Nikolas Rose

University College London | UCL · Institute of Advanced Studies

Are we humans destined to become ‘posthuman’? In this paper, we question the claims of posthumanism, accepting some of its broader insights whilst proposing a more empirically and ethically appropriate ‘vitalist’ response. We argue that despite recent changes in styles of thought that question the uniqueness of ‘the human’, and despite novel techno...

In this paper, we examine a number of approaches that propose new models for psychiatric theory and practices: in the way that they incorporate ‘social’ dimensions, in the way they involve ‘communities’ in treatment, in the ways that they engage mental health service users, and in the ways that they try to shift the power relations within the psych...

El año 2019, en el Centro Cultural de la Ciencia de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires se desarrolló un evento interdisciplinario titulado “Usos políticos de la evidencia neurocientífica sobre pobreza. Un encuentro de reflexión y debate”. Allí realizó una presentación el destacado sociólogo Nikolas Rose centrada en la revisión e historización de ci...

En tiempos de profundas crisis entrelazadas (ecológica, desigualdades, migratoria, geopolítica…), este libro se interroga por las posibilidades de una educación que se co-construya en común y para (el bien) común. La escuela y todas las educaciones son clave para la imaginación y la construcción de otras realidades, más allá de las lógicas y las “s...

In this article, we argue that the rapid rise in drug overdose deaths in America is a tragedy that draws attention to fundamental conceptual and experimental problems in addiction science that have significant human consequences. Despite enormous economic investment, political support and claims to have revolutionised addiction medicine, neurobiolo...

In this article we interrogate the claim that there is an opioid crisis: a dramatic rise in drug overdose fatalities in the United States over the past two decades that is also spreading to other countries. The usual argument is that this crisis is largely explained by errant prescription practices leading to an oversupply of opioids, leading to ad...

This interview was carried out in November 2015, during a visit made by Nikolas Rose to Chile in the context of the research program “Towards a genealogy of pharmacological power”, led by Ricardo Camargo. In this conversation, Nikolas Rose addresses his own academic history, from his early research as a biologist to the most recent endeavors relate...

In this paper I suggest that we might understand some features of contemporary populism by reworking the concept of ‘authoritarian populism’ first proposed by Stuart Hall in his analysis of ‘Thatcherism’. Following a brief review of my earlier analytics of ‘governing through freedom’, I suggest that while the political movements identified by the n...

China's internal rural-urban migrants experience social exclusion that may have significant mental health implications. This has historically been exacerbated by the hukou system. Echoing recent calls for interdisciplinary research on the interdependencies of urbanization and mental health, this review examines evidence of rural-urban migrants' men...

The human body was made legible long ago. But what of the human mind? Is it possible to ‘read’ the mind, for one human being to know what another is thinking or feeling, their beliefs and intentions. And if I can read your mind, how about others – could our authorities, in the criminal justice system or the security services? Some developments in c...

Artykuł ten analizuje współczesną biopolitykę w świetle często cytowanej wskazówki Michela Foucaulta, że dzisiejsza polityka koncentruje się na „życiu samym”. Sugeruje on, że ostatnie osiągnięcia w naukach o życiu, biomedycynie i biotechnologii mogą być z pożytkiem analizowane w odniesieniu do trzech aspektów. Pierwszy z nich dotyczy logiki kontrol...

Psychiatry is in one of its regular crises. It is a crisis of its diagnostic systems despite - perhaps because - of the recurrent claims about the extent of diagnosable 'brain disorders'. It is a crisis of its explanatory systems despite - perhaps because - of its current wager on the brain as the ultimate locus for explanations of mental disorders...

The contemporary global health agenda has shifted emphasis from mapping disease patterns to calculating disease burden in efforts to gauge ‘the state of world health’. In this paper, we account for this shift by showing how a novel epidemiological style of thought emerged in the closing decades of the twentieth century. As is well known, the compil...

Vivemos, de acordo com alguns, no século da biologia, onde agora entendemos a nós mesmos em formas radicalmente novas, visto que os conhecimentos da ciência genômica e neurociência tornaram acessíveis os funcionamentos de nossos corpos e nossas mentes para novos tipos de conhecimento e intervenção. Uma nova figura do humano e do social está tomando...

Focusing on the Human Brain Project, I discuss some social and ethical challenges raised by such programs of research: the possibility of a unified knowledge of "the brain," balancing privacy and the public good, dilemmas of "dual use," brain-computer interfaces, and "responsible research and innovation" in governance of emerging technologies.

This article considers how the brain has become an object and target for governing human beings. How, and to what extent, has governing the conduct of human beings come to require, presuppose and utilize a knowledge of the human brain? How, and with what consequences, are so many aspects of human existence coming to be problematized in terms of the...

The 1960s were in some ways the period during which there was a lot of stirring in the area of the brain sciences. W. A. R (Marshall et al., 1996, p. 287). L 'approche historique des neurosciences a été pour l'essentiel anachronique et triomphaliste. À quelques exceptions (par ex. Shepherd, 2010 ; Swazey, 1975), la naissance des neuroscien...

Advanced liberal democracies are currently witnessing a bewildering variety of developments in regimes of control. These range from demands for execution or preventive detention of implacably dangerous or risky individuals—sexual predators, paedophiles, persistent violent offenders—to the development of dispersed, designed in-control regimes for th...

This report looks at the possible benefits and unintended consequences of intervening in the brain, and sets out an ethical framework to guide the practices of those involved in development, regulation, use and promotion of novel neurotechnologies. - See more at: http://nuffieldbioethics.org/project/neurotechnology/#sthash.VEQ6xFkd.dpuf

One of the features of advanced life sciences research in recent years has been its internationalisation, with countries such as China and South Korea considered 'emerging biotech' locations. As a result, cross-continental collaborations are becoming common generating moves towards ethical and legal standardisation under the rubric of 'global bioet...

A new paradigm for medical care is emerging which terms itself “personalized medicine”. Advocates claim that medical treatment can now be targeted on the specific characteristics of each individual, using genetic profiling to identify the particular nature of the condition, and to tailor treatments for each person. Further, they argue, the focus of...

Risk assessment has assumed increasing salience in mental health care in a number of countries. The frequency of serious violent incidents perpetrated by people with a mental illness is an insufficient explanation. Understandings of mental illness and of the role of those charged with their care (or control) play a key role. "Moral outrage", associ...

This chapter examines the neuromolecular and plastic brain. Ideas about plasticity and the openness of brains to environment influences, from initial evidence about nerve development, through the recognition that synaptic plasticity was the very basis of learning and memory, to evidence about the influence of environment on gene expression and the...

This chapter focuses on the question of diagnosis of psychiatric disorders and examines the relationship between neuroscience and psychiatry from this perspective. Despite the penetrating gaze of neuroscience, which has opened up the brain to vision in so many ways, psychiatric classification remains superficial. This neuromolecular vision seems in...

This chapter examines the arguments that claim that human antisocial behavior—notably impulsivity, aggression, and related forms of criminal conduct—have neurobiological roots. While neurobiological evidence from genomics or functional brain imaging is likely to have limited traction in the criminal courtroom itself, a new diagram is nonetheless em...

The brain sciences are influencing our understanding of human behavior as never before, from neuropsychiatry and neuroeconomics to neurotheology and neuroaesthetics. Many now believe that the brain is what makes us human, and it seems that neuroscientists are poised to become the new experts in the management of human conduct. This book describes t...

This chapter explores the neurobiological self. It argues that the emerging neuroscientific understandings of selfhood are unlikely to efface modern human beings' understanding of themselves as persons equipped with a deep interior world of mental states that have a causal relation to their action. Rather, they are likely to add a neurobiological d...

This chapter explores the diverse attempts to render “mind” thinkable by means of images. Advances in clinical medicine from the nineteenth century onward went hand in hand with the penetration of the gaze of the doctor into depths of the body itself. There are now many examples of analogous advances linked to the structural imaging of the brain—in...

This concluding chapter suggests that for the human sciences, there is nothing to fear in the rise to prominence of neurobiological attempt to understand and account for human behavior. It is important to point out the many weaknesses in the experimental setups and procedures, for example, in the uses of animal models and in the interpretations of...

This chapter looks at the social brain hypothesis. The term social brain has come to stand for the argument that the human brain, and indeed that of some other animals, is specialized for a collective form of life. One part of this argument is evolutionary: that the size and complexity of the brains of primates, including humans, are related to the...

This chapter discusses the use of animals to explore issues relating to human cognition, emotion, volition, and their pathologies. Researchers who use animal models in their work point to similarities in the genomes of the two species, in the structure of mouse and human brain, in patterns of brain activation, in neural mechanisms at the cellular a...

The brain sciences are influencing our understanding of human behavior as never before, from neuropsychiatry and neuroeconomics to neurotheology and neuroaesthetics. Many now believe that the brain is what makes us human, and it seems that neuroscientists are poised to become the new experts in the management of human conduct. Neuro describes the k...

Introduction What kind of beings do we think we are? This may seem a philosophical question. In part it is, but it is far from abstract. It is at the core of the philosophies we live by. It goes to the heart of how we bring up our children, run our schools, organize our social policies, manage economic affairs, treat those who commit crimes or whom...

We live, according to some, in the century of biology, where we now understand ourselves in radically new ways as the insights of genomics and neuroscience have opened up the workings of our bodies and our minds to new kinds of knowledge and intervention. Is a new figure of the human, and of the social, taking shape in the 21st century? With what c...

In this article I reflecton the contemporary arguments for democratisation of science, in light of the work of the historian of the life sciences Ludwik Fleck. I explore some possible reasons for the current demands for ‘responsibility’ among scientific researchers, and briefly consider this in the context of the various arguments that have made a...

Este estudio revisa el desarrollo del análisis propuesto por Michel Foucault sobre el poder político en términos de gubernamentalidad, y esboza sus características principales. Se examina el despliegue de esta perspectiva, centrándose particularmente en cómo este enfoque genealógico del análisis de la conducta de todos y cada uno ha sido acogido y...

The race to build life from scratch inspires hyperbole on both sides. That may be warranted one day, say Claire Marris and Nikolas Rose, but not yet

The Oxford Textbook of Community Mental Health is the most comprehensive and authoritative review published in this field.

I denne artikel identificeres en række af de overvejelser, man må gøre sig, hvis man vil udforske det 21. århundredes biopolitik: en biopolitik, der med Foucaults ord stiller spørgsmål til “selve livet”. Tre angrebspunkter for en sådan forskning præsenteres: For det første må fokus rettes mod de seneste udviklinger indenfor “genetisk risiko-politik...

Over the past few decades, numerous initiatives have sought to engage members of the public in decisions concerning bioscience and biotechnologies as early as possible in the development of scientific research, based on the belief that such participation is in the public interest. What these initiatives hope to achieve, however, varies with the mot...

The article is the text of a lecture given at the Faculty of the Humanities, March 2001. It argues that one implication of recent advances in the sciences of life may be that the binary opposition of the normal and the pathological is put to question. Canguilheim's distinction between vital and social norms is challenged and superseded by a Foucaul...

The aim of this article is (1) to investigate the "neurosciences" as an object of study for historical and genealogical approaches and (2) to characterize what we identify as a particular "style of thought" that consolidated with the birth of this new thought community and that we term the "neuromolecular gaze." This article argues that while there...

This article argues that a new diagram is emerging in the criminal justice system as it encounters developments in the neurosciences. This does not take the form that concerns many "neuroethicists" -- it does not entail a challenge to doctrines of free will and the notion of the autonomous legal subject -- but is developing around the themes of sus...

This paper sets out an approach to the analysis of political power in terms of problematics of government. It argues against an overvaluation of the 'problem of the State' in political debate and social theory. A number of conceptual tools are suggested for the analysis of the many and varied alliances between political and other authorities that s...

This review surveys the development of Michel Foucault's analysis of political power in terms of governmentality and outlines its key characteristics. It examines the spread of this perspective, focusing in particular on how this genealogical approach to the analysis of the conduct of each and of all has been taken up and developed in the English-s...

The use of biomarkers to predict human behaviour and psychiatric disorders raises social and ethical issues, which must be resolved by collaborative efforts.

How should we understand the politics of security today? This article addresses this question from one particular perspective, that of 'biosecurity'. It examines contemporary strategies for managing biorisks in three European states: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. We suggest that the framing of threat and response differs, even within Euro...

For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of L...

Im Unterschied zu aktuellen Lektüren von Foucaults Gouvernementalität, die sich vor allem auf die Logik des Ökonomischen beziehen, werden in diesem Band die politischen Dimensionen seiner Theorie in den Vordergrund gerückt. Die Analyse der gegenwärtigen Sicherheitsgesellschaft dient als Ausgangspunkt für eine kritische Revision von Foucaults Machtt...

The intertwined genealogies of racialization and medicalization are mutating once more, with the much heralded arrival of personal genomics. A proliferation of commercial organizations now offer web-based services that, on the basis of an analysis of a DNA sample from a cheek swab and at the cost of a few hundred dollars, promise to scan millions o...

This paper describes the social role of psychology as it took shape across the 20th century, and argues that it was, in large part, this social vocation that provided the conditions for psychology establishing itself as an academic discipline. The development of psychology in this period was bound up with changes in the understanding and treatment...

Research programmes in the social sciences and elsewhere can be seen as ‘set-ups’ which combine inscription devices and thought styles. The history of inscription devices without consideration of changing and often discontinuous thought styles effectively takes the historical dimension out of the history of thought. Perhaps thought styles are actua...