Confrontations and Intersections in the Definitions of Government, Individual and Power

Abstract

This paper aims to promote dialogue between different theoretical productions that address the issue of Government, power and new subjectivities in current societies. This debate arises within the framework or big social and political transformations from the late 19th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, which question the classic notions of the theory of Government and of political theory. Given the proliferation of texts that address this debate from different approaches and disciplines, a non-exhaustive, yet representative corpus was selected of a few of the most influential currents: sociology of risk, the bio-political approach, and what we have called the globalization theoreticians. A comparative analysis will be made of the texts that make up the corpus, based on the globalization, Government, power and individual categories, the last one of which includes the identity formation processes. It is concluded that the current world order is not manifested as a direct continuity of modern capitalism, but that it implies a break with it, and that it contains a new structure and dynamics within. This situation translates into the need to redefine or build new categories with a heuristic potentiality to make the current situation intelligible and to suggest transforming strategies.