Foucault as spatial historian of social policy

Heeding the central purpose of the present collection, I position Michel Foucault (1926–84), the French intellectual, as a spatial historian of social policy. Casting Foucault as a researcher of social policy is not necessarily how many see him, but, if ‘social policy’ refers to how different agencies – including formal state institutions and other civic bodies – operate upon ‘the social’ to shape, order or control it, then he can surely be so characterised. In this connection, it is instructive to recall Titmuss’ description of social policies as ‘concerned with the right ordering of the network of relationships between men and women who live together in societies’ (Titmuss, 1974: 28).

Foucault was particularly concerned with ‘the mad, the sad and the bad’ (Philo, 2011a: 166), loosely mapping on to the fates of people with mental or psychiatric illnesses (for example Foucault, 1965, 2006a, 2006b), with physical sicknesses or conditions (Foucault, 1973), or who are malefactors from the broadly misbehaved to the perpetrators of serious crimes (Foucault, 1976, 2015). He asked searching questions about the social policies – or, more narrowly, the psychiatric, medical and judicial regimes – framing the problems that such people seemingly pose for wider society, probing both the specific institutions confronting them (the asylum, the hospital and the prison) and the specialist knowledges or discourses produced about such people, problems and institutions. His lens widened to take in the economic, political, cultural and ‘moral’ relations – increasingly conceived as power relations – spun around diverse representations of and practices directed at these problematic mind-bodies, all the while attending to multiple mechanisms meeting the injunction that, as Foucault (2003b) suggested, ‘society must be defended’. He thereby initiated a critical account of social policy interrogating the manifold ways in which this ‘defence of society’ takes place, exploring theoretically and empirically how society's defensive mechanisms become thought, enacted and, on occasion, resisted.

While his political energies often turned to the contemporary state of psychiatry or penal policy (Elden, 2017), his substantive inquiries always proceeded historically, informed by detailed engagements with diverse archival sources. For this reason, I champion him as an historian of social policy, notwithstanding objections about the extent and quality of his historical scholarship, most obviously perhaps around his earlier work on the history of madness (Philo, 2013).