Current/Future research activity
My current book on the liberal state centres upon the British state, but ranges over other examples, and includes colonial dimensions, especially in the case of India. The book has the provisional title, The State of Freedom: Making the Liberal Leviathan, Britain since 1800. It covers the period from about 1830 to the First World War. The book draws on a number of disciplinary fields as well as history, including science studies and governmentality studies. It involves consideration of the material and ethical fashioning of bureaucracy, extending into work on elite pedagogy. This focuses on the content and material forms of education in the public school and the Oxbridge College. The research also concerns the material forms of state formation in terms of communication systems, in particular the history of the British Post Office (see my online CRESC working paper available on this site ). My current research activities are therefore in the interdisciplinary, but especially historical, study of liberalism, governance and the state. For the contents page of the book see my Publications page.
Growing out of this current work, I am planning a book on the theme of freedom and the British, which involves the systematic questioning of received understandings of both freedom and liberalism.
This book has the provisional title, The Children of Freedom, a title designed to convey both the sense of the blighted liberal inheritance of freedom in post-1945 Britain, and the actual role of what is done to children themselves as being central to power in Britain. It will complete a trilogy of books on freedom and power. The workshop on inequality in history that I mention on the “About” page complements this concern with freedom and power. So too does my activity in the ESRC-funded Centre for the Study of Sociocultural Change (CRESC, see cresc.ac.uk). One result of this activity was the special issue of Cultural Studies, 2008, on government, culture and liberalism, which is available online on this site.
Also linked to CRESC, along with Tony Bennett, Francis Dodsworth and Nikolas Rose I ran a series of five workshops over 2007-9, on the theme of “Government and Freedom”, funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council. The programme and some of the papers for these are available on the www.cresc.ac.uk site.
At the LSE I am developing these interests in the history of liberalism, freedom and governance in a collaborative and interdisciplinary way. “Understanding freedom” Programme for spring-summer 2009 available on this site .
Research
