Critiquing the Educational Present: The (limited) usefulness to educational research of the Foucauldian approach to governmentality

The claim may be made that the Foucauldian analytics of power, in its detailed attention to the question of how modern societies are rendered governable, has superseded classical and radical analyses. This paper points to problems occasioned by Foucauldian governmentality's reliance on Foucault's flawed conception of the subject. These problems undermine the ambition of this style of research to outline possibilities for political intervention. It is suggested that educational critique can draw usefully on the scrupulous specificity of Foucauldian governmental analysis but that only a critique firmly based in a normative framework aligned to an idea of democratic sociality can aspire to political effectiveness.