The State of Freedom

by Joyce, Patrick

• ISBN13: 9781107694552
• ISBN10: 1107694558
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-05-20
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the state, the government offices they sat in and the college halls they dined in. Patrick Joyce argues that only by considering these things, people and places can we really understand the nature of the modern state. This is both a pioneering new approach to political history in which social and material factors are centre stage, and a highly original history of modern Britain.

Table of Contents

The Powers of the State:

Introduction - the social history of the state

Power, things and the coming of the technostate

The State of Things - Connecting

'Man is Made of the Post Office': Making the Social Technical:

The postal network becomes a system

Writing and postal technologies

Postal Economy and Society - Making the Technical Social:

Economising - the state and society

Postal society - learning the state

Filing the Raj - Political Technologies of the Imperial State:

Making centres

'The faculty of arrangement'

The State of Men - Governing

The Work of the State:

The common knowledge of the state

The civil service statesman

The Grammars of Governance - Pedagogies of the Powerful:

Lineages of the liberal governor

Classics and the remaking of liberal education

'The Fathers Govern the Nation' - the Public School and the Oxbridge College:

Making mastery

The domus

Conclusion: Legacies of the Liberal Leviathan

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