Invisible Control

Part two

Six thinkers

Three came from the left, one joined the Nazi party, and the others refuse the axis entirely. They converge anyway, which is the strongest reason to treat the finding as structural rather than partisan.

  1. 01Pierre Bourdieu1930 to 2002 / FranceThe school presents itself as a neutral machine that rewards talent, and in fact rewards advantages transmitted at home, converting inherited privilege into certified merit.
  2. 02Antonio Gramsci1891 to 1937 / ItalyA ruling group stays in power mainly by consent rather than by force, because its own interests have been absorbed by everyone else as ordinary common sense.
  3. 03Carl Schmitt1888 to 1985 / GermanyWhoever can declare an emergency and suspend the normal rules is the one actually in charge, whatever the constitution says about where power sits.
  4. 04Michel Foucault1926 to 1984 / FrancePower is not mainly the state forbidding things from above. It is a continuous, mundane production of norms, knowledge and selves, and it works best where it looks like ordinary competence.
  5. 05Ivan Illich1926 to 2002 / Austria and MexicoInstitutions that present themselves as our benefactors produce, past a certain size, the opposite of what they promise, while making us grateful for it and incapable without them.
  6. 06Giorgio Agambenborn 1942 / ItalyThe emergency suspension of normal law has stopped being an exception and become the ordinary technique of modern government, and what it governs is human beings reduced to biological life.