Imagining The State

Mark Neocleous

ISBN 10: 0335203515 / ISBN 13: 9780335203512

Published by Open University Press 2003-01-09, 2003

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-IUK-9780335203512

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Imagining The State
• Publisher: Open University Press 2003-01-09
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0335203515
• ISBN 13: 9780335203512
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

“This is an excellent study… a valuable asset for anyone teaching or studying political theory or political sociology.” Network

"Mark Neocleous offers a contemporary understanding of the modern state through the unusual medium of its body, mind and personality, and through the space it occupies in the social world. It's a work that not only draws upon our existing imagination of the state, but also feeds it." Professor Robert Fine

*What is the connection between Ronald Reagan's bottom and the King's head?
*Why are weather maps profoundly ideological?
*How do corporations get away with murder?
*Who are the scum of the earth?

In this book Mark Neocleous explores such questions through a critique of what he describes as the statist political imaginary. Unpicking this imaginary while also avoiding traditional approaches to state power, the book examines the way that the state has been imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home. Around these themes and through an engagement with the work of a diverse range of writers, Neocleous weaves a set of arguments concerning the three icons of the political imagination - the political collective, the sovereign agency and the enemy figure. From these arguments he draws out some telling connections between the role of the state in fabricating order, the social and juridical power of capital, and the relation between fascism and bourgeois ideology.

About the Author

Mark Neocleous is based at Brunel University.