Patrick Joyce. The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800.

Abstract

Patrick Joyce is among the most influential modern British historians of his generation. He has consistently set intellectual agendas rather than followed them. Having taken the linguistic turn and embraced postmodern theory, here he returns to social history, with invigorated attention to the dynamics of power and materiality. The state that Joyce puts in question will be unfamiliar to most readers; it is the ordinary things that the state does and through which the state operates—the “mundane state”—that interest him. The long, theory-laden introduction argues that by the mid-nineteenth century, the embedded technologies and hardwired infrastructure of the everyday state had generated the “technostate,” which facilitated enhanced modes of liberal governance. The State of Freedom is a companion volume to Joyce's book The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (2003), as well as a promised third volume, The Children of Freedom. Joyce's ambition is to recast the terms for understanding liberal Britain. “Liberal” here refers not to party labels or formal political thought, but to those processes aimed at cultivating liberal self-governance among citizens. To avoid confusion, Joyce employs the term “organized freedom” to suggest a political regime that rules through a freedom inextricably bound to power and constraint.