Governing the Soul

To govern the soul is not to issue commands or impose discipline from without. It is to produce a self that experiences its own governance as autonomy—to constitute individuals, through expertise, institutions, and vocabulary, as subjects with an interior life whose continuous management is both a personal obligation and, paradoxically, the very substance of their freedom. Nikolas Rose’s 1989 work of that title traced how the psy sciences—the vast archipelago of psychological disciplines that proliferated across the twentieth century—accomplished this feat across every institution of modern life. The factory floor, the school, the clinical consulting room, the self-help aisle: each became a site at which expertise was deployed not to compel behavior from without but to equip individuals with the vocabulary, the diagnostic categories, and the implicit obligations through which they would compel themselves. The soul governed in this manner is not unfree; it is, in the most operative sense, free—choosing, autonomous, self-directing. It is also thoroughly governed: its choices