptions of power and governmen-
tality: both Foucault and the pluralists argue that power is plural; however,
the similarities end there.38 According to the pluralist view, relations of
governance are based on either voluntary consent or coercion; government
operates either through the voluntary and autonomous subjectivity of citi-
zens or through the coercion and repression of their subjectivity. The plu-
ralists, like the feminists I cited earlier, dichotomize and juxtapose power
and powerlessness, subjectivity and subjection, coercion and consent, as
opposite effects of government. Foucault's view of power allows us to see
that subjectivity and subjection, like citizens and subjects, are never so
clearly distinguished in liberal democratic societies.
Foucault's conception of governmentality allows us to see further that

81 The Will to Empower

 in order to create a relationship of power and the possibility for governance,
two requirements must be met: "That the 'other' (the one over whom power
is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a
person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field
of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up." 39
The "others" in this case are the poor who were defined (on both the left
and the right) at the outset as those who do not act, who are apathetic, and
who understand themselves to be powerless. Without the empowerment
of the poor it would not be possible to act upon their actions or to extend
relations of power and government to them. Hence, the distribution of
power and the maximization of participation became the cornerstones of
antipoverty policy. Before "the poor" could be engaged and acted upon,
they had first to be armed, to be constituted as an army, a single unit.
McConnell assumed that the government acts when the people do, out
of some kind of organic and shared interest developed in an ungoverned
sphere of civil society. The pluralist view fails to account for the fact that
when people do not get together in their own associations, or at least when
there is the perception that the poor are apathetic, governmental inter-
ventions are designed to create the possibility for people to come together.
To govern, then, means first to stir up the desire, the interest, and the
will to participate or act politically. Establishing a relationship of gover-
nance requires first reconstituting the poor and powerless as acting sub-
jects. In short, according to the logic of empowerment, the poor must be
made to act.
By way of contrast, many people were far less concerned with the apathy
and inaction of the poor than with the mobilization of the poor: the poten-
tial for violence, black nationalism, civil rights, student activism, and other
perceived threats to the established white power structure. As discussed in
the preceding chapter, Samuel Huntington believed "democratic distem-
per" was a very real threat to democratic order. How was it possible during
this unprecedented mobilization to posit the "powerlessness" of the poor?
Nevertheless the measurement of nonparticipation became a key to the
planning process for combatting poverty. Peter Bachrach and Morton
Baratz, social scientists actively engaged in Community Action Programs,
operationalized and measured the "second face of power" in terms of ac-
tions and events that did not happen: "nonparticipation," "non-events," and
"non-decisions."40 Again, and most significantly, the focus of research was
on nonparticipation specifically because the poor were not participating in

82 The Will to Empower

programs designed to combat poverty. The measurement was applied in a
predictably selective manner only to those whose participation was sought
in reform programs: for example, white middle-class women's lack of power
and participation was not an object of planning.
As I illustrated in Chapter i, radical scholars explained power and pow-
erlessness in terms of the exclusion of the poor through non-actions and
non-decisions, as well as in terms of the ideological manipulation of the
poor against their real interests.41 What is less well documented is the fact
that political scientists who were concerned with finding a way to make the
actions of the powerful visible and accountable actually helped to invent
and operationalize new means for acting upon the subjectivities of the poor.
In their reflections on power, political scientists exhibited the will to em-
power, to know and to mobilize the poor according to the policies and logic
of empowerment. Social scientific theories of power linked the distribu-
tion and decentralization of power with maximized participation, which
linked the subjectivities of the poor to their subjection — albeit their self-
subjection as self-governing subjects.
To counter pluralist claims that nonparticipation signaled consent rather
than powerlessness, as well as to explain the absence of political conflict
in the face of blatant inequality, social scientists theorized the relationship
between nonparticipation and powerlessness. Radical scholars sought to
uncover the submerged means of manipulation used to repress conflict and
to exclude the political participation of the poor. In fact, the (nonpartici-
pation of the poor became as much a question of social scientific method
as it was a question of poverty and politics.
Bachrach and Baratz set out to measure the effectiveness of CAPs in
"maximizing participation." They needed measurements and evaluations
of participation, but the problem was a lack of participation. What they
devised, then, were methods for measuring and evaluating nonparticipa-
tion and powerlessness. According to the logic of empowerment, nonpar-
ticipation was taken to indicate a power relationship. The social scientific
operationalization of power was, so to speak, a means of putting power into
action.
I have already shown that the participation and constitution of "the
poor" was a means of overcoming the limits of democratic reform. For the
purpose of "empowering" the poor to participate, power was redistributed
through CAPs, and new arenas ("communities") for the exercise of power
were established by decentralizing power and extending relations of gov-

83 The Will to Empower

 ernment into new domains. The third innovation of CAP was devised to
balance the enhanced subjectivity of the poor with their subjection.

Arming the Poor

Someone had to apply the technologies of citizenship and new theories

of power generated in the War on Poverty, someone whose expertise lay in
spurring others into action. "Of all the innovations of community action,"
as Marris and Rein assessed it, "this may prove the most important: it cre-
ated the professional reformer, and invented an organizational framework
appropriate to his function." 42 It is important to note that the professional
organizer-reformer was not an entirely new character; there were histori-
cal precedents. In the American context, think of Frederick Douglass, Jane
Addams, Saul Alinsky, and public works projects such as the Tennessee
Valley Authority. The innovation during the War on Poverty, however, was
in the particular constellation of expertise, activism, and theories of power.
What made CAP organizers unique was the link they provided between
"helping" the poor and "self-help" on the national level.
According to the logic of empowerment, though, the social scientist or
organizer must exempt him- or herself from the exercise of power. The
poor themselves were to take over the function of evaluating and experi-
menting in programs designed to "maximize" participation, as Bachrach,
Baratz, and Margaret Levi explained:

If effective inroads on the poverty problem are to be made, experts in the

field must — at least during the formative period — possess sufficient pow-
ers of manipulation to control the situation, in order to select the range of
"suitable" policy options and to allow for experimentation and innovation
(within certain prescribed boundaries). The experts' ultimate objective,
however, must be to make themselves superfluous, vacating in favor of lead-
ers indigenous to the participant groups.43

Social scientists and program organizers were to govern at a distance, but

ultimately, government was to become self-government, making the social
reformer "superfluous." In other words, the job of government was clearly
delegated to the experts, who were to use their knowledge and their powers
to experiment and constantly evaluate the process of redistributing power
while simultaneously attempting to solicit the participation of the poor.
The actions and subjectivities of the poor would, it was hoped, be brought
in line with a certain model of power and empowerment. The claim to

84 The Will to Empower

knowing the poor — including the claims made by the poor to knowing
themselves, their own needs and desires—was tied to a technology for
their "empowerment" and the maximization of political participation.
Once again, the relationship of power between the helper and the helped
in the liberal arts of government is displaced. Hayden's "radical" organizer,
for example, exhibits what I call the will to empower by displacing the will
and the power of the organizer:

What is required is a certain kind of organizing that tries to make people

understand their own worth and dignity. This work depends on the exis-
tence of "material issues" as a fundamental organizing point — high rents,
voting rights, unpaved roads, and so on — but it moves from there into the
ways such issues are related to personal life. The organizer spends hours and
hours in the community, listening to people, drawing out their own ideas,
rejecting their tendency to depend on him for solutions.44

The plan to have the function of the organizer taken over by the poor
was made a part of CAP legislation, which explicitly restricted the politi-
cal participation of those program directors and organizers who were on
the federal payroll. Professional organizers, strictly excluded from political
life, were left with the need to constitute others as the constituency for
their programs. Empowerment was planned to become, effortlessly, "self-
empowerment." Expert reformers, private foundations, voluntary associa-
tions were and continue to be nongovernmental means of government.

The Subjects of Power

By emphasizing the productive aspects of power, I do not wish to disre-

gard the degree to which political power blatantly and too often displays
itself through gross domination and overt force. But when it does so, we
have no difficulty identifying its presence. For example, during the 1960s
and the War on Poverty, the FBI and the National Guard were mobilized
to repress the expression and organization of dissent by antiwar protesters
and the Black Panthers, in civil rights demonstrations and urban race riots.
Overt repression and state violence were visible (though often planned and
conducted in secret) on the nightly news and oddly juxtaposed to the esca-
lating violence in Vietnam. More recently, repressive measures have been
visible in the mobilization of police and the National Guard in south cen-
tral Los Angeles, in the unprecedented rates of incarceration and increases
in the executions of prisoners, as well as the treatment of immigrants. Even

85 The Will to Empower

 in more subtle forms of repression — police ticketing the homeless for
sleeping in public places, for example, or the relentless exploitation by vice
police of poor women and drug addicts—we can easily identify power in
its repressive form.
The popular thesis on the left that CAPs were invented by the govern-
ment primarily to divert, co-opt, repress, and undermine legitimate oppo-
sition to the state assumes that "the poor" do indeed have objective in-
terests that can be co-opted.45 I have shown that "the poor" cannot have
interests of their own until and unless they are constituted as a group. That
did not happen until the War on Poverty was waged; government did not
repress the poor but invented the poor as a group with interests and pow-
ers. Before governmental intervention — and I mean that in the broadest
sense—"the poor" were disparate, isolated, and often in conflict with one
another; they were Appalachian coal miners, urban single mothers, illiter-
ates, unskilled black migrants from the South, southern fundamentalists,
the elderly, "delinquent" youths, and the unemployed. The assumption
that people do not know their own best interests is politically suspect, but
that their interests do not divide them as much as they promise to unite
them is unfounded. Nevertheless, the implicit elitism of the will to em-
power, claiming to know what is best for others, does not condemn it to
failure or necessarily to a reactionary status. Empowerment is a power re-
lationship, a relationship of government; it can be used well or badly.
My account differs from other critical accounts of the War on Poverty
because I insist that it was not aimed at demobilizing the poor in a time of
upheaval or at repressing and co-opting radical civil rights and student ac-
tivists. To the contrary, I argue that CAPs created rather than quelled con-
flict. The War on Poverty was no misnomer — it sought to generate and
win a confrontation with the urban poor — but the legislation that declared
it did not command any troops. The War on Poverty (like other wars in re-
cent memory) had first to arm the enemy in order to engage in conflict. In
other words, the exercise of power in the War on Poverty did not deter-
mine the actions of the poor but determined that the poor would act.

86 The Will to Empower

3
Revolutions Within:
Self-Government and Self-Esteem

What breach of order is it possible to commit in solitude?

G U S T A V E DE B E A U M O N T AND A L E X I S DE TOCQUEVILLE

S o m e feminists have criticized Gloria Steinem's best-seller Revo-

lution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem for calling a feminist retreat to
personal life from the collective political front. 1 Deidre English's reserva-
tions are typical: "What is disturbing is to see the empowering therapy
supplant the cause. The strategic vision of social revolution here has all but
been replaced with a model of personal recovery." 2 Echoing Tocqueville,
critics ask how it is possible to challenge the existing order from a solitary
position. I return to Tocqueville's question later on, after I explain how
the self-esteem movement associates the self and the social order in what
Tocqueville himself might have called a "science of association." Is it pos-
sible to wage a real "revolution from within"? Critics are afraid that femi-
nism is going the way of Steinem's self-esteem movement and trading in
 collective action and confrontation for the solitude of self-reflection, ex-
changing the political for the personal.
English assumes that "real" politics does not occur in personal life and
that genuine political resistance is aimed at the social order as a whole, not
at one's self. Reading the self-esteem movement as a symptom of the polit-
ical demobilization of feminism, critics charge that movement with taking
the slogan "the personal is political" a bit too literally. To the contrary, I
argue in this chapter that critics should take the slogan quite literally in or-
der to recognize the ways in which the political has been reconstituted at
the level of the self. The self-esteem movement does not so much avoid
"real" political problems as transform the level on which it is possible to ad-
dress those problems.
Further, I argue there is little that is personal about self-esteem.3 In fact,
what is remarkable and of political importance about Steinem's book is not
where she directs her revolutionary subjectivity — to the personal or the
political fronts — but that she turns self-esteem into a social relationship
and a political obligation. The self-esteem movement is not merely a mis-
begotten strategy for women's liberation, as Steinem's critics charge; it is
more than that. It is a movement that does not leave politics and power as
they were but seeks to constitute a "state of esteem," a new political order,
and a new set of social relations.
The self-esteem movement was spearheaded in 1983 by the California
Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibil-
ity. The Task Force promised to deliver programs (what I have been call-
ing technologies of citizenship) that could solve social problems — from
crime and poverty to gender inequality — by waging a social revolution not
against capitalism, racism, and inequality, but against the order of the self
and the way we govern our selves.
Steinem's best-selling book is only a small part of the self-esteem move-
ment; it involves a whole range of experts, policy and social service profes-
sionals, and grass-roots activists. California Assembly Bill 3659, which es-
tablished the Task Force, states that today's social problems have become
ungovernable and seriously threaten democratic stability.4 "Government
and experts cannot fix these problems for us. It is only when each of us rec-
ognizes our individual personal and social responsibility to be part of the
solution that we also realize higher 'self-esteem.'" 5 This is a social move-
ment premised upon the limits of politics and the welfare state, the failures
of American democracy, and the inability of government to control con-
flict; it is a "revolutionary" movement seeking to forge a new terrain of poli-

88 The Will to Empower

tics and a new mode of governing the self, not a new government. In short,
in the discourse of self-esteem, the question of governance is a question of
self-governance.

Liberation Therapy

Personal fulfillment becomes a social obligation in the discourse of self-

esteem, an innovation that transforms the relationship of self-to-self into a
relationship that is governable.6 Self-fulfillment is no longer a personal or
private goal. According to advocates, taking up the goal of self-esteem is
something we owe to society, something that will defray the costs of social
problems, something that will create a "true" democracy. Hence, the solu-
tion to the current "crisis of governability" is discovered in the capacity of
citizens to act upon themselves, guided by the expertise of the social sci-
ences and social service professionals.
A key finding reported by the California Task Force is that "self-esteem
is the likeliest candidate for a social vaccine, something that empowers us to
live responsibly and that inoculates us against the lures of crime, violence,
substance abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, chronic welfare dependency,
and educational failure. The lack of self-esteem is central to most personal
and social ills plaguing our state and nation as we approach the end of the
twentieth century."7 More than a simple shot in the arm, self-esteem is a
kind of "liberation therapy" that requires a complete reorientation to social
problem-solving, as well as the mobilization of "every Californian" in an
effort compared by advocates to the landing on the moon and the discov-
ery of the atom.8 Those scientific innovations carried the burden of social
stability, but the new science of the self places the hope of liberation in the
psychological state of the people, especially poor urban people of color to
whom most of the "social ills" listed above are attributed.
Self-esteem is a practical technology for the production of certain kinds
of selves — for "making up people," as Ian Hacking put it.9 Self-esteem is
a technology in the sense that it is a specialized knowledge of how to es-
teem our selves, how to estimate, calculate, measure, evaluate, discipline,
and judge our selves. It is especially, though not exclusively, a literary tech-
nology: "self" emerges out of confrontation with texts, primarily, or with
the telling and writing of personal narratives — a practice Steinern refers to
as "bibliotherapy." We can learn and perform "bibliotherapy" upon our-
selves or join any of the numerous agencies, associations, and programs set
up to "enhance" self-esteem which have been catalogued, along with books

Revolutions Within 89
 and scholarly articles, by the California Task Force and in Steinem's book;
compiling research is tantamount to delivering therapy.
One of the goals of the self-esteem movement is to elicit the participa-
tion of as many people as possible, and that means hearing their stories of
struggle with their lack of self-esteem. Former California legislator John
Vasconcellos claims that his efforts to establish the California Task Force
to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility grew out
of his own "personal struggle despite repeated successes and achievements
in my life — to develop my own self-esteem," and that his commitment
to building self-esteem came from his experience with the state's budget
that spent "too little, too late [on] efforts to confine and/or repair our fel-
low Californians, whose lives are in distress and disrepair." 10 Similarly,
Steinern ascribes her own lack of self-esteem to her role in the feminist
movement and links her commitment to self-esteem to the limitations of
political action.
Self-esteem program goals include getting clients to write and tell their
personal narratives with an eye to the social good. Narratives bring people
to see that the details of their private lives and their chances for improving
their lives are inextricably linked to what is good for all of society. Steinern
suggests that enlisting teenage girls, for example, to write down their per-
sonal narratives and their feelings about teenage pregnancy can result in
the prevention of teenage pregnancy.11 In the process of writing their per-
sonal narratives, the girls construct a self to act upon and to govern.
Working toward self-esteem is a way to subject citizens in the sense of
making them "prone to" or "subject to" taking up the goals of self-esteem
for themselves and their vision of the good society. We make our selves
governable by taking up the social goal of self-esteem — just one minor
example of what Foucault called "technologies of the self." As he described
it, "through some political technology of individuals, we have been led to
recognize ourselves as a society, as a part of a social entity, as part of a na-
tion or of a state." 12 Transparency is established between the individual's
goal of achieving self-esteem and the social goal of eliminating child abuse,
crime, and welfare dependence. Those who undergo "revolution from
within" are citizens doing the right thing; they join programs, they volun-
teer, but most important, they work on and improve their self-image. At all
times, self-esteem calls upon individuals to act, to participate. "The con-
tinuation and future success of our democratic system of government and
society are dependent upon the exercise of responsible citizenship by each
and every Californian." 13

90 The Will to Empower

 Our relationship to our selves is directly related to citizenship because,
by definition, "being a responsible citizen depends on developing personal
and social responsibility."14 One must accept the responsibility to subject
one's self, to establish voluntarily a relationship between one's self and a
tutelary power (such as a therapist or a social worker) and a technique of
power (in a social program or a parenting class). Building self-esteem is a
technology of citizenship and self-government for evaluating and acting
upon our selves so that the police, the guards and the doctors do not have
to. Consent in this case does not mean that there is no exercise of power;
by isolating a self to act upon, to appreciate and to esteem, we avail our-
selves of a terrain of action; we exercise power upon ourselves.
Society needs protection from those who lack self-esteem, according to
advocates. Those who have failed to link their personal fulfillment to social
reform are lumped together as "social problems," diagnosed as "lacking
self-esteem," and charged with "antisocial behavior." Social scientists, as
the foremost experts on the needs of society, along with social workers and
other professionals such as philanthropists, policy experts, public health
professionals, and politicians speak in the name of society's interests.
Tutelary power is held by all those who speak for the interests and con-
cerns of society at large; for example, The Social Importance of Self-Esteem
is a volume dedicated to promoting the well-being of society.15 Yet that
power can be put into effect only by getting others to act.
I do not mean to underestimate the blatantly coercive and punitive mea-
sures taken by legislators, social workers, and other professionals under the
guise of liberation therapy. Battered women are often coerced by the courts
into participating in therapeutic programs that aim at their empowerment
or self-esteem. Mothers caught up in the juvenile court system can be made
to "graduate" from parenting courses, group therapies, and the like before
the custody of their children is secure. The institution of foster care is eas-
ily made into a coercive apparatus for preparing mothers to become the
kind of mothers deemed appropriate by society, by legislation, by philan-
thropists: the threat of taking children away is a primary tool of coercion.
But just as often, women are persuaded to participate in their own "em-
powerment" without threats. Governance in this case is something we do
to our selves, not something done to us by those in power. 16 1 am suggesting
that we have wildly underestimated the extent to which we are already self-
governing. Democratic government, even self-government, depends upon
the ability of citizens to recognize, isolate, and act upon their own subjec-
tivity, to be governors of their own selves. The ability of a citizen to gen-

Revolutions Within 91
 erate a politically able self depends upon technologies of subjectivity and
citizenship which link personal goals and desires to social order and stabil-
ity, linking power to subjectivity.17 The line between subjectivity and sub-
jection is crossed when I subject my self, when I align my personal goals
with those set out by reformers — both expert and activist — according to
some notion of the social good. The norm of self-esteem links subjectivity
to power; in the words of Nikolas Rose, it "binds subjects to a subjection
that is the more profound because it appears to emanate from our au-
tonomous quest for ourselves, it appears as a matter of our freedom." 18
The call for self-government and democracy is extended beyond politi-
cal institutions and economic relations by the self-esteem movement; the
political goals of participation, empowerment, and collective action are
extended to the terrain of the self. Steinern inverts the feminist slogan, "the
personal is political" by claiming that "the political is personal." Nikolas
Rose has shown how contemporary political technologies (such as efforts
to achieve self-esteem) promise a certain kind of freedom, not offering
"liberation from social constraints but rendering psychological constraints
on autonomy conscious, and hence amenable to rational transformation.
Achieving freedom becomes a matter not of slogans nor of political revo-
lution, but of slow, painstaking, and detailed work on our own subjective
and personal realities, guided by an expert knowledge of the psyche." 19
The liberation promised by self-esteem originates within the relation of
self-to-self but is not limited to the self. Indeed, self-esteem is advocated as
a basis for the democratic development of the individual and society; it out-
lines a whole new set of social relationships and strategies for their devel-
opment under the expert tutelage of "liberation therapists."

Constituting a State of Esteem

The California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and

Social Responsibility was charged by the state legislature with compiling
existing research on the relationship between "self-esteem" and six social
problems: "chronic welfare dependence," alcoholism and drug abuse, crime
and violence, academic failure, teenage pregnancy, and child abuse. Neil
Smelser, a sociologist and a member of the Task Force, admits the failure
of social scientists to identify the lack of self-esteem as the cause of social
problems: "The news most consistently reported . . . is that the associations
between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant,
or absent."20 Yet despite the "disappointing" correlation found between the

92 The Will to Empower

lack of self-esteem and the social problems listed,21 the Task Force forged
ahead, calling for increased funding for farther research. Its members and
the social scientists involved did not diagnose, empirically discover, or even
describe an already existing malaise and its cure. Instead, they applied
methods to measure what was not there: the focus of research moved to the
lack of self-esteem and its (non)relation to social problems.
The Task Force in its final report quoted Professor Covington, who
claims that self-esteem "challenges us to be more fully human. In addition
to being an object of scientific investigation and also an explanation for
behavior, self-esteem is above all a metaphor, a symbol filled with excess
meaning that can ignite visions of what we as a people might become."22
From the "discovery" of its absence, social scientists have a created a
tangible vision of a "state of esteem." Here the social sciences can be seen
as productive sciences; the knowledge, measurements, and data they pro-
duce are constitutive of relations of governance as well as of the subjectiv-
ity of citizens. In devising the methods for measuring, evaluating, and es-
teeming the self, social science actually devises the self and links it to a
vision of the social good and a program of reform. In short, social scien-
tists have helped to produce a set of social relationships and causal relations
where there were none before.
Social science has been instrumental in generating a self capable of self-
governance, but it is a decidedly unscientific enterprise. In the end, social
scientists themselves eschew the importance of evidence: "Our purpose is
to build aprima facie case for the importance of self-esteem in the causation
of violent crimes. Public policy does not wait for final proof in other
realms. . . . We see no need to be defensive about advocating the impor-
tance of self-esteem."23 The obvious question is why social science is a nec-
essary member of a coalition for building a prima facie case for self-esteem.
If the case is to be built prima facie, why call for more funding to gather evi-
dence in the form of social science research? The answer lies, I think, in the
productive capacities of social scientific research. It is social scientific re-
search that produces the subject as one who lacks self-esteem, and it is so-
cial science research that sets the terms for telling the truth of that subject.
Finally, it falls to social science research to establish policy measures to
regulate the subject according to that truth. In a turn of phrase taken from
Pierre Bordieu, from professing a faith in self-esteem for its liberatory
properties, experts have turned self-esteem into a profession.24
Social service providers and researchers will earn high salaries from the
self-esteem movement, and new programs are proliferating. "Empower-

Revolutions Within 93
 ment" and "self-esteem" are almost mandatory in mission statements and
grant applications for nonprofit agencies. But self-esteem advocates are not
merely the poverty pimps of the 1990s (although there is certainly plenty
of evidence for that characterization).25 It is a mistake to focus solely on the
immediate economic and professional interests of service providers. Pro-
gram directors and researchers may profit from the advances of the self-
esteem movement, but that does not fully explain why or how people come
to understand themselves as lacking self-esteem. It is equally partial to
characterize self-esteem programs as obscuring or neglecting the "real"
underlying causes (e.g., poverty, sexism, racism) of the lack of self-esteem.
The self-esteem movement is not conceived on the level of ideology. It is
not a ruse, a panacea, a cynical plot; it is a form of governance.
Despite the failure of social scientists to discern any causal relationship
between violence and self-esteem, a correlative relationship has worked its
way into law. I quote from Assembly Bill No. 3659, which established the
California Task Forcer "The findings of the Commission on Crime Con-
trol and Violence Prevention included scientific evidence of the correla-
tion between violent antisocial behavior and a lack of self-esteem, to wit: A
lack of self-esteem, negative or criminal self-image and feelings of distrust
and personal powerlessness are prevalent among violent offenders and
highly recidivistic criminals.'" 26 The Task Force adapted the model of the
Commission on Crime Control for its own "citizens' effort" to secure fund-
ing for further research and took from the field of criminology its methods
of applying and organizing knowledge.
It is significant, of course, that the new technology of self-esteem is pro-
duced in part out of methods devised for the prevention of crime and the
supervision of prisoners. From analyzing among the causes of the bloody
Attica prison riot a decline in the self-esteem of guards who were not con-
sulted before their powers were reduced, reviewers leap immediately to the
policy implications of that analysis for relationships between clients and
staff, doctors and patients, teachers and students, parents and children.27
The whole of society and all its designated "social problems" become the
location for the deployment of this new technology of subjectivity. A whole
society of esteemed, estimated, quantified, and measured individuals can re-
place a citizenry defined by their lack of self-esteem. It is also important to
remember that the language of empowerment and self-esteem emerged out
of social movements. Liberation is clearly tied to discipline in the discourses
of self-esteem in more ways than I can chronicle here. I mention just two.

94 The Will to Empower

 First, so-called welfare dependency, alcoholism, and teen pregnancy are
pathologized and criminalized alongside violence, child abuse, and illegal
drug use. This move is accomplished by relating the "low self-esteem" of
welfare recipients, for example, to their failure to act politically, to partici-
pate in their own empowerment, to engage in fulfilling the social obliga-
tion of "responsible citizenship." According to the California Task Force
report, welfare recipients fail to fulfil their responsibilities to society be-
cause they lack self-esteem, a deficiency demonstrated by their being on
welfare in the first place. Second, the knowledge originally applied to the
government, control, and reform of criminals and "antisocial behavior" is
now applied throughout the social body: the overt use of technologies of
surveillance and control in the field of criminality are displaced by the
technology of self-government applied to welfare recipients and alcoholics.
According to the California Task Force, the "social vaccine" must be ap-
plied at all levels of society. Family, work, government — all areas of soci-
ety must be integrated by the principles of self-esteem and personal and
social responsibility: "In the twenty-first century every government level
in the state and each of its programs are designed to empower people to
become self-realizing and self-reliant. . . . Every citizen (and noncitizen
as well) recognizes his or her personal responsibility for fully engaging in
the political process, and he or she recognizes the possibility for positively
affecting every other person in every situation and relationship."28 The
characterization of the future in present tense notwithstanding, the dis-
course of self-esteem is aimed at constituting a just and democratic society.
To get there, rather than revealing our opinions and persuading others to
act in concert with us, we should work to achieve self-esteem, which has to
do with our reputation with our selves. Constituting a state of esteem has
nothing to do with traditionally conceived public life and speech. A state of
esteem can be founded upon the inner dialogue between self and self.
From the prison cell to the whole of society, individuals in isolation can
act to bring about a social and democratic revolution. Steinern believes that
"self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the
lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or
to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own
conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the
basis of any real democracy."29 Given the possibility of thus aligning politi-
cal power and self-esteem, what is the answer to Tocqueville's question
about the possibility for resistance to the established order in isolation?

Revolutions Within 95
 A New Science of Politics

Foucault and feminism have shown how individuals come to understand

themselves as the subjects of sexuality and gender, respectively. Similarly,
I am arguing that individuals learn to recognize themselves as subjects of
democratic citizenship and so become self-governing. As with technologies
and discourses of sexuality and gender, it is possible to give a history of the
fabrication of citizen-subjects and of their relation to the social order. But
what Foucault and feminism have not elaborated, Alexis de Tocqueville
took as a guiding question: namely, why do these forms of power, citizen-
ship, and subjectivity emerge only with democracy? How does governance
become a question of self-governance in a democracy?
The capacities of citizens to govern their selves as well as the condi-
tions of self-government underwent dramatic changes in the nineteenth
century (Chapter 2). In America, the difficulties that Tocqueville encoun-
tered in distinguishing between despotism and democracy reveal that self-
government entails more than the exercise of subjectivity; it entails also the
subjection of the self.
Ostensibly, democracy liberated political subjects, transforming them
overnight into political citizens. A society in which a citizen is subject to
the rule of another is, ipso facto, not a democracy. (Chapter 1 explained the
flaws in Tocqueville's citizen/subject contrast.) The democratic citizen
who participates directly in government, in self-rule, thereby avoids sub-
jection, according to Tocqueville's first volume of Democracy in America.
But the line between the subjectivity of citizens and their subjection was
not so clear, he discovered; by the time he finished the second volume, he
seemed unable to distinguish either democracy from its tendencies toward
despotism or the sovereignty of the masses from their subjection.
Both despotism and democracy relied upon isolated and powerless
citizens, according to Tocqueville. Under despotism, subjects were simply
unfree and isolated. In a democracy, under conditions of equality, citizens
were isolated and made powerless by the freedom granted to each singly;
although free, they were relatively powerless as isolated individuals. Hence,
the power of numbers became the sine qua non of democratic power and
stability. In order to exercise self-government, citizens had to act in con-
cert and combine forces to wield any power and guard against the tendency
of democracies toward despotism.
The same democratic conditions — individual equality and individual
freedom — made combining numbers very difficult, however. "Since in

96 The Will to Empower

times of equality no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of an-
other, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his
fellow men, each one is both independent and weak," wrote Tocqueville.
"These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor
confused, give the citizen of a democracy extremely contradictory in-
stincts."30 Getting independent citizens to participate and take an interest
in the life and well-being of society was no small task. In a chapter titled
"That the Americans Combat the Effects of Individualism by Free In-
stitutions," Tocqueville insisted that local and associational freedoms —
political freedoms—were the only safeguards against despotism because
they ensured the capacity of citizens to govern themselves by providing the
training and the taste for freedom.
Yet the features of either despotism or democracy led citizens to ne-
glect their political freedoms, which, from disuse, were rendered power-
less against despotism. "Equality puts men side by side without a link to
hold them firm. Despotism raises barriers to keep them apart. It disposes
them not to think of their fellows and turns indifference into a sort of
public virtue." 31 Tocqueville recognized that although the police and the
state could prevent action by means of outright domination and force,
they could not produce the active cooperation and participation of citi-
zens. Democratic governance relied upon a productive (rather than a re-
pressive) form of governance, which eluded the grasp of the state.32 To
guide and govern a democracy, Tocqueville called for a "new science of
politics."33 Democratic participation was not clear-cut or naturally occur-
ring; it was something that had to be solicited, encouraged, guided, and di-
rected. Hence, the new science of politics needed to develop technologies
of citizenship and participation.
Isolated from one another by their freedom, individuals required an arti-
ficially created solidarity: namely, a science of association. "In democratic
countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of
knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others." 34 Even the legal
recognition of associations, previously considered a dangerous source of
disorder, was not enough to ensure democratic order if citizens could not
be led to exercise their political freedoms; the capacity of citizens to exer-
cise self-government itself had to become a matter of government.
In short, the threat of despotism and disorder came not from the unruly
but from the indifferent, the apathetic.35 "Individually weak citizens form
no clear conception in advance of the power they might gain by combin-
ing; to understand that, they must be shown it." 36 Citizens had to be made

Revolutions Within 97
 to act: first, they must know how to get together, to amass themselves to
act in concert; second, they must desire to do so. The former could be ac-
complished through the science of association; the latter was a matter of
what Tocqueville called "enlightened self-interest, or "interest rightly un-
derstood: "When no firm and lasting ties any longer unite men, it is im-
possible to obtain the cooperation of any great number of them unless you
can persuade every man whose help is required that he serves his private
interests by voluntarily uniting his efforts to those of all the others." 37 Per-
suading citizens to tie their self-interest and their fate voluntarily to soci-
ety was the key to stability without the use of force.
The republican preoccupation with civic virtue — overcoming one's
self-interest to take up the common interest—was replaced, according to
Tocqueville, by the discipline that led to actions incited by "enlightened
self-interest." Democratic political action was further distinguished by a
"general rule" that links citizens to society: "The doctrine of self-interest
properly understood does not inspire great sacrifices, but every day it
prompts some small ones; by itself it cannot make a man virtuous, but its
discipline shapes a lot of orderly, temperate, moderate, careful, and self-
controlled citizens. If it does not lead the will directly to virtue, it estab-
lishes habits which unconsciously turn it that way." 38
Tocqueville learned about discipline and enlightened self-interest from
his study of prisons. As others have pointed out, he learned that prison dis-
cipline could "make up" good citizens even if it could not produce virtuous
men.39 One must not make too much of the prison as a model for demo-
cratic government, however.40 The prison may serve as a perfect model for
despotism but not for democracy. The task Tocqueville set himself was to
discover those aspects of democracy that could be mobilized against despo-
tism, despite the similarities he saw between the two forms of governance.
If the condition of equality generalized the techniques of the prison to vol-
untary relations, the problem was to turn voluntary power relationships
against despotism.
Tocqueville claimed that neither despotism nor democracy had been
given shape by institutions and laws. Democracy was a certain kind of so-
ciety. The tendency toward despotism lay less in the governing institutions
of democracy than in the techniques by which democracy was governed.
The condition of democratic equality and individual isolation led to the
contradictory propensity of democratic citizens, on the one hand, to be-
come ungovernable in their independence and, on the other hand, to sub-
mit in powerlessness to any authority powerful enough to command them.

98 The Will to Empower

"Nevertheless, I am convinced that anarchy is not the greatest of the ills to
be feared in democratic times, but the least. Two tendencies in fact result
from equality: the one first leads men directly to independence and could
suddenly push them right over into anarchy; the other, by a more round-
about and secret but also a certain road, leads them to servitude." 41
Tocqueville's new science of politics, then, was concerned not with po-
litical institutions but with preserving democratic freedom and the power
of citizens within the voluntary relations of society. The ties that citizens
needed to cultivate were not political but social (associational), even if their
object was political; their fabrication marked the dislocation of the politi-
cal, the state, and the emergence of "the social" in the nineteenth century
alongside the birth of the social sciences. Associations — organized to build
bridges, to develop the arts and sciences, to do business—were useful for
cementing individual citizens' desires and goals to a vision of what was
good for society. With no apparent coercion or centralized state action,
voluntary associations could ensure a united citizenry and a stable society.
Democracy entailed the transformation of politics from an activity
dependent upon a conception of public (as opposed to private) life to a
matter of social life and the life of society. For democracy to meet the
requirement of getting individuals to act together in concert as citizens,
Tocqueville initially sounded a common republican theme: "As soon as
common affairs are treated in common, each man notices that he is not as
independent of his fellows as he used to suppose and that to get their help
he must often offer his aid to them."42 In a mass democracy, however, as
opposed to a republic, a single public sphere could not extend far enough
to impress upon all the citizens their need of one another to maintain sta-
bility. Republican self-government was understood to be a part-time activ-
ity taking place within the restricted public sphere and concerning matters
of public (shared) importance; freedom and politics were located in the re-
stricted public sphere. In a democracy, by contrast, democratic freedom
and hence the activities of self-government underwent a despatialization
and were then located in associations and in the capacities and actions of
individuals.
The capacity of citizens to be self-governing in a republic depended
upon institutions that disappeared under the conditions of democracy. In a
republic, a concern for the common weal was grounded in the fact that
public life was restricted to male property owners and soldiers. Tocqueville
claimed that the legislators of American democracy knew that a single pub-
lic sphere could not extend the awareness of mutual dependence to an iso-

Revolutions Within 99
 lated citizenry; hence, the whole of society had to be governmentalized and
venues constructed for citizens to take care of organizing and governing
themselves.
Voluntary associations, while avoiding the politically disabling expan-
sion of government into the activities of citizens, extended the reach of
power by getting people to act for themselves. Tocqueville asked, "What
political power could ever carry on the vast multitude of lesser undertak-
ings which associations daily enable American citizens to control?"43 As-
sociations artificially extended the reach of government into ungoverned
relations.
Still, what was it that distinguished democracy from despotism? The
answer lay not in politics or institutions but in the relationship of the indi-
vidual to society. Again, Tocqueville was struck by the absence of visible
official governmental powers and actions in America.44 Moreover, he was
dumbstruck and terrified by the invisible governance to which citizens
were subject: "Thus I think that the type of oppression which threatens
democracy is different from anything there has ever been in the world be-
fore. . . . I have myself vainly searched for a word which will exactly express
the whole of the conception I have formed." 45 What Tocqueville called
"despotism," for lack of a better expression, he described as a condition of
holding society — its interests, privileges, wisdom, and power — above the
individual. Despotism was the threat not of too much government but of
not enough. "The idea of intermediary powers is obscured and obliterated.
The idea of rights inherent in certain individuals is rapidly disappearing
from mens' minds; the idea of the omnipotence and the sole authority of
society at large is coming to fill its place."46 Powers of government, then,
were transferred from the government and from the individual onto soci-
ety at large; society was granted "its duty, as well as its right to take each
citizen by the hand and guide him." 47
We have traditionally understood Tocqueville to be holding out the
tyranny of the majority or society writ large as a threat to the subjectivity,
actions, and independence of individuals. For him, however, democratic
government did not pit the individual citizen against collective society, for
unlike the state, society had no agency or power of its own to wield. The
dangerous tendency in a democracy was not toward tyranny, domination,
or forced conformity but toward an invisible and gentle subjection. The
tutelary power of associations, which could lead citizens to exercise their
subjectivity and to act upon their enlightened self-interest, could also lead
them into complete subjection. "Each individual lets them put the collar

ioo The Will to Empower

on, for he sees that it is not a person, or a class of persons, but society itself
which holds the end of the chain."48 Citizens obeyed the call of society at
large; self-guided, without chains, without force, they quietly placed them-
selves in the hands of society and mobilized in society's interest.
Tutelary power could be easily combined with outward forms of politi-
cal freedom because it was society at large, not a class or a tyrant, placing
citizens in chains. Society was that which stood above. The individual citi-
zen was not pitted against the majority but was artificially linked to the ma-
jority by discipline and association. The distinction between despotism
and democracy rested on the degree to which tutelary powers acted for
individuals rather than guiding them to act for themselves. That is to say,
democracy depended upon the social construction of citizens capable of
governing themselves. "We should therefore direct our efforts, not against
anarchy or despotism, but against the apathy which could engender one or
the other almost indifferently."49 It was upon the small and daily routines
of social life that self-government depended. "Subjection in petty affairs is
manifest daily and touches all citizens indiscriminately. It never drives men
to despair, but continually thwarts them and leads them to give up using
their free will." 50

Recovery of the Will

Tocqueville overestimated the tendency of democracies toward despo-

tism because he underestimated the successes of the social sciences and
social reformers at developing technologies of citizenship. For example, he
and Gustave de Beaumont found prison reformers in the United States a
bit overzealous: "Philanthropy has become for them a kind of profession,
and they have caught the monomanie of the penitentiary system, which to
them seems the remedy for all the evils of society." 51 Today, self-esteem is
one example of our reformers' monomanie. It is an innovation in the means
of governing a democratic society.
The self-esteem movement is but one in a long line of technologies of
citizenship and continual efforts to reform the liberal arts of government.
Democracy is entirely dependent upon the technologies of citizenship de-
veloped in social movements, in public policy research, and in the sciences
of human development, and elsewhere. The constitution of the citizen-
subject requires technologies of subjectivity, technologies aimed at produc-
ing happy, active, and participatory democratic citizens. These technologies
rarely emerge from the Congress; more often they emerge from the social

Revolutions Within 101

 sciences, pressure groups, social work discourses, therapeutic social service
programs, and so on. Their common goal is to get the citizen to act as his
or her own master.
Social reform begins with the acknowledgment that democratic govern-
ment is limited in its capacity to govern. Democratic government relies
upon citizens to subject themselves to power voluntarily. Here is the state
of California saying, go ahead and democratize the family, the workplace,
the schools: "Sometimes we feel that if we create democracy in the home,
work place or school, we will undercut someone's authority and encourage
irresponsibility. In fact, democracy works well only when we all exercise
self-discipline and personal and social responsibility."52
Of course, not everyone can be "vaccinated," and those who lack self-
esteem will presumably continue to abuse, haunt, rob, reproduce and oth-
erwise bring ill health upon the social body.53 Nevertheless, as a cure for so
many ills, self-esteem means about as much as "positive thinking" meant
in the 1970s, "empowerment" in the 1980s, and "enterprise" in the 1990s.
We are not entering the age of an all-powerful therapeutic state, or a state
of complete subjection, for we are still citizens. Yet thousands of people
now define their lack of power and control in the world as attributable to
their lack of self-esteem. Gloria Steinern, spokeswoman for the National
Organization for Women (NOW), one of the largest feminist associations,
today attributes the failures of her political career and the feminist move-
ment to her own lack of self-esteem.
More important, state government documents such as those from Cali-
fornia that I have considered here do not create citizen-subjects by them-
selves. Nor do the therapists, mothers, and politicians who vaccinate citi-
zens with self-esteem bear the responsibility for creating citizen-subjects.
Self-esteem is but one in a long line of technologies that avail the citizen of
him- or herself. Self-rule remains essential to democratic stability, and so
the relationship of self to self is a political relationship, although one that
is more dependent upon voluntarily applied technologies of selfhood than
upon coercion, force, or social control engineered from above.
Self-esteem advocates, including Steinern, may not recognize the extent
to which personal life is the product of power relations, the extent to which
personal life is governed and is itself a terrain of government. The "inner
( ^ vvoice" she teaches us to listen to is the voice of pure and unmediated self-
^ knowledge. She assumes that women have a natural subjectivity that is
hindered or repressed by power, rather than shaped and constituted by

102 The Will to Empower

power. Steinern fails to grasp the difficulty of distinguishing subjectivity
from subjection.
Self-esteem as a social movement links subjectivity and power in a way
that confounds any neat separation of the "empowered" from the powerful.
Most important, the self-esteem movement advocates a new form of gov-
ernance that cannot be critically assessed by separating public from private,
political from personal. Too much is left out by critics of the self-esteem
movement who continue to think of power and resistance in paired oppo-
sition: individual and collective, public and private, political and personal.
What these criticisms omit, I contend, is the extent to which the citizen is
(like inequality, poverty, and racism) the product of power relations, the
outcome of strategies and technologies developed to create everything from
autonomy and empowerment to self-esteem. External powers act upon the
G «U.
terrain of the self, but we also act upon ourselves, particularly according to f ni^A
J
such models of self-help as the self-esteem movement. In the words of
Hacking, critics "leave out the inner monologue, what I say to myself. They
leave out self-discipline, what I do to myself. Thus they omit the perma-
nent heartland of subjectivity."54 We might add that they leave out self- V4A
government, how we rule ourselves. f

Tocqueville attributed to the general "equality of conditions" shared by ^

American citizens their role in generating stability. What has become evi- ^ \
dent since is that even in a society deeply divided by inequalities of race, .
class, and gender, political stability is relatively secure and overt resistance ^
rare. Although the absence of open conflict is notable, social science that ^ ^ ^
proposes a lack of something (of resistance, of a social movement, of a con- ^u^t r
sciousness of race, class, or gender, of self-esteem) is a productive science K.
that plays a large role in democratic government. v* ^ rw v -
I have outlined a history of the present "state of esteem," a new political * -n..,
order founded upon the self. Needless to say at this point, self-esteem does |
not divert the political will of feminism toward personal therapy. Already, ^
self-esteem is being replaced by the new monomanies of "enterprise,"
"community," and antiracism. The history of the self-esteem movement
illustrates only that self-governance is still a condition of democracy. %>

Revolutions Within 103

3
Welfare Queens:
Ruling by Number

lflf elfare recipients were obviously intimidated and dominated by

state power, excluded from political self-representation and participation.
Yet, during the Reagan era in America the so-called welfare queen was also
sovereign over the system of welfare. The ultimate con, she outsmarted the
system; she was a grifter, a fraud, who "abused" the desire of taxpayers to
help the down-and-out. As such, she was both sovereign and subject simul-
taneously. According to Nietzsche, that subjects can be held accountable is
a condition of their appearance.1 Yet the welfare queen was accountable in
a very strange way, I argue: that is, she was the subject of numbers and the
innovations in auditing techniques applied to welfare case data in the 1970s.
That the welfare queen was both sovereign and subject makes her a typi-
cal liberal democratic citizen-subject in the terms of my argument thus far.
But not all liberal democratic citizen-subjects are alike; there is more than
one kind, and welfare queens are just one example. To argue that the wel-
fare queen is a citizen-subject is surprising, perhaps, given that her status is
so often taken to be an effect of illiberal ideology and racism, not of liberal
welfare state practices. Critics sympathetic to the welfare state and welfare
activists believe that the "myth" of the black welfare queen is used to legiti-
mate the excessive and punitive practices of the welfare state by mobilizing
public prejudice against welfare recipients and black women. For example,
Lucie White writes, "'welfare fraud'" has long been one of the dominant
themes expressing the ambivalence, indeed aversion, within modern politi-
cal culture, to welfare. 'Fraud' connotes an idea — a negative image of the
'typical welfare recipient.' At the same time, it justifies an elaborate re-
gime for monitoring eligibility determinations and restricting the welfare
rolls." 2 Accounting for the "myth" entails something more than exposing
the lies about welfare queens, however.
The election campaign mantra for conservatives in the 1980s, "going af-
ter fraud, waste and abuse in the welfare system," meant prosecuting the
welfare queen and holding her accountable for "cheating" the system and
corrupting the welfare state. Welfare rights advocates argued that welfare
recipients were easy targets, the scapegoats of the right-wing backlash that
followed upon the gains of the civil rights movement and the growth of
entitlement programs throughout the 1970s. The argument of welfare
advocates was that poor women could not represent themselves, and so
they made easy targets during the fiscal crisis of the 1980s.
In other words, welfare rights advocates argued that the assault upon
the welfare queen was due to her powerlessness to represent herself. The
conflict was understood to be between the interests of the Reagan admin-
istration, which was set on turning back entitlement programs, and those
of the welfare recipients who relied upon those programs. For example,
Piven and Cloward explain that the Reagan administration scapegoated
A F D C recipients because, "unlike elderly or disability claimants, A F D C
recipients are unorganized and are therefore unable to respond to charges
effectively. . . . singling out A F D C inevitably becomes an attack on mi-
norities."3 It is the welfare queen's unaccountability, then, her voiceless-
ness, her absence from the stage of politics that accounts for her status as a
scapegoat.
That argument is no doubt familiar to most readers. Nevertheless, I ar-
gue that Nietzsche was right: the accountability of the subject is a condi-
tion of her appearance. It was not the powerlessness of the welfare queen
or her subjection that made her available as a scapegoat; rather, it was her

Welfare Queens
 sovereignty, her accountability, that was the condition of her appearance. It
is the fact that she was represented and constituted as a quantifiable and
calculable citizen-subject that accounts for her. I argue that the welfare
queen's condition of appearance was established long before Reagan made
her guilty for the overgrown welfare state. It was the Carter administra-
tion's new auditing techniques and case evaluation standards that became
the condition for the appearance of the welfare queen.
In other words, my explanation reverses the ones given by Piven,
Cloward, and White: excessive, punitive, and productive welfare practices
constitute the myth of the stereotypical welfare queen. The stereotype
does not justify or legitimate welfare practices; rather, those practices jus-
tify stereotypes.
The reason for my reversal is strategic. I indirectly confirm Nietzsche's
claim not for philosophical reasons but for political ones. The welfare
rights movement and its strategists have historically sought to combat the
racist and ideological representation of the welfare queen by calling upon
her to represent herself, to act in her own interests with others of her kind.4
In other words, critics seek to mobilize the very myth of the welfare queen
they seek to debunk. To start from the fact of political exclusion and then
argue for the inclusion of poor women's voices in debates over welfare re-
form, to argue for their self-representation, is already to take the welfare
queen for granted, to take her for "real." Indeed, any causal explanation,
however critical, that can be drawn between the mythical figure of the
black welfare queen and the welfare system mistakenly takes her for "real."
So, by staging a reversal of causal terms, I risk also taking a fiction for a fact.
That risk is worth taking — again, for strategic reasons. Another welfare
rights strategy is to "speak truth to power," to educate the public on the
facts in order to depose the myth of the welfare queen. Later on, I explain
further why that strategy is doomed to failure. No matter how many times
the facts are marshaled against the myths of welfare, the facts of the mat-
ter do not provide a leghold in the politics of representation. To argue that
not all welfare recipients are guilty of fraud fails on two fronts. First,
A F D C grants were so low in the 1980s that only those with public housing
in some states could get by on a welfare budget; therefore, the guilt of any
welfare recipient who lived relatively well was presumed by welfare fraud
investigators. (This was established for the first time, however, only in
1997.) 5 Second, to defend the innocence of the welfare queen is to under-
mine the conditions of her appearance. This is a somewhat different but
closely related trap to the one I laid out in the introduction to this book.

106 The Will to Empower

 How do we account for the fact that the welfare queen's existence is a
myth? The short answer is, by accounting: it is numbers that constitute the
body of the mythical queen. I argue that it is crucial to study the numeri-
cal terms of her embodiment — to account for the fact that she is embod-
ied, rather than to account for what is done to her body. That the stereo-
typical welfare queen is black, lazy, oversexed, and cunning, I argue, does
not necessarily point the right course for political resistance. If we were to
end our critique with the claim that welfare cheats were excluded from
democratic politics, racially stereotyped in the media, and scapegoated by
politicians, we would fail to see that the appearance of this mythical queen
was premised upon her accountability, not her race, class, gender, or kin-
ship ties.
Judith Butler notes a dual relation of the subject to power in her analy-
sis of gender and feminist politics: "It is not enough to inquire into how
women might become more fully represented in language and politics.
Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of 'women,'
the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures
of power through which emancipation is sought."6 Taking my cue from
Butler and Nietzsche, I argue that a critique of welfare cannot simply call
for more participation on the part of or in the name of welfare recipients
in the definition and provision of their own needs—a struggle Nancy
Fraser calls "the politics of need interpretation."7 (The same might be said
of job training now that federal entitlement programs like Aid to Families
with Dependent Children have ended.) Before calling upon welfare recip-
ients to act in their own interests and represent themselves politically as
recipients, one must, to paraphrase Butler, examine how the category
"welfare queen," the subject of welfare, is both produced and restrained by
the relations of rule we call "welfare." 8
To take the welfare queen for "real," to ask her to speak on her own be-
half and to act in her own interests, is to foreclose the possibility that she
could refute or refuse the terms of welfare. Critical strategies for mobiliz-
ing welfare recipients, discussed in Chapter 3 and below, typically seek to
mobilize the subject-effects of power rather than mobilize against the rela-
tions of rule that produce those effects.
Moreover, critical strategies insist that recipients leave the strategic field
of power in which they are constituted (just as Charity Organization Soci-
ety home visitors displaced poor people) to enter the public sphere of poli-
tics. Critics of the liberal welfare state too often take the state itself to be
the boundary of the political.

Welfare Queens
 Policing Democracy

A welfare-fraud suspect was a subject of welfare — of eligibility criteria

in a means-tested program — rather than a subject of the liberal state, a
subject of administrative procedure rather than constitutional due process,
a subject of error rates rather than civil rights. She did not break the law,
but she received a grant for which she was "ineligible." The welfare ad-
ministration's techniques of fraud detection — statistics, accounting, data
matching, hotlines, calculations of cost and benefit — provided the political
rationality which governed poor women's citizenship in terms of "waste,
fraud, abuse, and error." 9
Unlike that of citizens generally, a recipient's freedom was not the con-
dition of her subjection; it was her eligibility to receive AFDC, which was
quantifiable and calculable.10 Welfare recipients were eligible for welfare
not on the basis of being citizens but on the basis of a means test, a calcu-
lation of their eligibility. (This is not to say that freedom cannot be quan-
tified or calculated, only less obviously.) Eligibility criteria set the terms of
welfare and conferred a unity on welfare recipients so that then, and only
then, was it possible to. govern them according to those criteria.
That unity, however, was purely the product of numbers. The unifor-
mity of numbers does not represent the realities of poor women's lives or
their solidarity. Lucie White describes the life of Mrs. G., an AFDC re-
cipient accused of welfare fraud: "In order to participate in AFDC, Mrs. G
had no choice but to conform her life to the conditions the program im-
posed." Mrs. G. was "compelled to assent" to the rules of welfare. 11 Wel-
fare, like liberal democratic government in general, is both voluntary and
coercive.
The "voluntary" subjection of the welfare applicant to administrative
rules in return for money, vouchers, and services, made her immediately
subject to a whole series of double-binds that circumscribed her choices,
not the least of which was trading her constitutional rights for a welfare
check. Administrative laws and procedures determined not only her politi-
cal and public behavior but the terms on which she could discuss and
handle the basic and mundane aspects of her everyday life: where she could
live and with whom, what she could buy and where, whom she could trust.
First, unlike procedures for dealing with most felonies, the investigation
and prosecution of welfare fraud were only rarely carried out in criminal
courts or governed by the rules of due process.12 The presumption of guilt

108 The Will to Empower

was endemic, and recipients had to prove that they were not guilty in ad-
ministrative hearings. Everyone knew that families could not survive on
A F D C grants alone, since they rarely approached 70 percent of the federal
poverty level. The first premise of welfare-fraud investigations, therefore,
was that anyone living in relative stability must be cheating the system
somehow.
Second, investigations usually took place in administrative settings —
having moved out from an overcrowded criminal justice system — in which
one had no right to legal counsel; neither the rules of evidence nor the final
authority were clearly determined; and cases could be turned over to county
prosecutors at any time.
Third, anyone and any number of agencies could initiate a fraud inves-
tigation in most states. A disgruntled lover, the landlord, a father attempt-
ing to evade child support payments, or a postal worker could call a state
welfare-fraud hotline anonymously. A computer match from another bu-
reaucracy spit out a notice to attend an eligibility hearing. Child-protection
services could threaten an investigation in order to achieve anything from
getting a woman to agree to therapy to taking her children away. The sus-
picion of welfare-fraud was constantly repeated to recipients in standard
eligibility meetings and subsequent verification actions. Fraud hotline
posters were often conspicuous in waiting rooms.
Finally, investigations could be conducted on the agency, county, city,
state, and federal levels — even by private investigators, under county con-
tract, who earned a percentage of the amount recouped in fraud convic-
tions and overpayment designations. Tracing the lines of authority for the
systematic harassment of welfare recipients is extremely difficult, because
power was exercised in innumerable locations. (Recall my search for an au-
thority behind the Dumpster lockup in the introduction.)
Welfare fraud did not link women in poverty to the state so much as link
databases for computer cross-matches between agencies — the IRS, SSI,
AFDC, Department of Labor, and even state lotteries — in a vision of "sys-
tem integrity." Welfare fraud administration was a strategy to clean up,
police, account for, and discipline an unruly welfare program, not to dis-
cipline recipients. Its policing of numbers and strategies for ferreting out
"waste, fraud, abuse, and error," however, had a decisive disciplinary and
productive effect on welfare recipients. Welfare recipients were substanti-
ated by eligibility criteria and then, as recipients, their continued eligibil-
ity was regulated by the terms of welfare.

Welfare Queens
 Mythical Queens

If eligibility criteria produced welfare recipients as a group, how is it

that welfare recipients and especially "welfare cheats" were so often stereo-
typed as black? How were the terms of welfare inscribed onto the body of
"the black welfare queen?" Why was the racist and sexist narrative of the
black welfare queen repeated so often? Strangely, not one of the profes-
sional and governmental publications on welfare fraud that I have read
specifically mentions the racial breakdown of fraud, and not one account-
ing innovation specifically targeted or counted "welfare cheats" by race.
The allusions and allegations made by Ronald Reagan are legendary for
legitimating the allegedly popular stereotypes that equated welfare and race.
Proudly illiberal, Reagan charged that welfare was not a solution to the in-
equality that flowed from capitalism; rather, welfare was the cause of in-
equality. The narrative he spun on the welfare queen took on the quality
first of an explanation for the "welfare mess" and, second, of a clarion call
to taxpayers in revolt to clean up that mess. As Wahneema Lubiano notes,
Reagan's vituperative narrative made all recipients black and all guilty of
fraud. Lubiano points out that the "real" facts of welfare and race matter
very little, because the myths narrated by Reagan took on the appearance
of reality: "And it does not matter that all such children needing state care
are not black, or that poverty and unemployment are reasons that they need
state care; what matters, what resonates in the national mind's eye, is the
constant media-reinforced picture of the welfare queen — always black." 13
I argue, following Lubiano, that the black welfare queen is never actu-
ally embodied; she is and remains a fiction or, rather, she is embodied as a
fiction. There is no "real" woman who matches the stereotype. Lubiano is
right that the media representation of the queen was a myth. But where
does that leave us strategically? We are still armed only with the facts set
against the myth — and as Lubiano demonstrates, in the politics of repre-
sentation the facts don't matter.
From my perspective, it is crucial to study the terms of her embodiment,
not her actual body. The welfare queen is not only an ideological scapegoat
and Active character, a racial formation, but also a strategic one. Her race
and gender embodiment is the product of fictional narratives and rhetori-
cal ploys, but the fact that she has a body is an effect of numbers.
Numbers are methods of inscribing the lives of welfare recipients and
rendering them actionable. As Nikolas Rose writes, "Numbers do not
merely inscribe a pre-existing reality. They constitute it." 14 This is to say

no The Will to Empower

that administrative decisions based on numbers are not designed as they
are simply because taxpayers and politicians are racist. Rather, accounting
practices constitute the very "realities" they supposedly count. Thus, for
strategic reasons, because I agree with Lubiano that the strategy of dis-
counting myths with facts is fruitless, I want to present a new narrative ac-
count of the mythical queen's origin.
The policies that constituted and embodied the welfare queen predate
Reagan's rhetoric. For all his hate-mongering, Reagan was not the source
of the myth, nor were the media. Rather than being an explicit attack on
poor black women, the terms of welfare were set to attack "waste, fraud,
abuse, and error" in the name of "system integrity." The myth of the wel-
fare queen began to govern the lives of welfare recipients directly only after
a series of crises were declared to be threatening the welfare state and dem-
ocratic government. Following the 1960s surge in the numbers of AFDC
recipients, in 1972 the Subcommittee on Fiscal Policy of Congress's Joint
Economic Committee declared a "crisis in public welfare." The subcom-
mittee called the welfare system "an administrative nightmare" resulting in
"confusion, inefficiency, and lawlessness."15
The crisis was discovered under the Nixon administration, where the so-
lution of quality control (QC) was devised. Evelyn Brodkin and Michael
Lipsky have pointed out the ways in which QC was used as a means to
get the numbers under control, especially error rates in eligibility deter-
minations, and indirectly to reduce the numbers of people on welfare. 16
Brodkin reports that at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB),
"officials were scrutinizing the H E W (Health, Education and Welfare)
budget, searching for ways to get control over the 'uncontrollable' entitle-
ment in lieu of legislative reform. Error rates presented an obvious target.
From the budget analysts' viewpoint, caseload error rates represented more
than an indicator of inadequate state management practices. They signalled
an unnecessary outflow of federal dollars." 17
Policies to "enhance system integrity" continued under Carter, who
linked the cleanup to a second crisis, the "crisis of democracy": "This
Administration has declared war on waste and fraud in government pro-
grams. . . . We are concerned with more than saving tax dollars, crucial as
that is today. We must restore and rebuild the trust that must exist in a de-
mocracy between a free people and their government." 18 The "crisis of de-
mocracy" was a political crisis, as Carter pointed out, and had only an in-
direct relation to welfare. Carter went on, "As a known or suspected part
of the total federal budget, losses through fraud, abuse and error may be

Welfare Queens
 small. But compared to the tax bill of the average American, those losses
are huge — and demoralizing."19 Thus, Carter transformed the political
"crisis of democracy" into a crisis of numbers: the numbers of tax dollars
lost to waste, fraud, abuse, and error; the rising numbers of A F D C recipi-
ents; and the rising number of taxpayers in revolt. To govern a democracy
meant to discipline systems rather than people, to govern at a distance pro-
vided by certain auditing techniques.
Carter appointees devised a strategy not to punish the welfare cheat but
to dispel the myth of rampant cheating which, Carter felt, threatened the
"integrity of the program." In fact, under the direction of Joseph Califano,
administrative reforms were intended to document the fact that very few
recipients were committing welfare fraud, that there was no real crisis.
Califano opened a national conference on "fraud, abuse, and error" with
these remarks: "We cannot let a relatively few cheats and chiselers rob the
truly needy of the help they need. So we intend to discipline these and
other programs—while we fight those who would dismantle them." 20 In
order to prove the integrity of welfare administration, Califano introduced
even more ways to make welfare recipients calculable.
At the end of a ten-year period of QC innovations, new verification re-
quirements for A F D C eligibility could include photo identification, some-
times fingerprints, two proofs of residency, verification of social security
numbers for every family member (even infants), birth certificates, proof of
school attendance, and so forth. Lipsky sums up the net effect of Q C mea-
sures as "bureaucratic disentitlement."21
Indeed, these strategies of welfare-fraud prevention — strategies that
changed the terms of welfare — made Reagan's attack possible, made the
welfare cheat "real." The new terms of welfare included random QC checks,
pre-eligibility screening for fraud and errors, and a shift in emphasis from
criminal to administrative prosecutions for welfare fraud. Rather than
undergoing jury trials and jail time for fraud, recipients were more likely
required to pay back any "overpayments" they had received from welfare
agencies, perhaps with fines attached —without any proof whatsoever that
they had intended to commit fraud.22 In other words, recipients often paid
the price for agency errors much as if they were guilty öf fraud.23
By transforming the political crisis into a crisis of numbers and trans-
ferring it from the political to the administrative realm, Brodkin argues,
welfare officials succeeded in "depoliticizing" the crisis by steering a ques-
tion of policy out of Congress and into the hands of accountants and man-
agers.24 A concentration on numbers rather than on votes, however, does

112 The Will to Empower

not necessarily indicate a shift away from politics, conflict, or domination.
Nikolas Rose relates numbers to democratic politics this way: "Numbers
are not just 'used' in politics, they help to configure the respective bound-
aries of the political and the technical."25 Rather than "depoliticizing" the
exercise of power, then, welfare-fraud strategies give scope and method to
the productivity of power.
According to Sheldon Wolin, there is a distinctively political motive
for transferring a public and contested issue into the realm of administra-
tion and bureaucracy: "In brief, the variability of welfare programs means
that at any political moment they can be expanded, sharply modified, re-
versed, even revoked altogether. Variability is the condition that makes
possible two complementary phenomena: a certain kind of flexible power
and a certain kind of pliable citizen."26 This is another way to say that dis-
cretion was introduced through the extension of bureaucracy. But even
more important, this "flexible power," as Wolin calls it (or bio-power, as
Foucault would say), can be mobilized because welfare is rooted in admin-
istrative rather than constitutional law, and administrative jurisdictions are
discretionary.
Rather than being a "depoliticizing" move, the expansion of adminis-
trative domains has served to expand the reach of power, a particularly pro-
ductive kind of power. Political "justice" and the political crisis of democ-
racy were averted by reforms in which investigators (who could be private
investigators under contract to the state; employees of the city, county,
state, or federal welfare department; or criminal investigators from the dis-
trict attorney's office) determine the terms of a "fair" investigation, "fair"
evidence, and so on. The political in other words, has fluid rather than fixed
boundaries.
Far from being rationalized systems of social domination and control,
the methods of welfare-fraud investigation and administration were for
policing numbers, not people. Far from being an illiberal strategy or a
cynical and conspiratorial effort to disenfranchise certain citizens, welfare-
fraud administration was distinctively liberal. The terms of poor women's
citizenship were the liberal terms of rights and responsibilities, the terms
of a contract between citizen and state.

The Terms of Poor Women's Citizenship

On the back of a typical application for welfare, food stamps, or general

assistance, the terms of welfare were listed. Very often, a social worker

Welfare Queens
 would ask if the applicant understood these terms and, if so, the welfare
worker signed the form as evidence that the applicant has read and under-
stood them. At this time recipients were reminded of the penalties for wel-
fare fraud.27
The terms laid out a series of double-binds to which the recipient "con-
sented." They were listed in three parts: rights, responsibilities, and ap-
peals. Rights included, for example, the right to apply for public assistance,
the right to privacy, the right to have the application explained to you, and
so on.
Responsibilities included informing the case worker of any changes in
the data provided on the form: "If you give facts that are not true, or do not
report a change, you may be charged with fraud. Any facts that you give
may be checked by the county office. Facts that deal with your case can be
gotten from other sources only if you agree in writing. However, if you do
not give your written consent for us to check with other sources or provide
us with other proof of your facts, your application may be denied or your
grant stopped."28 In short, if you chose to exercise your right to privacy,
you forfeited your right to assistance.
The agencies that exchanged information included the United States
Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Department of
Jobs and Training, Child Support Enforcement, unemployment agencies,
AFDC, Medical Assistance, Department of Agriculture, mental health
centers, state hospitals and nursing homes, insurance companies, the De-
partment of Public Safety, collection agencies, anyone under contract to
the state's Department of Human Services, and social service agencies.29
Reasons given for obtaining information included the need to decide "if
you or your family needs protective services." In other words, for instance,
the information could be used against you in a juvenile court if a case was
initiated by child-protection services. Information was gathered to be used
in a punitive system of "protection."
After this double-bind came a more serious one which claimed that
Quality Control might choose a case randomly to verify a recipient's facts
against those obtained from third parties. "Even if you do not want the
contact made, and you do not give your written consent, the reviewer may
still make the contact after telling you." Cooperation was thus compulsory.
This section did several things. First, it clarified that even a county offi-
cial was not the final arbiter of one's eligibility. Final determination of eli-
gibility was always deferred, never settled, and usually discretionary. No
one was in charge here; there was no ultimate authority in rules or in the

114 The Will to Empower

adjudication of the rules.30 Second, it established that quality control and
welfare-fraud investigation were the same thing. Errors could be caused by
either clients or workers, but the recipient paid in either case. The terror of
random sampling was duplicated by toll-free welfare-fraud hotlines; any-
one could report suspicions about a recipient and some states guaranteed
an investigation. The most common callers were postal workers, disgruntled
lovers, and ex-husbands. Third, one's consent was absolutely meaningless
but absolutely necessary. To be eligible for A F D C one had to comply with
the verification process and consent to the invasion of privacy — the as-
sumption of guilt before the law — and anyone who did not consent could
be investigated anyway.
The appeals process, if a recipient objected to any of the foregoing
terms or the determinations of eligibility based on them, was extremely
risky to pursue. Most significantly for anyone who lost an appeal, "any
overpayment you get between the effective date of the action and the ap-
peal decision must be refunded to the county office." The appeals process,
of course, did not establish precedents for future decisions.31 Even if one
woman appealed and won, the terms of welfare would not change.
As an incentive to states and counties to pursue welfare-fraud investiga-
tions and audits, the federal government fined states for error rates that
were too high. In my own experience, fraud investigators were sometimes
the heroes of local media spots, but in state legislatures and Human Service
departments they were routinely despised. The occasional plea sent out
to welfare recipients to turn in their own kind in order to legitimate the
unpopular A F D C program — an attempt to enlist the participation of
recipients further in their own subjection — to my knowledge never re-
cruited great numbers. With no clear lines of authority, how is it possible
to account for an exercise of power that had such pervasive effects upon
women's citizenship? With so many lines of possible action, how is it pos-
sible to understand, let alone resist, the actions that are taken?

The Terms of Resistance

The rules of welfare created a strategic field, a space of calculation, a set

of possible actions, and then exploited those possibilities. By "strategic
field" I mean a field of possible actions distinct from the centralized au-
thority of the state and the law. It is established by relations of rule that are
not specific either to a sphere (public/private) or to a geography (local,
state, or federal government), nor is it founded in law. A strategic field is

Welfare Queens
 not spatially defined but marked by a variable set of strategies; it is estab-
lished not only by eligibility requirements but also by various disciplinary
measures: quality control procedures, computer data cross-matching, ac-
counting practices, and a model of operation whose consequences are not
covered by the law.
Welfare-fraud administration was a method for "acting at a distance"
upon welfare recipients.32 Welfare eligibility rules marked off a strategic
field in which setting the goal to clean up data sets, for example, or to catch
welfare cheats, utilized strategies that were based on numbers. It was es-
tablished to discipline not people, per se, but the system of welfare. Never-
theless, numbers were methods of inscribing the lives of welfare recipients
and rendering them actionable, as well as fictional. No "real" woman but
only an abstract woman, a "case," can be constituted by numbers. The
quantification of the lives of certain citizens does not necessarily determine
or control their behavior, but it does determine that what is counted will
add up to something actionable.
Rather than "depoliticizing" the exercise of power, the strategic field of
welfare-fraud accounting gave scope to the productivity of power and
linked it to expertise, rules, and criteria for evaluation. I do not want to sug-
gest that the terms of welfare were uttered in a unified or centralized voice.
Rather, the fields for running numbers overlapped and intersected with
other strategic fields, as when a probation officer, doctor, landlord, or drug
counselor shared information with a fraud investigator.
The tactics of one Canadian anti-fraud campaign documented by Jim
Torczyner are identical to those common in the United States: "There were
no public hearings before the campaign was launched because the investi-
gations were introduced as administrative changes that required no change
in law or regulation. Consequently, the parliamentary process was by-
passed. Although investigators had no legal authority, they had sweeping
discretionary power." 33 The strategic field of power gives broad scope for
tracking and accounting for numbers.
As a result, poor women's citizenship in the welfare state was deter-
mined not by the law applied to a particular territory but by the terms of
welfare or the relations of rule that made up a strategic field. Within the
strategic field of welfare fraud the option for recipients to resist were never
fully foreclosed, but the relations of rule that constituted the strategic field
were multiple, shifting, and often contradictory and insidious. The worst
double-bind followed from the fact that A F D C grants were made at levels
well below the established poverty line. Everyone knew that welfare grants

116 The Will to Empower

were not enough to live on and this fact more than any other created an at-
mosphere of fear and suspicion. Welfare recipients knew, probation officers
knew, therapists and ex-boyfriends knew, fraud investigators knew: if you
lived in one place and had well-fed and well-cared-for children, you were
in all likelihood committing welfare fraud; if you were homeless or living
in substandard housing, if your kids were poorly dressed and truant, then
you were a likely candidate for child-protection services. In either case, you
fell within the jurisdiction of a social service or administrative official.
The test of the strategic value of this account of welfare lies in the new
forms of resistance that then can be imagined within that field. I have more
to say here about what not to do than about what to do because I am not
myself standing in that strategic field. Theory will not solve strategical
questions of resistance — those will be solved politically — but political
theory does serve the negative task of providing the critical space for un-
learning and dehabituating ourselves to accustomed ways of conceptualiz-
ing politics.
Critical studies of administrative reform and practice are laced with one
central and foundational argument — that bureaucracy and administrative
practices function chiefly to "depoliticize" power relationships. According
to this logic, when issues leave the arena of the state, they no longer pro-
duce conflict because the exercise of power is masked; issues disappear, as
it were, from the public consciousness and public debate. I have argued, to
the contrary, that the "regulation," "professionalization," or "depoliticiza-
tion" of social life is better understood as an expansion of the political and
an extension of power's reach.
In the field of welfare administration I have shown that transforming
political problems into problems of numbers does not so much "depoliti-
cize" an issue as make political and governmental action on that issue pos-
sible. Government by numbers, then, indicates an extension of the reach of
power rather than its concealment. It all depends on where you look. If you
look for a face (a racist politician, a power-hungry social worker), you will
be disappointed, because in the strategic field of welfare everyone is ac-
countable but there are no bodies.
Critical theories of "depoliticization" are limited in their potential to
imagine new forms of resistance because they fail to account for political
power beyond the state.34 Rather than relocating the analysis of politics it-
self, critical theorists equate politicization with relocating issues in the
public sphere or "the political" by removing them from the "depoliticized"
arenas of family, economy, or bureaucracy. By failing to locate possible re-

Welfare Queens
 sistance in the strategic field in which it operates, I argue, critical and
democratic theorists too often overlook important possibilities for demo-
cratic action and resistance.
Nancy Fraser, whose work exemplifies politically engaged and critical
theory of the welfare state, lists four kinds of "client resistance."35 The first
is individual resistance aimed, for example, at extending the administrative
jurisdiction of an agency to include the needs of the client; the second, the
establishment of informal organizations such as domestic kin networks
(documented by Carol Stack)36 and "survival networks"; and the third, the
insistence of clients on the primacy of their own subjective narratives over
the therapeutic narratives asserted by the experts. None of these forms
of resistance is considered to be "political," however; Fraser reserves the
designation "political" for a very specific fourth form of resistance, that of
organizing as welfare recipients:

In addition to informal, ad hoc, strategic, and/or cultural forms of resis-

tance, there are also more formally organized, explicitly political, organized
kinds. Clients of social welfare programs may join together as clients to chal-
lenge administrative interpretations of their needs. They may take hold of
the passive, normalized, individualized or familialized identities fashioned
for them in expert discourses and transform them into a basis for collective
political action.37

Fraser fixes "political" resistance at the level of identity, a level that then
aims resistance at the state.38 In her account, it is only when we embody the
terms of welfare that we are acting "politically." Her account rules out much
of what I take to be crucial and possible forms of resistance in the welfare
rights movement.
Actions and debates that attempt to resist the fixing of a woman's iden-
tity "as a recipient" are not, in Fraser's formulation, explicitly political.
This excludes what in my own experience is the most common political
practice in welfare rights organizations: debating who counts as a "reci-
pient." In Women, Work and Welfare, a membership organization in Min-
neapolis, some of the most reliable contests and controversial debates in-
volved setting out terms of resistance. Arguments constantly erupted over
who, exactly, should be resisting welfare. Who was and was not a legitimate
spokeswoman for recipients? For example, are they/we clients, recipients,
participants, welfare moms, queens, single moms, poor moms, members of
a gender, a class, a race? How should someone be categorized who is not a
recipient but participates in welfare rights struggles? How long should a

118 The Will to Empower

woman have been on welfare to count as a recipient or spokesperson, or
how many years can lapse afterward before she is no longer eligible to fill a
board position reserved for "recipients"? What are the terms of resistance
that can accommodate all the ways women situate themselves in terms of
race and class? Should those who resist do so also in the name of their racial
and ethnic affiliations, or only as clients or mothers? These questions and
more were persistent and hotly debated in organizational meetings, at so-
cial functions, and during demonstrations — everywhere welfare rights ac-
tivists found themselves.
Establishing the terms and subjects of resistance was an ongoing
struggle, part of the everyday politics of resistance. In Fraser's account, an
expressly political identity is organized by its location in the welfare state —
the waiting room: "Notwithstanding the atomizing and depoliticizing
dimensions of A F D C administration, these women were brought together
in welfare waiting rooms. It was as a result of their participation as clients,
then, that they came to articulate common grievances and act together.
Thus the same welfare practices that gave rise to these grievances created
the enabling conditions for collective organizing to combat them." 39 In
this formulation, borrowed by Fraser from Frances Fox Piven, the explic-
itly political subjectivity of welfare recipients is rendered merely an orga-
nizational and ontological effect of the organization of state power, a frozen
embodiment of power. To achieve an expressly "political" identity, Fraser
and Piven insist, political subjects' identities must cohere through group
solidarity, which is bounded by shared interests and a shared location vis-
a-vis the state. The waiting room of a welfare office coheres group identity,
which can then act politically. Politics for these critical theorists is some-
thing that follows from the exercise of state power, and resistance results
from the process by which subjectivities are fixed.
By pointing out the limitations of aligning the terms of resistance with
the terms of welfare, I seek to expand democratic debate to encompass the
constitutive terms of welfare. Critical accounts of welfare are limited in
rendering political identity only in terms of state power and not in terms
of politics. Questions of strategy and forms of political resistance always
devolve, in Fraser's account (as well as those of the democratic theorists
addressed in Chapter 2), back to the state. Although Fraser situates discur-
sive contests over needs "between the political, the economic, and the do-
mestic," and she recognizes the multiple locations or directions from which
needs discourses flow and collide, the principal function of "enclaves"
(similar to what I have called strategic fields) is to "depoliticize" needs dis-

Welfare Queens
 courses.40 In order to become "political," then, needs must be brought out
of the "enclaves" and "go public." But where, exactly, is "the public?"
Although Fraser brilliantly articulates the creation of new publics and
new institutions by feminist activists — exemplified by the movement to
assist battered women, she presents the process of politicization as result-
ing in either the political (politicized) or the administrative (depoliticized)
satisfaction of needs. For Fraser, these are not merely multiple sites of
power but sites shaped by the primacy and unity of political power in the
realm of the state and in the terms of discourse. In my account, however,
these borders are not traversed by "runaway needs" and needs discourses so
much as they are traversed and linked by strategies and relations of rule.
Thus, welfare-fraud investigations link the caseworker, the IRS, child pro-
tection, the landlord, the hospital, the family, the social worker, and so on.
Traversing this map in the process of "politicizing" needs does not require
one to break out of the family, the social, the market, the agency, or the
accounting firm but demands that one recognize and resist the political
strategies that run across those spheres. Whereas Fraser separates subjec-
tivity from subjection in order to imagine political resistance, I have argued
that feminist and democratic critiques of welfare should call into question
any form of resistance or critique that separates those terms. Practices of
governing and ruling are not restricted to "the political" or to one sphere,
and so we must focus on how we are governed and by what practices, rather
than by which people in which sphere.
What we take for "real" political issues has bound us to forms of resis-
tance that are not effective. For example, Piven and Cloward insist that
there are "real" political issues, and then there are those that serve the ide-
ological function of making those "real" issues disappear.

There are, in other words, problems in the welfare programs. But no seri-
ous investigation of "fraud and abuse" would begin with unemployment,
food, and welfare programs. It might begin with defense contracts or the tax
system, where fraud and profiteering are normal rather than merely ram-
pant, and where the gains made are huge. And one might go to the private
vendors associated with the Medicare, Medicaid, and housing programs.
For the Reagan administration, however, fraud and abuse are not the real is-
sues, and the budget cuts are not directed against these problems. They are
directed against the recipients of welfare state benefits.41

Welfare rights activists have understood the "welfare queen" to be an

ideological ruse to cover up the "real" abuses of power at higher levels of

120 The Will to Empower

government. The counterattack by welfare rights organizations and ad-
vocates aims to expose the faces of "real" fraud, to unmask the irrationality
of political leaders for whom welfare-bashing is a political meal ticket. This
strategy goes back as far as the struggles of the National Welfare Rights
Union led by George Wiley in the 1960s and 1970s, which were aimed
at unmasking the "real" welfare crisis and the "real" fraud.42 But despite
the facts, despite the "real," and no matter how many people know about
it, making an issue "public" or "politicizing" it is not an effective mode of
resistance.
One cannot, of course, simply refuse the terms of welfare, for they are a
condition of receiving housing, food, and income.43 Once one is already
defined by the terms of welfare, a different kind of strategy is necessary, a
strategy that targets those very terms. Resistance must take the form of a
refusal to act as a recipient, a refusal to be what our relations to the state
have made us. As Foucault suggested, "Maybe the target nowadays is not
to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine
and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political 'double
bind,' which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of mod-
ern power structures."44 To hold the productive aspects of power and the
liberal arts of government politically accountable, we must imagine a way of
politically managing the fact that there is such a thing as the social construc-
tion of citizenship — that like welfare queens, all citizens are also subjects.

Welfare Queens
Conclusion
Iteration

The repetition that citizens are apathetic, too uninterested or too

self-interested to engage in politics, is both excited and monotonous, to use
a Tocquevilleian phrase. This book has asked what makes that repetition so
inexhaustible, so ready at the tip of the tongue. The condition of its utter-
ability is the will to empower. When we hear that subjects are apathetic or
powerless and that citizenship is the cure, we are hearing the echo of the
will to empower. It is the echo of a way of thinking about politics, power,
and democracy that is forever blinded by what is not there.
Even as I write, political scientists are, like Colonel Waring, developing
a new cottage industry and new sources of political capital out of waste.
Lamenting the loss of "social capital," Robert Putnam asserts that trust,
civility, and "civic engagement" are on the wane in America.1 Americans
don't join up as they used to in civic associations, bowling leagues, bridge
clubs; we even avoid the neighborhood street-corner chats. We are more
likely to write a check than to take part in a rally or listen to a speech. By
"social capital," Putnam means "features of social life — networks, norms,
trust — that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue
shared objectives."2 Just when the government is devolving the adminis-
tration of welfare to the state and local levels, we no longer have the "social
capital" necessary to run it. The culprit? According to Putnam, it is televi-
sion. T V is antisocial. We spend too much time watching rather than asso-
ciating; our children are socialized and educated via their interaction with
TV. "Social capital" is in crisis because we do not get up off the couch and
participate civically. The repetitions of the will to empower seem endless.
Like any discourse, the discourses of empowerment are learned, habit-
ual, and material, as Samuel Delaney says.3 It is quite natural to seek the
cause of political problems in order to prescribe a cure. It is my hope that
readers of this book will find it harder to pin a political problem on the lack
of citizenship. I hope that in its stead we will interrogate what is there in
the will to empower, the technologies of citizenship and arts of government
by which the various kinds of citizens we have are constituted.
Rather than too few citizens or too little attention to citizenship, we
have different kinds of citizens who are recognized not for what they do
or what they have been made into but for what they lack. I have argued that
the will to empower is a strategy of government, one that seeks solutions
to political problems in the governmentalization of the everyday lives of
citizen-subjects. Also, I have argued that apathy and powerlessness cannot
stand as both the cause and the effect of political problems. For democratic
government to work, citizens must be made —which says to me that citi-
zens can be remade, and that the social construction of citizenship is both
a promise and a constraint upon the will to empower.
There is more than one kind of citizen-subject. To be clear, I do not ar-
gue that there is no difference between citizens and subjects; rather, their
differences are a measure of how variously citizens are made. When I say
that the citizen is the condition of possibility for democratic politics, I mean
not that the citizen is the foundation of democracy but that the making of
citizens is a permanent political project for democracy Is it possible to
make new kinds of citizens? Yes. I have argued that they are made all the
time. But if their social constitution is erected upon what they are said to
lack, then citizens will always fall short of democratic expectations.

Conclusion
 This book asks the reader to consider the political effects of the will to
empower. Those effects are twofold. First, citizen-subjects are socially con-
stituted, and that means that citizens embody power relations; power is a
property of the citizen, and so citizens are always subject in some sense, even
if it is to their own self-government. Political power is exercised both upon
and through the citizen-subject at the level of small things, in the material,
learned, and habitual ways we embody citizenship. At every turn, I find
that power in technologies of citizenship and the liberal arts of govern-
ment. That means that not all powers can be held accountable because they
cannot be confronted face to face. We need a different criterion by which
to measure democracy, one different from the accountability of power.
That power has no face does not mean that it is monstrous, only that it
could be.
The second political effect of the will to empower is on the ways that the
political is constituted. I have argued that democratic politics is not out
there, in the public sphere or in a realm, but in here, at the very soul of sub-
jectivity. Politics is also down there, in the strategic field of small things.
For democratic theory to insist upon the autonomy of the political or civil
society is, once again, to be blinded by what is not there.
So many of the words I have written here are critical of democratic the-
ory and democratic modes of government that I fear this book will be read
as antidemocratic. It is not my intention to deliver a polemic against de-
mocracy or against efforts to think it otherwise. What I value most about
democracy is that its effects are contingent rather than permanent; it is a
strategic field that is never closed to new interventions. The interventions
of this book are not intended to vanquish democracy, only to carve out a
place in that strategic field for the insights of poststructuralism.
I am not alone in taking a kind of radical democratic solace in the works
of Michel Foucault, despite the fact that his work is often taken to betray
the promise of democracy. It is widely suspected that Foucault's theory and
its application provide us with neither a mode of acting politically within
modernity nor a model of the agent who can reconstitute power in a more
just and equitable manner. But poststructuralist analyses of power and sub-
jectivity do not merely tear at the foundations of modern democratic the-
ory and citizenship. As I have argued throughout this book, in order to un-
derstand how it might be possible to produce citizens otherwise or more
democratically, it is necessary to inquire into the constitution of the citizen
capable of fashioning a self that is governable.

Conclusion
 More implicitly, my argument is pointed to those who will to empower:
activists, organizers, educators, social service professionals, and social sci-
entists. That is to say that the argument here is one which, over the years,
I have had with myself. This book holds the will to empower to the fire
not to destroy it or discount it but to bring both its promise and its dangers
to light.

Conclusion
J
Notes

I N T R O D U C T I O N : SMALL T H I N G S

1. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in

Progress," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 343.
The full quotation: " M y point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dan-
gerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always
have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic
activism."
2. Many of the insights here are indebted to several recent studies of the political:
Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmod-
ernism,' " in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 3 - 2 1 ; William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), and The Ethos ofPluralization (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1995), esp. the chapter "Democracy and Territoriality";
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); and Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, "Political
Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government," British Journal of Sociology 43
(June 1992): 1 7 3 - 2 0 5 .
3. Butler, "Contingent Foundations," 13.
4. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 1 8 1 .
5. Gilles Deleuze, "The Rise of the Social," trans. Robert Hurley, foreword to
Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon, 1979), x. In addition to
Donzelot's book, I have drawn from others that document the emergence of various
social techniques, esp. the essays in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller,
eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), and works by Jonathan Crary, Ian Hacking, Mary Poovey, Denise Riley,
and John Tagg, some of which are cited elsewhere.
6. J. A. Hobson, The Social Problem (1901; Bristol, Eng.: Thoemmes Press, 1996), vi.
7. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8.
8. Hobson, Social Problem, 6.
9. Ibid., vi.
10. Ibid., 4.
1 1 . Ibid., vi.
12. Ibid., 1.
13. Ibid., 7, quoting D. G. Ritchie.
14. Colonel Waring quoted in Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform,
and the Environment, 1880-1980 (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1981), 74 (my emphasis).

127 Notes to Pages 108-1 14

 15- Ibid.
16. Ibid., 29.
17. Quoted in ibid., 79, from "The Sanitary Engineer—A N e w Social Profession,"
Charity and the Commons (Survey): 16 (1906).
18. Melosi, Garbage, 72.
19. Lars Eighner, Travels with Lisbeth: Three Years on the Road and in the Streets (New
York: St. Martin's, 1993), 1 1 7 .
20. Eighner reports that when a pizza parlor's employees saw him scavenging, they
began to hold their garbage inside overnight (ibid., 115).
21. The Chicago Sun Times, June 2, 1997, reported that the Drug Enforcement
Agency prescribes proper disposal of controlled substances and does prosecute accord-
ing to the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.
22. "Rural Residents Get Dumpsters Back," Lewiston Morning Tribune, (Idaho)
March 10, 1993. A newspaper story on the dangers of Dumpster-diving quoted Tom
Jackson, president of the Ohio Grocers Association, that if it continued, "the food in-
dustry will explore ways to keep divers out of Dumpsters" ("Food Industry, Others Raise
Safety Concerns," Columbus Dispatch, February 27, 1994).
23. For a brilliant and scathing account of Second Harvest, "a national cartel," a
nonprofit whose purpose is to distribute donated food from major corporations to food
shelves and soup kitchens, see Theresa Funiciello, The Tyranny of Kindness: Dismantling
the Welfare System to End Poverty in America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993),
1 2 3 - 6 1 . Funiciello argues that Second Harvest's $ 1 4 million annual operating bud-
get distributes donations that are largely garbage. It is estimated that up to 60 percent
of donations must be thrown out, while corporations pass off the cost of garbage dis-
posal onto food shelves and write off the estimated value of all donations on their
taxes, as well as powder their public image. If the $404 million donations in cash and in
kind that keep Second Harvest running were simply given to poor people, Funiciello
reasons, there would be no hunger in the United States and no cost to taxpayers. As it is,
taxpayers subsidize the operation of Second Harvest and private corporations. While
Charles Murray and Funiciello both argue for the dismantling of the welfare system be-
cause it "makes" the poor, they clearly do so for very different reasons, as I demonstrate
in Chapter 1.
24. Columbus Dispatch, February 27, 1994.
25. Michael Moore, Roger and Me (Burbank, Calif.: Warner Home Video, 1990).
26. League of Women Voters, The Garbage Primer (New York: Lyons & Burford,
1993)-
27. Albert O. Hirschmann calls this volley The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity,
Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1991).
28. William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1983).

128 Notes to Pages108-114

CHAPTER I . D E M O C R A T I C SUBJECTS

1. Tocqueville conceived of power as it was attached to local institutions, not to in-

dividuals. See Thomas Dumm, "Freedom and Space," in Michel Foucault and the Politics
of Freedom (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996).
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan,
1968). For an account of the significance of Wittgenstein's language philosophy for po-
litical inquiry, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of
Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1972).
3. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), esp. 1 2 - 1 8 . Butler takes a more critical approach to theories
of the subject and subjection and emphasizes that the subject is never simply made but
always in the permanent state of becoming.
4. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structural-
ism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed., ed. Herbert L . Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1983), 212.
5. The liberal theorist Isaiah Berlin uses "subject" in this sense in his discussion of
positive freedom: "I wish to be an instrument of my own, not of other men's acts of will.
I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes,
which are my own." ("Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty [Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1969], 1 3 1 . )
6. Eve Sedgewick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), 1 1 .
7. Samuel Delany gives the clearest possible explanation of how discourse works to
shape perception; he argues that discourse is learned, habitual, and material. See his
"The Rhetoric of Sex and the Discourse of Desire," in Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia
and the Body Politic, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1994),
229-72.
8. See, e.g., Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York:
Plume/Penguin, 1995).
9. I am making an argument analogous to the distinction between sex and gender in
feminist theory. If we ask what the difference is between men and women, we presup-
pose in advance of any analysis that there are men and there are women. T o avoid re-
producing what Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna call the "incorrigible proposi-
tion" that there are two and only two genders, analysis must proceed at the level of their
constitution; see their Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978).
10. See William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), esp. chap. 3, "Democracy, Equality, Normality."
1 1 . Delany, in "Rhetoric of Sex" (269), calls such discourses "homogenizing dis-
courses."

129 Notes to Pages108-114

 12. Sheldon Wolin, "What Revolutionary Action Means Today," rpt. in Dimensions
of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London:
Verso, 1992), 241.
13. Other strains of radical democracy include workplace democracy and class-based
participation, self-development strategies drawing upon Rousseau and the British ideal-
ists. See Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970); Peter Bachrach and Aryeh Botwinick, Power and Empowerment:
A Radical Theory of Participatory Democracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1992); C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973).
14. T o name a few (chronologically): Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); Iris
Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992); Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions ofRadical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship,
Community (London: Verso, 1992); Connolly, Ethos ofPluralization.
15. Wolin, "Revolutionary Action," 244.
16. On the centrality of the 1960s to visions of radical democracy, see Meta Mendel-
Reyes, Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (New York: Routledge,
!995)-
17. Wolin, "Revolutionary Action," 245.
18. Wolin embraces cynicism as a positive sign of a prepolitical rebellion but not
itself "genuinely political" (Ibid., 252).
19. Judith Butler points out that "agency belongs to a way of thinking about persons
as instrumental actors who confront an external political field. But if we agree that poli-
tics and power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated
and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire
into its construction." See her "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of
'Postmodernism,'" in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 13.
For Wolin, instrumental forms of political action are not properly political and may
be antidemocratic. "A democratic conception of citizenship, if it means anything at all,
means that the citizen is supposed to exercise his rights to advance or protect the kind
of polity that depends on his being involved in its common concerns" ("Revolutionary
Action," 242).
2 o. Wolin, "Revolutionary Action," 252.
21. Ibid.
22. Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 150.
23. Ibid., 1 9 0 - 9 1 .
24. See Carole Pateman, "Sublimation and Reification: Locke, Wolin, and the
Liberal Democratic Conception of the Political," Politics and Society 5 (1975): 4 4 1 - 6 7 .
Wolin revises his own view somewhat in "Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Politi-
cal," Salmagundi 60 (Spring-Summer 1983): 3 - 1 9 .
25. Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 1 9 1 .

130 Notes to Pages108-114

 26. Lest I be misread as trashing Wolin's democratic theory, I must add that his "De-
mocracy and the Welfare State: The Political and Theoretical Connections between
Staatsrason and Wohlfahrtsstaatsrason" (in ibid.) largely inspired my own inquiries into the
forms of government characteristic of the welfare state. M y debt to his work will be evi-
dent to anyone familiar with that essay.
27. Wolin, Ibid., 247.
28. Ibid., 247-48. On Arendt's conceptions of the social and the political, see below.
29. For an overview of the debates over power and democracy and an account of "the
present impasse," see David Ricci, Community Power and Democratic Theory: The Logic of
Political Analysis (New York: Random House, 1971).
30. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 279. Dahl changed his position with the publica-
tion of A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
3 1 . Dahl, Who Governs?, 2 2 3 - 2 8 .
3 2. See Report of the National Advisory Commission in Civil Disorders (New York:
Dutton, 1968), esp. the chart on N e w Haven (n.p.).
33. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of
Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 7.
34. A very interesting debate between Linda Gordon and Piven and Cloward ap-
pears in Social Research 55 (Winter 1988): 609-47. Whereas Piven and Cloward's so-
cial control thesis represented the position of the left on welfare for several decades,
Gordon's criticism of their thesis exemplifies the subsequent shift on the left, from
attacking welfare to defending it against cuts and reforms.
35. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They
Succeed and How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979), 3.
36. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in The Marx-Engels Reader, id ed.,
ed. R. C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978).
37. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974), 27.
38. For a thorough overview of the debates over power, see Peter Bachrach, The
Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (London: University of London Press, 1969). A
short list of substantive studies includes Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, Powerand
Poverty: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); John Gaventa,
Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalacian Valley (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1980).
39. Lukes believed this to be true only in the radical conception of power (see Power,
3 2 - 3 3 ) . I am arguing that it is true of the three "faces" of power in general.
40. Ibid., 34.
4 1 . It is important to note that many theorists of participatory democracy hoped
that their studies would spark rebellion—Lukes was most explicit on this point—but
few hoped their studies would spark revolution, and they carefully distinguished their
own class analyses from those of socialists. Peter Bachrach, e.g., wrote in "Class Struggle
and Democracy," Democracy 2 (Fall 1982): 34, that "militancy and radicalism have been
nurtured within the existing hegemonic order. Consequently, the mistake of trying to

131 Notes to Pages 108-1 14

 inculcate 'socialist consciousness' within the working class must not be repeated while
the idea of democracy can still be made to live. Within the context of American experi-
ence, democracy, rather than socialism, is subversive."
42. The literature on feminism and Foucault is enormous. Much of it is summarized
in Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault, and the Law (London: Routledge,
1993), and in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge,
1990).
43. Foucault posed the same question in terms of the repressive hypothesis in The
History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1980).
See the passages on the "speaker's benefit" (6-7) and "the ease of acceptance" (86).
44. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (New York:
Basic Books, 1984), 9.
45. Ibid., 217.
46. Ibid., 217.
47. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).
48. Theresa Funiciello, The Tyranny of Kindness: Dismantling the Welfare System to
End Poverty in America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993), 1 1 9 .
49. See Iris Marion Young, "Punishment, Treatment, Empowerment: Three Ap-
proaches to Policy for Pregnant Addicts," Feminist Studies 20 (Spring 1994): 33—57.
50. One such program in Minneapolis, called T L C , was conducted and funded by a
network of agencies and corporations: United Way, Honeywell, Success by Six, Year of
the City, FAO Schwartz, and the Minneapolis Health Department. They offered things
"women wouldn't buy for themselves," such as movie tickets and dinners.
5 1 . The phrase comes from the title of Funiciello's chap. 6 in Tyranny of Kindness.
52. It is on this point that I differ with Kathy Ferguson's excellent The Feminist Case
against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); see esp. xv, 1 5 0 - 5 2 .
She distinguishes clearly between citizens (welfare activists) and subjects (compliant
recipients), and she understands welfare to be an institution of social domination and
control.
53. The logic of liberal democratic government can seem somewhat relentless. Con-
sider "A Source for Empowerment: The Family Violence Program at Bedford Hills
Correctional Facility," a report issued by the State of N e w York, Department of Cor-
rectional Services, in May 1994: "Through the program the participants have developed
insight into the causes or nature of their self-destructive behavior. They have gained the
strength and ability to redirect their lives into more appropriate, goal-directed activi-
ties. A solidarity exists among the participants. A special rapport has been developed
with the staff" (2). Here, even a prison can be transformed into a place of "empower-
ment." Thanks to Mariana Valverde for alerting me to the report.
54. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, An Introduction (New
York: Vintage Books, 1980): 143.
55. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Rout-
ledge, 1990).

132 Notes to Pages108-114

 56. Foucault, "Governmentality," in The Foucualt Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 102.
57. Iris Young argues that treatment meted out to pregnant addicts "often operates
to adjust women to the dominant gender, race, and class strucures and depoliticizes and
individualizes their situations" ("Punishment, Treatment, Empowerment," 33-34). I ar-
gue to the contrary that treatment governmentalizes their situations.
Nancy J. Hirschmann, "Domestic Violence and the Theoretical Discourse of Free-
dom," Frontiers 26, no.i (1996): 1 2 6 - 5 1 , considers the policies for treating a victim of
domestic violence to claim that liberal discourses of freedom are inadequate and to ex-
amine the material construction of the "choice" to leave her batterer.
58. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social
Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), esp. chap. 7.
59. Foucault, "Governmentality," 89.
60. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 221.
61. Samuel Delany's novel The Mad Man appears in several different revised edi-
tions. The quotation is taken from a brilliant review of Delany's pornographic novels by
Ray Davis, "Delany's Dirt," in Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany, ed. James
Sallis (Oxford University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 179.

C H A P T E R 2. THE L I B E R A L ARTS OF G O V E R N A N C E

1. Arguments to revive civil society as the space of autonomy are proliferating at the
moment. For critical summaries, see Michael J . Shapiro, "Bowling Blind: Post Liberal
Civil Society and the Worlds of Neo-Tocquevillian Social Theory," Theory and Event 1,
no.1 (1995) (http://i28.220.50.88/ journals/theory_&_event/voo 1 /i. 1 shapiro.html);
Nikolas Rose, "Between Authority and Liberty: Governing Virtue in a Free Society,"
forthcoming in Janus: The Journal of the Finnish Society for Social Policy (1998); Michael
Hardt, "The Withering of Civil Society," Social Text 1 4 (Winter 1995): 27-44. Also, for
a defense of civil society, see Michael Walzer, "The Idea of Civil Society: A Path to
Social Reconstruction," Dissent, Spring 1 9 9 1 , 293-304.
2. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995). Ferguson is noted as one of the first to use the term
"civilization." He is also sometimes held to be, along with other figures of the Scottish
Enlightenment, one of the first sociologists. M y reading of Ferguson draws upon Colin
Gordon, "Governmental Rationality: An Introduction," and Graham Burchell, "Pecu-
liar Interests: Civil Society and Governing the 'System of Natural Liberty,'" both in
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and
Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
3. See Gordon, "Governmental Rationality."
4. Adam Ferguson quoted in Fania Oz-Salzberger's introduction to Ferguson, Essay
on the History of Civil Society, xxiii.

133 Notes to Pages108-114

 5- Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, The
Foucault Effect.
6. Bruno Latour, "The Powers of Association," in Power, Action, Belief: A New
Sociology of Knowledge} ed. John Law (New York: Routledge, 1986), 269. In addition to
Foucault's essays cited here, see Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural For-
mation, 1830-1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
7. The classic statement on negative and positive liberty is made by Isaiah Berlin,
Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
8. T . H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings,
ed. Paul Harris and John Murrow (1895; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 89.
9. Cf. Isaiah Berlin's warning {Four Essays, 1 1 8 - 1 7 2 ) that positive liberty forces one
to be free.
10. Green, Lectures, 264. Self-help was not always a technique for "the conduct of
conduct." For example, in 1859, Samuel Smiles provided a series of character studies to
teach self-help by example. He wrote a traditional conduct book, in other words, one
that did not suggest any mode of acting upon others. See Smiles, Self-Help (1859; Lon-
don: John Murray Ltd., 1969). For a thorough re-thinking of Berlin's distinction be-
tween negative and positive liberty, see Duncan Ivinson, The Self at Liberty: Political
Argument and the Arts of Government (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).
1 1 . Ibid., 1 6 1 .
12. Ibid., 162.
13. Ibid., 94.
14. Octavia Hill, "A Few Words to Volunteer Visitors among the Poor," in Our
Common Land (London: Macmillan, 1877), 54.
15. Hill, Our Common Land, 57.
16. Octavia Hill, "A More Excellent Way of Charity," in Our Common Land, 83.
17. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 47.
18. Hill, Our Common Land, 6 1 - 6 2 .
19. Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination
of the Late Victorians (New York: Vintage, 1991), 214.
20. Hill, Our Common Land, 36.
21. Ibid., 2 6 - 2 7 .
22. Ibid., 40.
23. Helen Bosanquet, Rich and Poor (London: Macmillan, 1908), 4 0 - 4 1 .
24. Ibid., 53.
25. Helen Bosanquet, The Standard of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 278.
26. Ibid., 17.
27. Ibid., i.
28. Ibid., 2.
29. Ibid., 4 1 .
30. On indirect government, see Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, "Political Power
beyond the State: Problematics of Government," British Journal of Sociology 43 (June
1992): 1 - 3 1 .

134 Notes to Pages108-114

 3 i . Bosanquet, Standard of Life, 195.
3 2. Sheldon Wolin's thesis that political orders are reconstituted in times of crisis is
treated in Kirstie McClure, "The Issue of Foundations: Scientized Politics, Politicized
Science, and Feminist Critical Practice," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith
Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3 4 1 - 6 8 .
33. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucualt: Beyond Structur-
alism andHermeneutics, 2d ed., ed. Herbert L . Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1983), 221.
34. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, "Conformism, Housekeeping, and the Attack of the
Blob: The Origins of Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social," in Feminist Interpretations
of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Station: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995), 5 1 - 8 2 . Many of the themes in Arendt's work which I discuss are given
more suggestive and sympathetic attention in Honig's collection than I give them here.
35. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
33 n 2 4-
36. Ibid., 40.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 47.
39. Ibid., 28, 35.
40. Ibid., 2 1 .
4 1 . Ibid., 4 1 .
42. The best treatments of Arendt's work on the question of democracy are Hanna
Fenichel Pitkin, "Justice: On Relating Public and Private," Political Theory 9 (1981): 3 2 7 -
52; and the essays in Honig, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt.
43. "The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the
manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitu-
tion of the public realm and the various forms of government. . . . it does not survive
the actuality of the movement which brought it into being" (Arendt, The Human Condi-
tion, 199).
44. See William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995).
45. Beatrice Webb cited in Judith Walkowitz's excellent history of women's in-
volvement in the public sphere, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 57.
46. I am drawing again from the wonderful history of garbage reform by Martin V.
Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1890-1980 (Chicago:
Dorsey Press, 1981), 1 1 9 . Virtually the same comment was made by Comte; see Denise
Riley, "Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 49.
47. Denise Riley (ibid., 49) sums up the emergence of the social as follows: "The
nineteenth century 'social' is the reiterated sum of progressive philanthropies, theories
of class, of poverty, of degeneration; studies of the domestic lives of workers, their hous-
ing, hygiene, morality, mortality; of their exploitation, or their need for protection, as
this bore on their family lives too. It is a blurred ground between the old public and pri-

135 Notes to Pages 108-1 14

 vate, voiced as a field for intervention, love, and reform by socialists, conservatives, radi-
cals, liberals, and feminists in their different and conjoined w a y s . . . . Once the seemingly
neutral and vacant backdrop of "the social" presents itself for scrutiny, it appears as a
strange phenomenon in its own right."
48. Ibid., 48.
49. Riley's account of women and the social does not simply laud the accomplish-
ments of feminist reformers but points out how middle-class women came to occupy the
entire category "women" to the exclusion of working-class and minority women. Her
contribution to feminist theory is an explanation of how the social both enabled and
constrained women's activism. Compare the recent celebration of middle-class women's
contribution to the social in Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political
Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Also important is the debate that followed the publication of Jacque Donzelot, The
Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon, 1990). See Michele Barrett and Mary Mc-
intosh, The Anti-Social Family, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1982), esp. 9 5 - 1 0 4 and 1 6 1 - 7 2 ;
and Paul Hirst, "The Genesis of the Social," Politics & Power Three, 1981: 67-95. In a re-
lated exchange, Joan Scott and Linda Gordon debated the historical terms of women's
agency in relation to the social; see Signs 15, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 848-60.
50. In addition to the works already cited, see, e.g., Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and
the Work ofBenevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th-century United States (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Poli-
tics and History of Family Violence (New York: Penguin, 1988); Judith Walkowitz, Prosti-
tution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1980).
51. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary
Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), and Justice Interruptus:
Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997); Wendy
Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 3.
5 2. Fraser, Unruly Practices, 1 7 5 - 8 1 .
53. Ibid., 177.
54. Graham Burchell makes a related claim in, "Liberal Government and Tech-
niques of the Self," in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Ratio-
nalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (London:
University College London Press, 1996), 1 9 - 3 6 .
5 5. Brown, States of Injury, 15.
56. Ibid., 173. Brown refers to Barbara Ehrenreich and Frances Fox Piven, "Women
of the Welfare State," in Alternatives: Proposals for America from the Democratic Left,
ed. Irving Howe (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
57. Frances Fox Piven, "Ideology and the State: Women, Power, and the Welfare
State," in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1990), 2 5 0 - 5 1 .
58. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society.
59. See, e.g., Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (Pittsburgh: Cleis,

136 Notes to Pages108-114

 an
1994)' d Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1995).
60. Samuel R Huntington, " T h e United States," in The Crisis of Democracy: Report on
the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, ed. Michael Crozier, Samuel
P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki (New York: N e w York University Press, 1975), 1 1 2 .
61. Ibid., 64.
62. Ibid., 4.
63. Ibid., 5.
64. Ibid., 84.
65. Ibid., 6.
66. Ibid., 75.
67. Ibid., 7.
68. Ibid., 75.
69. Ibid., 9.
70. Brzezinski quoted in ibid., 7.
7 1 . Jürgen Habermas similarly read the signs of political life to signal a "breakdown"
of the public sphere: " T w o tendencies dialectically related to each other indicated a
breakdown of the public sphere. While it penetrated more spheres of society, it simulta-
neously lost its political function, namely: that of subjecting the affairs that it had made
public to the control of a critical public." (The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence [Boston: M I T Press, 1988], 140).
72. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards
a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
73. Arendt, The Human Condition, 45.
74. Ian Hacking, "Making Up People," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, In-
dividuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas Heller (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1986), 223.

C H A P T E R 3. THE WILL TO EMPOWER

1. Where "the poor" appears in quotation marks, I mean to highlight the fact that
the category was an administrative invention of the antipoverty programs. Where the
term does not appear in quotation marks, I mean to indicate that the coherence of the
group was accepted as a fact.
2. Peter L . Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: The Role of Medi-
ating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for
Public Policy Research, 1977), 3. On Kemp and Darman, see Daniel Wattenberg,
" 'Power to the People' Becomes a Young Republican War Cry," Insight on the News,
vol. 6, no.52 (Dec. 24, 1990), 18.
3. Cf., e.g., Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship
(New York: Free Press, 1986), and Theresa Funiciello, The Tyranny of Kindness: Disman-
tling the Welfare System to End Poverty in America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
!993)-

137 Notes to Pages 108-1 14

 4- Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen, eds., Women and the Politics of Empowerment
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 4.
5. Jacqueline Pope, "The Colonizing Impact of Public Service Bureaucracies in
Black Communities," in Race, Politics, and Economic Development: Community Perspectives,
ed. James Jennings (New York: Verso, 1992), 142.
6. Ibid., 143.
7. The best history of Community Action is by Peter Marris and Martin Rein,
Dilemmas of Social Reform: Poverty and Community Action in the United States, 2d ed. (Chi-
cago: Aldine, 1967); I have drawn much historical material and insight from their book.
See also Alan Althshuler, Community Control: The Black Demand for Participation in Large
American Cities (New York: Pegasus, 1970); Campaign for Human Development, Poverty
In America: A Study of Social Power (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Confer-
ence, 1974); John C. Donovan, The Politics of Poverty (New York: Pegasus, 1967); Ralph
Kramer, Participation of the Poor: Comparative Studies in the War on Poverty (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969); Stephen M . Rose, The Betrayal of the Poor: The Trans-
formation of Community Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1972).
8. Office of Economic Opportunity, Community Action Program Guide, vol. 1 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Office of Economic Opportunity, 1965), 7.
9. George Brager quoted in Marris and Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, 49.
10. For an earlier account of the invention of the "delinquent," see Anthony Piatt,
The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969).
1 1 . Marris and Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, 24.
12. Quoted in ibid., 3 6 - 3 7 .
13. Peter Bachrach, Morton S. Baratz, and Margaret Levi, "The Political Signifi-
cance of Citizen Participation," in Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice, ed. Bachrach
and Baratz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 206-7.
14. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Subcommittee on Employ-
ment, Manpower, and Poverty, Economic Opportunity Amendments of 1967, 90th Cong.,
ist sess., 1967, Report 563, 20.
15. See, e.g., Daniel Patrick Moynihan's account of C A P in Maximum Feasible Mis-
understanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1970), in
which he claims that the poor were manipulated into carrying out the radical agenda of
C A P organizers.
16. Office of Economic Opportunity, Community Action Program Guide, 1 : 1 6 .
17. Marris and Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, 216.
18. Tom Hayden, "Welfare Liberalism and Social Change," rpt. from Dissent, in The
Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, ed. Marvin E. Gettleman and
David Mermelstein (New York: Vintage, 1987), 478.
19. Ibid., 478.
20. Ibid., 496.
21. An excellent case study of a Manhattan neighborhood is Ira Katznelson, City
Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1981). Katznelson argues that CAPs and programs like them, de-

138 Notes to Pages108-114

vised in response to urban uprising and riots, in effect "absorbed the energies of insur-
gents, . . . . transformed their protests and rendered them harmless. These institutions
did so by reconnecting the disaffected to political life and in this way making them part
of the regular, legitimate, and predictable political process" (179-80). His thesis then, is
the opposite of mine, that the co-optation of citizens in revolt was designed as a strategy
to demobilize civil rights and black power insurgents as well as to deemphasize the poli-
tics of class. The effect of programs was to produce political stability and the demobi-
lization of insurgents, according to Katznelson, whereas I argue that political conflict
was produced by the mobilization of "the poor." These are clearly related arguments.
22. Nikolas Rose has shown that government is dependent upon knowledge: " T o
govern a population one needs to isolate it as a sector of reality, to identify certain char-
acteristics and processes proper to it, to make its features notable, speakable, writable, to
account for them according to certain explanatory schemes. Government thus depends
upon the production, circulation, organization of truths that incarnate what is to be
governed, which make it thinkable, calculable, and practicable" {Governing the Soul: The
Shaping of the Private Self [London: Routledge, 1990], 6).
23. Ibid.
24. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York:
Penguin, 1963), 156.
25. It was another best-seller at the time that originated the culture-of-poverty the-
sis: Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez (New York: Random House, 1961). For a criti-
cal account of that thesis, see Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black
Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). Stack illustrates community networks of
exchange and help in a poor black community which belie the notion that the poor are
powerless. Nonetheless, she argues that welfare works to create and maintain depen-
dency and forecloses class mobility as it buys the acquiescence of welfare recipients:
"Welfare programs merely act as flexible mechanisms to alleviate the more obvious
symptoms of poverty while inching forward just enough to purchase acquiescence and
silence on the part of the members of this class and their liberal supporters. . . . In fact
[these programs] are purveyors of the status quo, staunch defenders of the economic im-
perative that demands maintenance of a sizeable but docile impoverished class" (128).
Thus, Stack concurs that welfare programs exclude the authentic participation of recip-
ients, whereas I argue that welfare works by mobilizing certain kinds of participation and
action.
26. Harrington, The Other America, 2 1 - 2 2 .
27. Sargent Shriver, "The War on Poverty Is a Movement of Conscience," in
Gettleman and Mermelstein, The Great Society Reader, 207.
28. Harrington, The Other America, 164.
29. Bachrach, Baratz, and Levi, "Political Significance of Citizen Participation," 206.
30. Marris and Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, 44.
3 1 . Office of Economic Opportunity, Organizing Communities for Action under the
1967 Amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act (Washington, D.C.: Office of Economic
Opportunity, 1968), 4.
32. Ibid., 7.

139 Notes to Pages 108-1 14

 33- Marris and Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, 229.
34. Kramer, Participation of the Poor, 265.
35. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structur-
alism and Hermeneutics, 2d. ed., ed. Herbert L . Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 225.
36. Kramer, Participation of the Poor, 247.
37. Grant McConnell quoted in Althshuler, Community Control, 77.
38. Similarities between pluralist and Foucauldian notions of power have been noted
(and overstated) in Fred Dallmayr, Polis and Praxis: Exercises in Contemporary Political The-
ory (Cambridge, Mass.: M I T Press, 1984).
39. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 220.
40. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, "The Two Faces of Power," American
Political Science Review 56 (1970): 947-52.
4 1 . See, e.g., John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an
Appalachian Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); David Couzens Hoy,
"Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes, and the Frankfurt School," in Foucault:
A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); and Peter
Miller, Domination and Power (London: Routledge, 1987).
42. Marris and Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, 222.
43. Bachrach, Baratz, and Levi, "Political Significance of Citizen Participation,"
Power and Poverty, 207.
44. Hayden, "Welfare Liberalism," 496.
45. See, e.g., Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements:
Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979), and Regulating the Poor: The
Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1971).

C H A P T E R 4. R E V O L U T I O N S W I T H I N

1. Gloria Steinern, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Boston: Little,

Brown, 1992).
2. Deidre English, review of Revolution from Within by Gloria Steinern, New York
Times Book Review, February 2, 1992, 13.
3. Nikolas Rose, "Beyond the Public/Private Division: Law, Power, and the Family,"
Journal of Law and Society 14 (Spring 1987): 6 1 - 7 6 . Rose offers a compelling account of
the limitations of feminist critique based on the public/private division which has in-
fluenced my arguments here.
4. California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Respon-
sibility, Appendixes to "Toward a State of Esteem" (Sacramento: California Department of
Education, 1990), 102.
5. California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Respon-
sibility, Toward a State of Esteem: The Final Report (Sacramento: California Department
of Education, 1990), vii-viii.
6. Ibid., 22.

140 Notes to Pages108-114

 7- Ibid., 4.
8. Ibid., vii.
9. Ian Hacking, "Making Up People," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, In-
dividuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, and
David E. Wellberg (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986). Consider, for ex-
ample, the following titles listed in California Task Force, State of Esteem; Stewart
Emery, Actualizations: You Don't Have to Rehearse to Be Yourself (New York: Irving, 1980);
Morris Rosenberg, Conceiving the Self (Melbourne, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger, 1979); Vir-
ginia Satir, People Making (Palo Alto, Calif.: Science & Behavior Books, 1988).
10. California Task Force, State of Esteem, ix.
1 1 . Steinern, Revolution from Within, 29.
12. Michel Foucault, "The Political Technology of Individuals," in Technologies of
the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, Mass.:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 146.
13. California Task Force, Appendixes, 102.
14. California Task Force, State of Esteem, 22.
15. Andrew Mecca, Neil Smelser, and John Vasconellos, eds., The Social Importance
of Self-Esteem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
16. Nikolas Rose argues that governing subjectivity is not consistent with central-
ized power: "Rather, government of subjectivity has taken shape through the prolifera-
tion of a complex and heterogeneous assemblage of technologies. These have acted as
relays, bringing the varied ambitions of political, scientific, philanthropic, and profes-
sional authorities into alignment with the ideals and aspirations of individuals, with the
selves each of us wants to be" (Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self [Lon-
don: Routledge, 1990], 213).
17. See Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Struc-
turalism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed., ed. Herbert L . Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983).
18. Rose, Governing the Soul, 256.
19. Ibid., 2 1 3 .
20. Mecca, Smelser, and Vasconellos, Social Importance of Self-Esteem, 15.
2 1 . Ibid.: "One of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume (at least
to those of us who adhere to the intuitively correct models sketched above) is how low
the association between self-esteem and its consequences are in research to date." N o -
tice that although no association is established, self-esteem is here linked to "its conse-
quences."
22. California Task Force, State of Esteem, 44.
23. Thomas Scheff, Suzanne M. Retzinger, and Michael T. Ryan, "Crime, Violence,
and Self-Esteem: Review and Proposals," in Mecca, Smelser, and Vasconellos, Social Im-
portance of Self-Esteem, 179.
24. Rose, Governing the Soul, 256.
2 5. Theresa Funiciello's arguments, discussed in Chapter 2, provide a case in point.
Although she fails to see that the social services are a form of governing the poor, she
does clearly articulate the relationship between the social science professions and in-

141 Notes to Pages108-114

 come redistribution. From The Tyranny ofKindness: Dismantling the Welfare System to End
Poverty in America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1983), 38: "What became the
professionalization of being human took off, bloating under government contracts. For
every poverty problem, a self-perpetuating profession proposed to ameliorate the situa-
tion without altering the poverty."
26. California Task Force, Appendixes, 104.
27. Scheff, Retzinger, and Ryan, "Crime, Violence, and Self-Esteem," 1 9 2 - 9 3 .
28. California Task Force, State of Esteem, 12.
29. Steinern, Revolution from Within, 9 - 1 0 .
30. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper Perennial,
1969), 672.
3 1 . Ibid., 510.
32. Ibid., 91.
33. Ibid., 12.
34. Ibid., 517.
35. Ibid., 510.
36. Ibid., 521.
37. Ibid., 5 1 7 .
38. Ibid., 527.
39. The disciplinary origins of democratic citizenship in the United States are
elaborated by Thomas Dumm, Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the
United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Also see Roger Boesche,
The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1987), 229-59.
40. As Peter Miller put it, "Carceral power opened up the entire fabric of society to
a normalizing regulation, but it no longer provides the exclusive model" (Domination and
Power [London: Routledge, 1987], 201).
4 1 . Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 667.
42. Ibid., 510.
43. Ibid., 5 1 5 .
44. Ibid., 72.
45. Ibid., 691.
46. Ibid., 669.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 693.
49. Ibid., 736.
50. Ibid., 694.
5 1 . Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the
United States and Its Application in France (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1964), 80.
52. California Task Force, State of Esteem, 37.
53. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick uses addiction to illustrate the production of a simil-
iarly pathologized identity on the basis of the subject's lack. See her "Epidemics of

142 Notes to Pages108-114

the Will," in Zone 6: Incorporations, ed. Jonathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York:
Urzone, 1992).
54. Ian Hacking, "Self-Improvement," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David
Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 236.

C H A P T E R 5. WELFARE QUEENS

1. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kaufman

(New York: Vintage, 1967), 45.
2. Lucie White, "Subordination, Rhetorical Survival Skills, and Sunday Shoes:
Notes on the Hearing of Mrs. G.," Buffalo Law Review 38 (Winter 1990): 37.
3. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, "The Contemporary Relief Debate,"
in The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State, ed. Fred Block et al. (New York: Pan-
theon, 1987), 48.
4. For some of the historical accounts of welfare rights strategies that I have found
useful, see Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why
They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979); Milwaukee County Welfare
Rights Organization, Welfare Mothers Speak Out: We Ain't Gonna Shuffle Anymore (New
York: Norton, 1972); Mimi Abromovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Pol-
icy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1988); Jackie Pope,
"Women in the Welfare Rights Struggle: The Brooklyn Welfare Action Council," in
Women and Social Protest, ed. Guida West and Rhoda Lois Blumberg (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 57-74.
5. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive
Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997). Strangely
enough (or, actually, predictably in the terms of my own argument), Edin and Lein's
work is sympathtic to welfare recipients.
6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 2.
7. Nancy Fraser, "Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical
Theory of Late-Capitalist Political Culture," in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda
Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 1 9 9 - 2 2 5 .
8. "Relations of rule" is a phrase from Dorothy Smith, cited in Chandra Mohanty,
"Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Feminism and the Politics of Feminism," in
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes
Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Mohanty suggests that a politics
of location can in strategic ways replace the politics of representation and identity.
9. "Waste, fraud, abuse, and error," a list of equivalents constituting a "crisis," comes
from a conference held in 1978 by then H E W Secretary Joseph Califano; see U.S. De-
partment of Health, Education, and Welfare, Conference Proceedings, The Secretary's Na-
tional Conference on Fraud, Abuse, and Error: Protecting the Taxpayer's Dollar (Washington,
D.C.: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1979).

143 Notes to Pages 108-1 14

 10. On freedom and liberal government, see Thomas L . Dumm, Democracy and Pun-
ishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1987), and Michel Foucault and the Politics ofFreedom (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996).
1 1 . White, "Subordination," 43.
12. See Robert W. Collin and Willa M . Hemmons, "Equal Protection Problems
with Welfare Fraud Prosecution," Loyola Law Review 33 (Spring 1987): 1 7 - 4 9 .
13. Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ide-
ological War by Narrative Means," in Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on
Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction ofSocial Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New
York: Pantheon, 1992), 340.
14. Nikolas Rose, "Governing by Numbers: Figuring Out Democracy," Accounting,
Organizations, and Society 16, no. 7 (1991): 6 7 3 - 9 2 .
15. Quoted in Evelyn Z. Brodkin, The False Promise ofAdministrative Reform: Imple-
menting Quality Control in Welfare (Philadelpia: Temple University Press, 1986), 25.
16. Brodkin, False Promise; Michael Lipsky, "Bureaucratic Disentitlement in Social
Welfare Programs," Social Service Review, 58 (March 1984): 3 - 2 7 .
17. Brodkin, False Promise, 30.
18. Jimmy Carter quoted in John A. Gardiner and Theodore R. Lyman, The Fraud
Control Game: State Responses to Fraud and Abuse in AFDC and Medicaid Programs (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 2.
19. Ibid., 10.
20. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Conference Proceedings.
21. See Lipsky, "Bureaucratic Disentitlement"; and Brodkin, False Promise.
22. For a compelling and detailed account of one administrative hearing, see White,
"Subordination." Many thanks to Austin Sarat for pointing out White's article to me.
23. E.g., Gardiner and Lyman (.Fraud Control Game, 1984) report that "adminis-
trative sanctions" can be used to bypass the criminal justice system so that fines of
2 5 percent can be administratively imposed on top of the excess assistance which a re-
cipient must repay. That is, the recipient must recoup any grant monies and pay fines
or interest on overpayments, even if the overpayment was caused by agency error and
no fraud has been proved. Also see General Accounting Office, Benefit Overpayments:
Recoveries Could Be Increased in the Food Stamp and AFDC Programs (Washington, D.C.:
U S . General Accounting Office, 1986), a report that advocates stepping up administra-
tive recoupments (even in cases of agency error) rather than criminal prosecutions for
fraud.
24. Brodkin, False Promise.
2 5. Rose, "Governing by Numbers," 678-79.
26. Sheldon Wolin, "Democracy and the Welfare State: The Political and Theoret-
ical Connections between Staatsrason and Wohlfahrtsstaatsrason" in The Presence of the
Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989), 160.
27. White, ("Subordination," 39 n.12), while representing A F D C claimants, ob-
served that "workers are trained to emphasize fraud at each stage in the application and

144 Notes to Pages 108-1 14

grant review process. Claimants are subject to repeated lectures from their workers
about fraud, and must sign forms acknowledging that they have understood those warn-
ings. In addition, they must submit third party verifications of virtually all the informa-
tion they provide in the application process. . . . The only justification offered to clients
for these requirements is to prevent them from committing fraud."
28. The forms I use here are published by the Minnesota Department of Human
Services: for example, D H S - 1 8 4 2 (3-87) PZ-01842-05.
29. Following the Debt Reduction Act of 1984, a public information flyer printed by
the Minnesota Department of Human Services in June 1987, titled, "Notice About
I.E.V.S. [Income and Eligibility Verification System]," listed these agencies. A 1990
flyer, "Your Privacy Rights" listed social services.
30. In the case of Mrs. G (White, "Subordination," 32), an administrative judge de-
cided against her; then, after she filed an appeal, the county welfare director called her
lawyer to say that "the county had decided that it wouldn't be 'fair' to make Mrs. G pay
the money back." N o explanation was given.
3 1 . Lipsky, 15.
32. Bruno Latour, "The Powers of Association," in Power, Action, and Belief: A New
Sociology of Knowledge} ed. John Law (New York: Routledge, 1986).
33. Jim Torczyner, "Discretion, Judgment, and Informed Consent: Ethical and
Practice Issues in Social Action," Social Work 36 (March 1991): 124.
34. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, "Political Power beyond the State: Problematics
of Government," British Journal of Sociology 4 3 : 2 (June 1992): 1 7 3 - 2 0 5 .
35. Forgive the fact that my case is articulated against the critical and politically en-
gaged writings of Nancy Fraser. The negative attention I give her writing here is a mea-
sure of how well her own work has measured up to the possibilities of political theory.
Fraser, "Struggle over Needs," 2 1 3 - 1 9 .
36. Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York:
Harper & Row, 1974).
37. Fraser, "Struggle over Needs," 219.
38. Wendy Brown, who is both critical of identity politics and sympathetic to prior-
itizing "the political," poses the state as the center of resistance in States of Injury: Power
and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
39. Fraser, "Struggle over Needs," 219.
40. Ibid., 204.
4 1 . Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, The New Class War: Reagan's Attack
on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 6 (my emphasis).
42. Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization, Welfare Mothers Speak Out.
43. Jacqueline Urla suggests that numbers themselves may be used as tools of resis-
tance; see her "Cultural Politics in an Age of Statistics: Numbers, Nations, and the Mak-
ing of Basque Identity," American Ethnologist 20, no. 4 (1993): 8 1 8 - 4 3 .
44. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structur-
alism andHermeneutics, 2d ed., ed. Herbert L . Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1983), 216.

145 Notes to Pages 108-1 14

 CONCLUSION: ITERATION

1. Nikolas Rose, "Between Authority and Liberty: Governing Virtue in a Free So-
ciety," Janus: The Journal of the Finnish Society for Social Policy (forthcoming). See the
essays by Michael Shapiro and Nikolas Rose cited earlier.
2. Robert D. Putnam, "Tuning In, Tuning Out: T h e Strange Disappearance of
Social Capital in America," PS: Political Science & Politics, December 1995, 664-65.
3. Samuel Delaney, "The Rhetoric of Sex and the Discourse of Desire," in Hetero-
topia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: Michigan
University Press, 1994), 2 2 9 - 7 2 .

146 Notes to Pages 108-1 14

Index

Aid to Families with Dependent Children Comte, Auguste, 45, 135

(AFDC), 1 6 - 1 8 Connolly, William, 17, 1 2 7 - 1 3 0 , 135
eligibility criteria, 1 1 3 - 1 2 1 "crisis of democracy"
and social control, 3 4 - 3 5 Trilateral Commission, 62-66
quality control, 1 1 1 - 1 1 5 and welfare fraud, 1 1 1 - 1 1 3
See also welfare
American Enterprise Institute for Public Dahl, Robert, 15, 28-30, 1 3 1
Policy Research, 68 Delany, Samuel, 4 1 - 4 2 , 133, 146
Arendt, Hannah, 43, 1 3 1 , 135, 137 Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 43, 61, 127
depoliticization, 55-58 democratic theory, 1, 1 5 - 1 8
the social, 55-58 driven by "lack," 15, 30-34, 46-47, 7 3 -
association 86,93
science of, 96-103 power, 28-34
depoliticization, 44, 54-66
Bachrach, Peter, 74, 82-84, 1 3 0 - 1 3 1 , Arendt, Hannah, 55-58
138-140 Brodkin, Evelyn, 1 1 1 - 1 1 3
bio-power, 38-42 bureaucracy and administration, 26-28,
Bosanquet, Helen, 46, 1 3 4 - 1 3 5 59-60, 7 0 - 7 1 , 1 1 3 - 1 2 1
"Residuum" and failure to will, 5 3 - 5 4 Fraser, Nancy, 59-60
self-help, 5 1 - 5 4 Pope, Jacqueline, 7 0 - 7 1
Standard of Life, 5 2 - 5 4 Wolin, Sheldon, 26-28
Brodkin, Evelyn, 1 1 1 - 1 1 3 , 144 despotism, 9 6 - 1 0 1
Brown, Wendy, 59-60, 136, 145 Donzelot, Jacques, 43, 136
Burchell, Graham, 133, 136 Dumm, Thomas L., 142, 144
bureaucracy Dumpsters, 1 0 - 1 8 , 109
disentitlement,
and social control, 3 1 - 4 2 Economic Opportunity
See also Kathy Ferguson; Jacqueline Act of 1964, 72
Pope Office of, 73, 77-80, 1 3 8 - 1 3 9
Butler, Judith, 5, 107, 127, 130, 143 Eighner, Lars, 10, 127
English, Deidre, 87-88, 140
California Task Force to Promote Self-
Esteem and Personal and Social Family Assistance Plan, 61
Responsibility, 88-95, 102, Ferguson, Adam, 133
140-142 on "man in society," 4 4 - 4 5
Carter, President, 5, 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 , 144 Ferguson, Kathy, 132
charity Foucault, Michel, 1, 4, 45, 127, 129, 1 3 2 -
Christian, 48-54 135, 1 4 0 - 1 4 1 , 145
See also social reform movements, "bio-power," 38-42, 1 1 3
Charity Organization Society democratic solace, 1 2 4 - 1 2 5
citizen-subject, 1 9 - 4 2 liberal governance, "governmentality,"
social construction of, 38-42, 1 2 3 - 1 2 5 55,81-82
Cloward, Richard, 30, 120, 1 3 1 , 140, 143, power, 8 0 - 8 1
H5 technologies of the self, 90
Fraser, Nancy, 5, 59-60, 1 1 8 - 1 2 1 , 133,
Community Action Program, 5, 25, 6 9 -
86 136, 143, 145
 Funiciello, Theresa, 36-42, 128, 132, 137, Mendel-Reyes, Meta, 130
141-142 Miller, Peter, 127, 1 3 3 - 1 3 4 , 140, 142
Mills, C. Wright, 29
Gaventa, John, 1 3 1 , 140 Milwaukee Welfare Rights Organization,
General Accounting Office, 144 *43> J 45
Ginzberg, Lori D., 136 Mouffe, Chantal, 6, 127, 130
Gordon, Colin, 133 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 138
Gordon, Linda, 1 3 1 , 136 Murray, Charles, 3 4 - 4 2 , 128, 132
governance
and bio-power, 38-42, 53 National Welfare Rights Organization, 61,
by number, 65-66 121
self-governance, 44-54, 87-103 new social movements. See social
Green, T. H., 134 movements
failures of will, 4 6 - 4 7 Nietzsche, Friederich, 1, 105-106, 143
liberal arts of governance, 43-48, 53
Office of Management and Budget, 1 1 1
Hacking, Ian, 65, 89, 137, 141, 143
Hardt, Michael, 133 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, 135
Harrington, Michael, 77-78, 139 Piven, Frances Fox, 30, 6 0 - 6 1 , 105, 1 1 9 -
Hayden, Tom, 76, 138, 140 1 2 1 , 136, 140, 143, 145
Hill, Octavia, 4 8 - 5 1 , 66, 134 Piatt, Anthony, 138
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 134 political, the
Hirschmann, Albert O., 128 by numbers, 1 1 o - 1 2 1 (See also Judith
Hobson, J. A., 127 Butler)
liberal arts of governance, 7-8, 43-44, eclipse of, 55-58
53 Hannah Arendt on, 55-58
social conduct, 7 - 9 indeterminacy of, 1 5 - 1 8 , 44, 61
Hoy, David Couzens, 140 self as terrain of, 46-54, 87-103
Huntington, Samuel, 62-66, 82, 137 transformation of, 5, 54-58, 87-103,
115-125
Juvenile Street Cleaning League, 8 - 1 0 See also depoliticization
"poor"
Katznelson, Ira, 138 empowerment of, 68-86
Kemp, Jack, 68 government of, 3 4 - 4 2 , 48-54, 68-86
Kramer, Ralph, 8 0 - 8 1 , 1 3 8 - 1 4 0 "powerlessness of," 72-76
social construction of, 3 4 - 4 2 , 76-86
Laclau, Ernesto, 6, 127, 130 social scientific knowledge of, 76-85
Latour, Bruno, 4 3 - 4 7 , 134, 145 Poor Law, 51
League of Women Voters, 16, 128 Poovey, Mary, 7, 49-50, 127, 134
Lewis, Oscar, 139 Pope, Jacqueline, 7 0 - 7 1 , 138, 143
Lipsky, Michael, 1 1 1 - 1 1 5 , 1 4 4 - 1 4 5 power
Lubiano, Wahneema, 1 1 0 , 144 faces of power debate, 28-34
Lukes, Steven, 3 1 - 3 4 , 1 3 1 indeterminacy of, 1 0 - 1 8
lack of, 73-86
Macpherson, C. B., 130 relation to citizenship, 8 1 - 8 6
Marris, Peter, 75-86, 1 3 8 - 1 4 0 Putnam, Robert, 1 2 2 - 1 2 3 , 146
Marx, Karl, 22, 3 1 - 3 2 , 1 3 1
McClure, Kirstie, 135 Reagan, Ronald, 13, 34
McConnell, Grant, 8 1 - 8 2 , 140 on welfare fraud, 105, 1 1 0 - 1 1 2 , 120
Mead, Lawrence, 137 Rein, Martin, 75-86, 1 3 8 - 1 4 0
Melosi, Martin V., 127, 135 Ricci, David, 1 3 1

148 Index
Riley, Denise, 59, 1 3 5 - 1 3 6 social services,
Rose, Nikolas, 127, 1 3 2 - 1 3 4 , 1 3 9 - 1 4 1 , class interests of, 3 4 - 4 2
144-146 "society as a whole," 6 - 8
social science, 76, n o , 1 1 3 Stack, Carol B., 139, 145
Steinern, Gloria, 87-103, 1 4 0 - 1 4 2
Scott, Joan, 127, 130, 136 ^ subjects, 1 9 - 4 2 , 85-86
Second Harvest, 128
Sedgewick, Eve, 23, 142 technologies of citizenship, 1 - 9
self-esteem, 6, 87-103 empowerment, 67-86
self-help, 48-54, 73-86 See also self-help
Shapiro, Michael, 133, 146 Tocqueville,
142
Alexis de, 1, 19-24, 57, 87,
Smelser, Neil, 92-93
Smiles, Samuel, 134 science of association, 96-103
social Trilateral Commission, 62-66
"housekeeping," 58-62
invention of, 43-66 Up & Out of Poverty Now, 13
social capital, 1 2 2 - 1 2 3 Urla, Jacqueline, 145
social conduct, 7 - 9
social control, 30-44, 54-58 Vasconcellos, John, 90, 141
and administrative reform, 1 1 0 - 1 2 1
and Community Action Programs, 76, Walkowitz, Judith, 61, 1 3 5 - 1 3 6
80-86 Waring, George Edwin, 8 - 1 0 , 25, 50, 122,
and theories of power, 3 0 - 4 2 127
social movements, new, 62-66 War on Poverty. See social reform
and disciplinary power, 87-103 movements, Great Society
See also social reform movements Wattenberg, Daniel, 137
social reform movements, 6, 48-54 Webb, Beatrice, 58-60, 135
Charity Organization Society, 48-54, welfare
66, 107 feminist theories of, 5 8 - 6 1
Community Action Programs, 67-86 fraud, 1 0 4 - 1 2 1
empowerment zones, 68 quality control, 1 1 1 - 1 1 5
Female Bible Mission, 49-50 and social control, 3 1 - 4 2
Great Society, 34-36, 67-86 White, Lucie, 105-108, 1 4 3 - 1 4 4
Mobilization for Youth, 7 3 - 7 4 Wiley, George, 61, 1 2 1
sanitation reform, 8 - 1 8 , 58-59 Wolin, Sheldon, 1 3 0 - 1 3 1 , 135, 144
self-esteem, 87-103 citizenship, 2 4 - 3 4
Social Purity, 61 depoliticization, 26-28, 64
Tennessee Valley Authority, 84 welfare, 1 1 3
welfare rights, 1 1 5 - 1 2 1 , 143 Women, Work, and Welfare, 1 1 8
social science,
constitutive role of, 76-84, 89-95 Young, Iris Marion, 1 3 0 - 1 3 3

Index 149