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Critical Dialogue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2008

Anna Marie Smith
Affiliation:
Cornell University

Extract

In her timely and provocative book, Kathleen Arnold examines the super-exploitation and disenfranchisement of the “new working class”—low-income immigrants, African Americans, and women workers—and utilizes these phenomena as a catalyst for sharpening our critical understanding of American governance in our globalizing conditions. She contends that the neoliberal state is deploying deregulation and massive policing interventions simultaneously. The latter range from the exposure of welfare mothers to the rigors of workfare to the war on drugs, post-9/11 domestic security operations, mean-spirited attacks on the homeless, and the crackdown on illegal immigration. Arnold proposes a sobering diagnosis that is loosely based upon Giorgio Agamben's theory of bare life: As the state operates outside the law on a frequent and even systematic basis to reduce these target groups to a subhuman status, we are witnessing the triumph of prerogative power in American society today.

Type
Critical Dialogue
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2008

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