Part 1: The Legitimation of Authoritarian Domination: Dispositions to Obey and Constellation of Interests
1. Desire for normality, normative processes and power of normalization
2. Believing and getting others to believe: the subjective motives of legitimacy
3. Desire for the state and control dispositifs
4. Modernity and technocratization
Part 2: The ‘Complications’ of Domination: A Critique of the Problematics of Intentionality
5. Neither ‘collaborators’ nor ‘opponents’: Economic Actors caught up in Different Logics of Action and in Random Sequences
6. Neither ‘Bribery’ nor ‘Compensation’: Unforeseen Configurations
7. No absolute control, but convergences and circumstantial opportunities
8. Neither Expression of Tolerance nor Instrument of Repression: Economic Laissez-faire as an Improvised Mode of Domination
9. Interpreting the Relations of Domination: The Plasticity of the Authoritarian
Exercise of Power
10. Conclusion
Béatrice Hibou is CNRS Director of Research at CERI-Sciences Po, France. Her comparative research in political economy explores, from a Weberian perspective and a Foucaultian conception of power, the political significance of economic reform, state trajectories and the exercise of domination, based on cases from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and Europe. Her major publications include The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era (2015), The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (2011), and Privatizing the State (ed., 2004).
Rereading Marx, Weber, Gramsci and, more recently, Bourdieu and Foucault, Béatrice Hibou tackles one of the core questions of political and social theory: state domination. Combining comparative analyses of everyday life and economics, she highlights the arrangements, understandings and practices that make domination conceivable, bearable, and even acceptable or reassuring. Domination is all the more insidious and painless it often refers to the question of a desire of state. To carry out this demonstration, Hibou examines authoritarian or totalitarian situations —especially comparing the paradigmatic European cases of fascism, Nazism and Soviet socialism and those of contemporary China or North and Sub-Saharan Africa—which also allows us to grasp what domination is in the contemporary democratic framework. Hibou provides the reader with the necessary tools to develop a renewed critique of the downward political slide in the contemporary city.