Counter-conduct and Critique of Critique: A Genealogy of Leadership Anxiety in ‘Global Governance’ Advocacy and Opposition

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Publication Title

Global Studies

DOI

10.1080/13600826.2016.1144564

Abstract

Reading counter-conduct as a problematic mode of critique that sustains pastoralism, this article locates comparably governmentality-sustaining modes of critique in today's anti-globalisation protests that share a leadership anxiety with the “global governance” discourses they target. Such leadership anxiety is prefigured by a revolutionary will to create new domains of public criticism, but this will is self-limited, infringing upon neither government, nor economic laws, nor principles of right. Through a history of leadership anxiety in English Revolutionary political discourse I show that, to the extent that it has been informed by transatlantic “republican” thought, protest today is administered according to adaptations of Christian pastoral concerns for the care of each and all. The government of each ensures that equality rests on confession and dissection among subjects declared equals, and the government of all relies on flexible, indiscernible postulates of superiority. While billed as attempts to achieve societal “leaderlessness”, these anti-globalisation movements, similar to Foucault's counter-conducts, sustain governmentality by presuppositions of equality and superiority.

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