Putting the Politics Back into Youth Studies: Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Changing State of Youth

Abstract

This paper argues that youth studies should return to the political. It does so through emphasizing the importance of age in youth to the state and to the political management of capitalist social relations. Through a process of critique, this paper argues that the neglect of age to contemporary orthodox youth studies is a consequence of its misplaced and unsustainable concern with youth as a process of 'growing up'; and that where connections are made between the state, age and youth, these remain incoherent and poorly developed. By way of mapping out the basis for an alternative, this paper advocates the need to derive age and youth from their broader significance to the political management of the social relations of production and, more specifically, to the changing form of the capitalist state.