Foucault, war and nationalism

Abstract

This article provides a brief response to contributions by Bartmanski and Phillips, and Hewson. While acknowledging the importance of their innovative and quite different deployment of Foucauldian analytical tools to the analysis of culture as a way of life and the possible erasure of humanity, respectively, it also identifies some blind spots in their arguments. The focus is primarily on the role of war and nationalism in the transformation of social order over the course of human history. I argue that neither phenomenology nor the political economy of capitalism can adequately account for our current troubled predicament. Instead, it is necessary to rely on the comparative historical sociology of war and nationalism to better understand the long-term dynamics of social change.