Socialist Governmentality? Healthcare, technologies of the self, and subjectification in European state socialism, 1945–1990

After the col­lapse of the Cold War two-bloc sys­tem in 1989/90, his­to­ri­og­ra­phy and social sci­ences tend­ed to sharply con­trast post-World War II social­ist and non-social­ist soci­eties. Recent­ly, the focus has shift­ed to a more com­pre­hen­sive and nuanced per­spec­tive inter­est­ed in dif­fer­ences as much as par­al­lels, includ­ing inter­sec­tions and con­ver­gences between the two sys­tems. Some even ask, if the Iron Cur­tain might not be bet­ter described as a per­me­able Nylon Cur­tain. In this con­text, a more gen­er­al ques­tion has emerged: whether and how Michel Foucault’s ideas on lib­er­al (and cap­i­tal­ist) “gov­ern­men­tal­i­ty”, first for­mu­lat­ed in 1977/78, can be pro­duc­tive­ly applied on con­tem­po­rary or his­tor­i­cal social­ist soci­eties. After all, at first glance the lib­er­al and indi­vid­u­al­ized tech­nolo­gies of the self stand in sharp con­trast to the ide­o­log­i­cal­ly shaped and admin­is­tra­tive­ly medi­at­ed for­ma­tion of a “social­ist personality”.

It is hard­ly con­tro­ver­sial that the Fou­cauldian con­cept of “biopol­i­tics” – secur­ing and enhanc­ing “life” of the gov­erned “pop­u­la­tion” – is a very use­ful tool for ana­lyz­ing both social­ist and non-social­ist gov­ern­ment poli­cies when it comes to, for exam­ple, birth reg­u­la­tion and prona­tal­ism, agri­cul­tur­al poli­cies or pre­ven­tive health­care regimes. “Gov­ern­men­tal­i­ty” as defined by Fou­cault, how­ev­er, char­ac­ter­izes a kind of biopol­i­tics which seems to be specif­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed to a way of live in neolib­er­al-demo­c­ra­t­ic and cap­i­tal­ist soci­eties. The con­cept focus­es on “pri­vate” lifestyles (diet and phys­i­cal activ­i­ty, sex, emo­tions, etc.). The shap­ing of indi­vid­ual behav­ior and sub­jec­tiv­i­ty through a “con­duct of con­duct” ensures that the individual’s striv­ing for auton­o­my and their capac­i­ty for self-con­trol, self-reliance, and reflex­iv­i­ty serve the (pre­sumed) com­mon good. Gov­ern­men­tal­i­ty, then, describes how self-con­duct simul­ta­ne­ous­ly “gov­erns” oth­ers by gov­ern­ing one­self in ways that are desir­able for the poli­ty and accept­able to the governed.

In the last decades, the con­cept of gov­ern­men­tal­i­ty helped to under­stand how neolib­er­al­ism made cit­i­zens respon­si­ble for the for­mer tasks of the post­war-wel­fare state and how the mar­ket redis­trib­uted those tasks to the indi­vid­ual (sub­ject). From this the­o­ret­i­cal stand­point, gov­ern­men­tal­i­ty seems incom­pat­i­ble with social­ist ide­ol­o­gy, state con­trol, phys­i­cal repres­sion, and the pre­rog­a­tive of the col­lec­tive. In recent years, how­ev­er, we learned that pur­su­ing a bot­tom-up per­spec­tive can pro­vide addi­tion­al or even deep­er insights into the com­plex­i­ties of social­ist real­i­ties. This is the aim of the pro­posed work­shop: To take a clos­er look at gov­ern­men­tal­i­ty, not from the per­spec­tive of pol­i­cy mak­ers or the pow­er appa­ra­tus, but by using the exam­ple of health­care in post-1945 Social­ist Europe.

We pro­pose to explore con­crete exam­ples from every­day health­care set­tings – in psy­cho­log­i­cal coun­sel­ing, clin­i­cal social work, and com­mu­ni­ty med­i­cine, in treat­ing chron­ic dis­eases and in pre­ven­tive health­care, in school edu­ca­tion and the work­place, in healthy leisure activ­i­ties, and in shap­ing a hap­py fam­i­ly life. What mech­a­nisms of dis­sem­i­na­tion, recep­tion, and medi­a­tion of self-tech­niques can be found and ana­lyzed? Were ele­ments or pat­terns of gov­ern­men­tal­i­ty trans­ferred from the West to the East or do we also find “home-grown” inven­tions? Were social­ist soci­eties more “lib­er­al” than they realised and want­ed to be? If so, what does this mean for the way we look at gov­ern­men­tal­i­ty in “West­ern” societies?

The work­shop will be held in Berlin on Sep­tem­ber 13–14, 2023. We plan this to be a fair­ly small group of peo­ple to make the dis­cus­sions as open and live­ly as pos­si­ble. To facil­i­tate a pro­duc­tive dis­cus­sion, we invite papers from ongo­ing research that will be dis­trib­uted to par­tic­i­pants (and com­men­ta­tors) in advance. Expens­es for trav­el and hotel will be cov­ered. We wel­come abstracts in Eng­lish of no more than 300 words. Please send an abstract and a short CV by e‑mail (henriette.voelker@charite.de) by Decem­ber 19, 2022.

The work­shop is orga­nized by Dr. Alexa Geisthöv­el and Lau­ra Hot­ten­rott (both ERC Leviathan) and Prof. Dr. Vio­la Balz (FOR “normal#verrückt”). We grate­ful­ly acknowl­edge the sup­port of the Euro­pean Research Coun­cil (ERC Grant 854503) and the Ger­man Research Foun­da­tion (DFG FOR 3031). Please do not hes­i­tate to con­tact us if you have any questions.