Gary Wickham

The term ‘post-national formations’ is a product of some of the recent work of Jürgen Habermas. In using this term, Habermas highlights what he regards as a laudatory trend in social and political research. This is the trend away from an intense focus on the role of nation-states – a role he believes to be unconducive to progressive politics – and towards a focus on the role of new configurations – a role he believes to be much more conducive to this type of politics. ‘Post-national formations’, then, is the term Habermas uses to describe new non-state configurations he has identified. He is confident these configurations will eventually break free of the supposed yoke of the nation-state and usher in a new era of progressivism. This article is not concerned with the post-national formations literature per se. Rather, it is concerned with this literature’s failure to take into account the full history of both the nation-state and the notion of sovereignty that helps the nation-state to function. In pursuing this concern, the article draws material from various sources to offer a short historical defence of the sovereign state.

In this chapter, we discuss the reception of Foucault's work in Anglophone countries and survey the recent work done on his ideas in the twenty-first century. We highlight how Foucault gained traction in those areas, thanks to his novel tools and methods that allowed him to analyze power while distancing himself from Marxism and its followers. Foucault's work on power structures and governmentality offered concrete insights from precise historiographies that changed political and social theory since its inception. Some such analyses, including genealogy and archaeology, helped uncover the threads of power that drew scholars to Foucault's thought. We also offer some criticisms of his work, including how his conception of power and society wasn't so different from the Marxists’ line of thought, as well as how some of Foucault's historiographies tended to exclude certain specificities that endangered parts of his theory. Yet, despite this criticism, we suggest that Foucault belongs in the pantheon of thinkers who have profoundly influenced social and political thought today.

The study of civility is branching out. A wide range of new studies have been published in the last twenty years. While the increase in the diversity of approaches usefully expands the scope of the concept, it is also a cause for concern. Much of the new work pays little attention to civility’s complex history as a practice and simply assumes its fundamental capacity to lead interaction between human beings in a peaceful direction, leaving this body of work in no position to fully appreciate the crucial role of the state. Our main argument here is that civility emerged alongside the modern state in early-modern Europe to form an ongoing state–civility nexus, a nexus by which the state produces and maintains conditions that allow civility to flourish, in turn allowing civility to help the state maintain itself, particularly by restraining the state’s raw power. We pursue this argument by exploring two sets of writings. One set is composed of work by early-modern writers, especially Thomas Hobbes, with some attention paid to four others: Justus Lipsius, Jean Bodin, Samuel Pufendorf, and Christian Thomasius. The second set is composed of work by twentieth-century writers, especially Norbert Elias, with some attention paid to two others: Max Weber and Edward Shils.

Dignity is crucial to the proper operation of rights. If rights are to do what they are meant to do, they need to be deeply embedded in a country’s society and culture. It’s not enough just to have rights sitting on the books. The overwhelming majority of people in the country need to respect them at a personal level. Without the dignity component, rights are hollow. The contrast between rights with dignity and rights without is increasingly apparent with regard to two groups of Australians who are much in the news lately. These are those who have retired from the full-time workforce and those who are in the last stage of their lives – whether in their own homes or in some form of assisted-living accommodation.

Most experts agree Australia’s health financing system needs a reboot to reduce the distortions and inefficiencies created by the overlapping coverage between Medicare and private health insurance. Any new such financing system would need to carefully balance competition and choice, with affordability of coverage and equal access to quality care. It also needs the flexibility to respond to changing health-care needs. One solution is to allow individuals to opt out of Medicare and require them to buy private health insurance. This voluntary opt-out model, with risk-based government subsidies, would make private cover fully substitutable for Medicare.

The Australian Football League’s (AFL) fan base keeps growing and growing, whether measured by total attendances, total TV audiences, or the billions of dollars the league is able to command for its “product”. So what is it the barrackers are getting that keeps them coming back? You only have to be at a game for a few minutes, or observe the way dedicated fans watch on TV or mobile phones or listen on radio, to see that footy adds a lot of passion to a lot of lives. That’s important, but it’s not all that footy serves up. It also promotes a bizarre type of optimism that serves society well, the type of “keep going no matter what the odds” mentality that Australia has relied upon in the darkest times of its short history, especially the two world wars and the great depression. By this mentality, gathering glory is not the be all and end all of a life well lived – that’s sometimes frowned upon. What’s much more important is the stoic willingness to stare down hard times by shovelling gravel (usually only metaphorically) in the hope of building something better, even if the “better” turns out to be more shovelling alongside other like-minded people.

Not enough consideration has been given by some texts in the field of ‘social identity’ to the task of defining society, which is, after all, the notion behind the first half of the field's name. For these particular texts, one very basic definition – ‘society is human interaction’ – is left to stand alone. This paper does not challenge the importance of any of the attempts by these texts (or by any other texts in the field) to describe and analyze the plethora of identities being promoted, invented, or rejected around the world. Rather, it focuses on only the ‘social’ component in ‘social identity’, arguing that the field as a whole would be stronger if all its contributors, or at least the great majority of them, granted this component a more important role. In particular, the paper offers the field three definitional possibilities it might usefully add to the ‘society is human interaction’ definition.

It’s both heartening and perplexing to read in the press about the ALP’s increasing determination, in the wake of the NSW election result, to make clear to voters that Labor is not allied to the Greens. It’s heartening because it has become obvious since its 2010-13 “fling” with the Greens that the electorate will punish any failure by Labor to mark its independence. More than that, it’s heartening because a political party that isn’t sure what it stands for isn’t really a party. It’s perplexing, on the other hand, because there seems to be considerable uncertainty within the party about where to look to find an independent progressive direction that can win elections. Has the current generation of Labor thinkers forgotten the names Bob Hawke and Paul Keating? Surely not. These two leaders knew what to do with all three letters in “ALP”: a strong and confident Australia, a strong and confident workforce, and a strong and confident party. This was and remains widely attractive. They strove for a strong and progressive Australian society, one that treated workers and employers as equally important. They convinced a majority of Australians that progress towards a stronger, fairer society would necessarily include a stronger, fairer economy – even if it entailed privatisation of some industries and assets. For them, a strong Australia was to be fully engaged in the world.

There is a commitment in Thomas Hobbes’s work which is largely neglected by sociology, a commitment to society as a product of sovereignty. Hobbes makes this commitment in line with his strident opposition to the scholastic idea of the dominance of reason in nature. For Hobbes, society is not based on natural reason. Drawing on his distinctive Epicurean anthropology, he argues that the small amount of reason that nature supplies to humans is enough to give them a limited capacity for sociability – enough, that is, to achieve a rudimentary level of self-preservation – but not nearly enough to produce society. He builds this argument directly against the scholastic argument that nature in fact supplies to humans so much reason that, were they to apply it in the manner in which nature intends, they would achieve a perfect society. In forging his particular direction against the scholastics, Hobbes draws mostly on his Epicurean political philosophy, whereby the rule of a strong authority, the sovereign, disciplines the wills of subjects in order to properly balance their passions, to the extent that a distinct domain of peace and security is created and maintained, a domain he mostly calls simply ‘society’. His account of society is normative in only one respect, a very important respect – its dedication to the fundamental importance of peace and security.

Ongoing reflections on the fall of the Rudd/Gillard Labor governments continue to feature suggestions about the impact of policy shifts to the Left, especially under Gillard (possibly influenced by her dalliance with the Greens). These suggestions mirror those made about the fate of the Whitlam and Howard governments. The increasingly shambolic Leftist reform agenda of the Whitlam years was seen to be too much for the electorate, while the fate of the Howard government was seemingly sealed by shifting too far to the Right in its approach to industrial relations. This is an intriguing theme, which, as the Whitlam and Howard parallels attest, continues to be raised whenever governments are thrown out rather than nudged out. But discussion rarely approaches the matter from the other direction: what is actually involved in sticking close to the political centre?