Public Seminar with visiting professor Mitchell Dean

What is Society? Social Thought and the Arts of Government

By Visiting Professor, Mitchell Dean, Professor of Sociology, Macquarie University, Sydney

Opponents: Paul Du Gay, Globalization Professor, IO, CBS & Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Professor & research director, MPP, CBS

Mediator: Kaspar Villadsen, Associate professor, MPP, CBS

Following conservative politicians, neoliberal philosophers and radical critics, different strands of social science joined the questioning of the salience of ‘society’ and ideas of ‘the social’ over the last decades. Many announced the death of the social. When the social reappeared, it was often in the moral domains of community and civil society. Drawing upon the history and genealogy of the social, this talk discusses the relation of social thought to law and the state and to economics, and how a notion of society as a ‘problematic unity’ was linked to the formation of the ‘social question’. It argues for the necessity of a social domain in contemporary societies and for the continued salience of the very idea of society and the normative questions it poses in today’s context.

Mitchell Dean is Professor of Sociology and Academic Director, Participation and Community Engagement, in the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University, Australia. From 2003-8, he was the Dean of the Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy at Macquarie University. He was Visiting Professor in the Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School (2002-3) and has held Visiting Fellowships at the Australian National University, Birkbeck College, London, and Goldsmiths College, London. His areas of speciality are political and historical sociology, critical social and political theory, and governing in liberal democracies. His most recent writings focus on governing and power within societies and increasingly across and between societies. He is the author of The Constitution of Poverty (Routledge, 1991), Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology (Routledge, 1994), Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society (Sage, 1999 and 2010, expanded second edition) and Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule (Open University Press, 2007). He is editor with Barry Hindess of Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government (Cambridge University Press).

Mitchell Dean was Visiting Professor in the Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics at CBS in (2002-3) and is now back again! He is at CBS for three months until the end of June. He has delivered a PhD course on Governmentality – analytical strategies for the critique of power with Kaspar Villadsen, and he will be working at mpp on frameworks and transformations of social rationality and public governance using cases from Denmark, Australia and the United States.