Nikolas Rose

I found this book to be a real mixed bag. To the good, it lucidly explores a wide range of developments in neuroscience and wider discourses around them to make a compelling case that there is an emergent "neuro" approach that is shaping social policy and what it means to be human. To the bad, it fails to explore some important questions raised throughout, especially about context and does not fairly acknowledge obvious objections to some of its claims. One of its main arguments is I think show more essentially a straw-man argument about social science critics of the neurosciences. Ultimately I think the book is less than the sum of its parts - though some of those parts are excellent show less

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 chapter is rather brief and very Anglo-centric, but in total they offer a rather full and complex picture of Foucauldian show more subjectivity, and that key characteristic of the modern lifestyle, "the obligation to be free." show less

this may take some time - will need to go back and read sticky notes