ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: War Today and the Primacy of the Economy
Author: Nishitani Osamu
This paper investigates a particular regime of understanding the human world, represented by the rise of evolutionism around the middle of the 19th Century. Evolutionism was born at the convergent point of two contemporary sciences: i.e., economics and biology. It enabled the structural grasp of human world with the special terms of these disciplines. Both of these disciplines deal with human beings as countable, substitutable and homogeneous units either in the micro or the macro level, and they do not care much about heterogeneous and concrete existences, different from each other. The regime supported by these disciplines can dispense with politics. So it leads the concepts of society and governmentality to a particular direction of ‘management’. The term ‘management’ is said to be originally made use of in some military connection and it promotes administration or ‘governmentality without politics’ in the ‘liberal system without freedom’. This paper owes ideas to and looks into the writings of M. Foucault at the end of 1970s and those of his contemporary of P. Legendre, historian of law and psychoanalyst. Surprisingly, what they have revealed has much in common with the contribution of K. Polanyi in the field of critics of economics.
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