Summary
This paper traces the emergence and demise of the Third Way using Foucault's thought to investigate the governmentality of Third Way politics in terms of its techniques of governing focusing on the construction of the citizen-consumer, the social market, and the reform of public services, especially in the context of Tony Blair's New Labor administration in the UK. On this basis the paper makes some broad comments about education, power and freedom.
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Extract
Education, Power and Freedom: Third Way Governmentality, Citizen-Consumers and the Social Market
1. Introduction
Politics is rarely stable or predictable even within democratic systems and elections easily make fools of even the most prudent social scientists. In the May 2005 British parliamentary elections Tony Blair became the first Labor leader ever to secure a consecutive third term - if by a much slimmer majority1 - and only the second leader of any British party to do so since 1900. When he led Labor to power in 1997 he became the youngest prime minister since William Pitt the younger in 1783. By contrast, Gerhard Schröder, German Chancellor from 1998 to 2005 and perhaps the strongest European Third Way ally of Blair, failed to win an outright majority in the 2005 September elections, and eventually agreed to cede the chancellorship to Angela Merkel, who as chairwoman of the CDU, became the first woman to lead Germany since it became a modern nation sate in 1871. These events indicated a shift in the center of political gravity away from the prospect of social democratic politics in Europe once again towards a new conservatism. Blair ceded power to Gordon Brown who after finally becoming Prime Minister was ousted by a coalition government in 2010 led by the Conservatives in power with the Liberal Democrats who faced a huge deficit and immediately instogated an austerity budget aimed at overcoming UK's structural problems in five years.Looking back on a hundred years of European socialism after the founding of the Second International, Donald Sassoon (1997: 733) in his kaleidoscopic survey describes "the new revisionism" that took hold after the end of the first experiment in "actually existing socialism" as one that depended upon the idea that "capitalism would not be destroyed be a self-generated crisis, or by a revolution, or by the steady expansion of public property." Rather the ne...See the full content of this document
(Copyright 2011)
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