Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self

In Governing the Soul, Rose ably uses Foucauldian theory to examine the creation of the modern citizen. A person with desires, neuroses, and ambitions, at once an autonomous being and the target of technical interventions from a wide range of psychological and para-psychological experts working at the behest of the state, corporations, and schools. Each of the chapters is rather brief and very Anglo-centric, but in total they offer a rather full and complex picture of Foucauldian subjectivity, and that key characteristic of the modern lifestyle, “the obligation to be free.”