‘Common sense’ and ‘governmentality’: local government in southeastern Ireland, 1850‐1922

Abstract

Early paradigms in political anthropology identified formal government councils as a subject for cross‐cultural comparison (structural functionalism) or as a political resource for goal‐orientated actors (transactionalism). Recent concerns with power and regulation can also profit from a focus on local‐level government councils by using them to explore the conceptual and empirical linkages between ‘common sense’ and ‘governmentality’. In this article, as a point of entry, we highlight a key moment in the history of Britain's colonial and hegemonic project in Ireland, namely the orderly administrative transition from colony to state which occurred in Ireland after 1919. By constructing a historical narrative of a local government council in the southeast after 1850, and of its material and discursive bases, we show how the actions and ideologies of elite farmers were implicated in this orderly administrative transition and, therefore, how the concepts of governmentality, hegemony, and common sense might be linked.