Jacques Donzelot’s The Policing of Families (1977) in Context

Abstract

The Policing of Families (first published in French in 1977 [English edition, 1979]) is Jacques Donzelot’s best-known book and a crucial point of reference in studies on the family, social work and social policy. Nikolas Rose has highly praised The Policing of Families as ‘path-breaking’, and as ‘the best account’ of ‘the whole range of technologies that were invented that would enable the family to do its public duty without destroying its private authority’.1 The text stands in an interesting relationship with the analysis of the family in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, which the History of Sexuality, Volume 1 only presents in brief. Donzelot’s text has been available to Anglophone scholars for decades longer than Foucault’s lectures, and has long appeared to stand as the Foucauldean paradigm on ‘the family’. Jaimey Fisher, for instance, notes that ‘Foucault’s generalisations’ in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1 ‘have been filled out to a large degree by Donzelot’,2 while Michael J. Shapiro states that ‘to exemplify the Foucauldean discursive event, we can revisit Jacques Donzelot’s Foucauldean history of modernity’s emerging surveillance of the family’.3