The Rule of Freedom

Liberalism and the Modern City

Patrick Joyce

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781844673902
• eBook ISBN: 9781789608496
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The liberal governance of the nineteenth-century state and city depended on the "rule of freedom." As a form of rule it relied on the production of certain kinds of citizens and patterns of social life, which in turn depended on transforming both the material form of the city (its layout, architecture, infrastructure) and the ways it was inhabited and imagined by its leaders, citizens and custodians.

Focusing mainly on London and Manchester, but with reference also to Glasgow, Dublin, Paris, Vienna, colonial India, and even contemporary Los Angeles, Patrick Joyce creatively and originally develops Foucauldian approaches to historiography to reflect on the nature of modern liberal society. His consideration of such "artifacts" as maps and censuses, sewers and markets, public libraries and parks, and of civic governments and city planning, are intertwined with theoretical interpretations to examine both the impersonal, often invisible forms of social direction and control built into the infrastructure of modern life and the ways in which these mechanisms shape cultural and social life and engender popular resistance.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Maps, Numbers and the City: Knowing the Governed
• 2. The Water and the Blood of the City: Naturalising the Governed
• 3. The Light of Publicity: Making Liberal Community
• 4. City Past and City Present: Building the Liberal City
• 5. The Republic of the Streets: Knowing and Moving in the City
• 6. Modern Freedom: Comparisons and Conclusion
• Index