The Political Anatomy of Domination, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017
The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy Series

Rereading Marx, Weber, Gramsci and, more recently, 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, even acceptable or reassuring. To carry out this demonstration, Hibou examines authoritarian situations?especially comparing the paradigmatic European cases of fascism, Nazism and Soviet socialism and those of contemporary China or North and Sub-Saharan Africa.

1. Desire for normality, normative processes and power of normalization

2. Believing and getting others to believe: the subjective motives of legitimacy

4. Modernity and technocratization

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