French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment

In this study of space and power and knowledge in France from the 1830s through the 1930s, Rabinow uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to examine how social environment was perceived and described. Ranging from epidemiology to the layout of colonial cities, he shows how modernity was revealed in urban planning, architecture, health and welfare administration, and social legislation. The Crisis Of Representations: From Man To Milieux -- Modern Elements: Reasons And Histories -- Experiments In Social Paternalism -- New Elites: From The Moral To The Social -- Milieux: Pathos And Pacification -- From Moralism To Welfare -- Modern French Urbanism -- Specific Intellectuals: Perfecting The Instruments -- Techno-cosmopolitanism: Governing Morocco -- Middling Modernism: The Socio-technical Envirionment. Paul Rabinow. Originally Published: Cambridge, Mass. : Mit Press, C1989. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [398]-427) And Indexes. This study of power/knowledge in France, from the 1830s through the 1930s, uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to examine how the social environment was described. It aims to show how modernity was revealed in urban planning, architecture, and social legislation. In a treatise written in 1682, a certain Alexandre Le Maitre, a French Protestant engineer working for the Prussians, proposed a particularly crystalline condensation of the elements of classical space.