Abstract
The Policing of Families (first published in French in 1977 [English edition, 1979]) is Jacques Donzelot’s best-known book and a crucial point of reference in studies on the family, social work and social policy. Nikolas Rose has highly praised The Policing of Families as ‘path-breaking’, and as ‘the best account’ of ‘the whole range of technologies that were invented that would enable the family to do its public duty without destroying its private authority’.1 The text stands in an interesting relationship with the analysis of the family in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, which the History of Sexuality, Volume 1 only presents in brief. Donzelot’s text has been available to Anglophone scholars for decades longer than Foucault’s lectures, and has long appeared to stand as the Foucauldean paradigm on ‘the family’. Jaimey Fisher, for instance, notes that ‘Foucault’s generalisations’ in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1 ‘have been filled out to a large degree by Donzelot’,2 while Michael J. Shapiro states that ‘to exemplify the Foucauldean discursive event, we can revisit Jacques Donzelot’s Foucauldean history of modernity’s emerging surveillance of the family’.3
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Notes
Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Refraining Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 74.
Jaimey Fisher, Disciplining Germany: Youth, Re-education, and Reconstruction After the Second World War (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 279.
Michael J. Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 175.
Chris Philo, ‘Foucault’s children’, in Louise Holt (ed.), Geographies of Children, Youth and Families: An International Perspective (London: Routledge, 2011), 48.
Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Le Travail social (Paris: Minuit, 1978), 68–82.
This situation was described by Jacques Donzelot in one of his first articles: a social worker appeared at the university to study the elemental structures of kinship in marginal neighbourhoods. See Jacques Donzelot, ‘Travail social et lutte politique’, Esprit, 4–5 (1972), 654–73, reprinted in Philippe Meyer (ed.), Normalisation et contrôle social (pourquoi le travail social?) (Paris: Seuil, 1976), 99–120.
Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Le Métier d’éducateur: Les instituteurs de 1900, les éducateurs spéclialisés de 1968 (Paris: Minut, 1983), 145–98.
Murielle Monrose, ‘Une lecture statistique de l’histoire des travailleurs sociaux’, in Jean-Noël Chopart (ed.), Les Mutations du travail social: Dynamiques d’un champ professionnel (Paris: Dunod, 2000), 13–21 at 17.
Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Susan Emanuel (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 380 n. 54 on the demand of ‘prophecy’: ‘A more complete understanding of the “Sartre effect” would require an analysis of the social conditions of the appearance of the social demand for a prophecy for intellectuals: conjunc-tural conditions, such as the experiences of rupture, tragedy and anguish associated with the collective and individual crises produced by the war (the Occupation, the Resistance and the Liberation); structural conditions, such as the existence of an autonomous intellectual field endowed with its own institutions of reproduction (the École Normale Supérieure) and legitimation (journals, circles, publishers, academies, etc.), and hence able to sustain the independent existence of an “aristocracy of intelligence” which was separated from power, if not against all powers, and able to impose and sanction a particular definition of intellectual accomplishment.’
Michel Autès, Les Paradoxes du travail social (Paris: Dunod, 1999), 49.
Josette d’Escrivan, ‘Peut-on ne pas dénoncer l’inacceptable?’ Esprit, 4–5 (1972), 33–7. See also Autès, Les Paradoxes du travail social, 51 and José Luis Moreno Pestaña, Foucault, la gauche et la politique (Paris: Textuel, 2011), 81–6.
See Verdès-Leroux, Le Travail social, 142. On the imposition of the label ‘social work’, as of the 1972 issue of Esprit, see Robert Castel, ‘Du travail social à la gestion sociale du non-travail’, Esprit, 3–4 (1988), 28–47.
Jacques Donzelot, ‘Devenir sociologue en 1968: Petite topographie physique et morale de la sociologie en ce temps-là’, Esprit, 344 (2008): 47–53 at 50.
Anne Bessaguet, Michel Chauvière and Annick Ohayon, Les socio-clercs: Bienfaisance ou travail social (Paris: Maspero, 1976), 30.
On the conflicts in the conception of the work by the GIP between the Christian factions (Esprit and those tending towards reformism) and the young activists associated with Michel Foucault, see Daniel Defert, ‘L’émergence d’un nouveau front: les prisons’, in Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds), Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons: Archives d’une lutte, 1970–1972 (Paris: Éditions de l’IMEC, 2003), 315–26 at 321.
Every symbolic message adapts to an audience—always with peculiar properties—to which it provides a certain response to its specific needs for meaning. See Jean-Claude Passeron, ‘Le sociologue en politique et vice versa: Enquêtes sociologiques et réformes pédagogiques dans les années 1960’, in Jacques Bouveresse and Daniel Roche (eds), La Liberté par la connaissance: Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004), 15–104 at 38.
On the mutual adaptation of demand and the production of discourses between theoreticians and recipients of the theories of social control, see Robert Castel, ‘De l’intégration sociale à l’éclatement du social: l’émergence, l’apogée et le départ à la retraite du contrôle social,’ Revue internationale d’action communautaire, 20 (1988), 67–78 at 74.
François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, Deborah Glassman (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 311.
Raymond Moulin and Paul Veyne, ‘Entretien avec Jean-Claude Passeron: Un itinéraire de sociologue’, Revue européenne des sciences socials, 34 (1996), 275–354 at 303.
Christian Bachmann, Autour de Robert Castel (Paris: Cedias-Musée Social, 1992), 12.
Jacques Donzelot, ‘Une anti-sociologie’, Esprit, 12 (1972), 835–55.
See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur,’ Les Temps modernes, 246 (1966), 865–906 at 872.
Robert Castel, ‘Champ Social a rencontré Robert Castel’, Champ Social, 21 (1976), 4–5 at 5.
See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, Robert Hurley (trans.) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979 [first published in French in 1977]), 48–95, section entitled ‘Government through the family’.
On this question, see Moreno Pestaña, Foucault, la gauche et la politique, 104–7. Donzelot would go on and theorise totalitarian, Bolshevik and fascist unity in his next work, published in 1984, conceived as a settling of scores with the leftism to which he belonged. See Jacques Donzelot, L’Invention du social: Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1984).
On the ideological shift of Foucault’s circle: Jacques Donzelot, ‘Misère de la culture politique’, Critique, 34 (1978), 572–86, available at: http://donzelot.org/articles/Misere%20de%201a%20culture%20politique.pdf (last accessed 1 March 2012); Jacques Donzelot, ‘Á propos de la gouvernmentalité: Une discussion avec Colin Gordon’ (2005), available at: http://donzelot.org/articles/gouvernementalitecolingordon.pdf (last accessed 1 March 2012).
See Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), 184–228.
Claude Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron, Le Savant et le populaire: Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 93.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Bachelors’ Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béam, Richard Nice (trans.) (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 196.
Jean-Claude Passeron, Le Raisonnement sociologique: Un espace non poppérien de l’argumentation (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006), 306.
Ibid., 174–5. For Donzelot, ‘the construction (or the historical reconstruction) of the policing discourse coincided perfectly with historical reality. I wonder whether anything could be further removed from Foucault’s own convictions in that matter.’ See Willem Frijhoff, ‘Foucault reformed by Certeau’, in John Neubauer (ed.), Cultural History after Foucault (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 83–91.
Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51–80.
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Pestaña, J.L.M. (2012). Jacques Donzelot’s The Policing of Families (1977) in Context. In: Duschinsky, R., Rocha, L.A. (eds) Foucault, the Family and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291288_6
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