Professor Nikolas Rose

Nikolas Rose is the James Martin White Professor of Sociology, and the Director of the LSE's BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, founded in 2003. He joined LSE in 2002, and from 2002 to 2006 he was Convenor of the Department of Sociology. He was previously Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, where he had been Head of the Department of Sociology, Pro-Warden for Research and Head of the Goldsmiths Centre for Urban and Community Research and Director of a major evaluation of urban regeneration in South East London. He was originally trained as a biologist before switching to psychology and then to sociology. In 1989, he founded the History of the Present Research Network, an international network of researchers whose work was influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and together with Paul Rabinow, he recently edited the Fourth Volume of Michel Foucault's Essential Works. From 1996 to 2004 he was managing editor of Economy and Society, one of Britain's leading scholarly interdisciplinary journals of social sciences. He edits a Cambridge University Press book series on Society and the Life Sciences (with Professor Paul Rabinow of University of California, Berkeley), and is co-editor (with Professor Anne Harrington of Harvard University) of BioSocieties: an interdisciplinary journal for social studies of neuroscience, genomics and the life sciences published for the LSE by CUP from 2006.

Nikolas Rose has published widely on the social and political history of the human sciences, on the genealogy of subjectivity, on the history of empirical thought in sociology, and on changing rationalities and techniques of political power, and he has also published in law and criminology. His books include The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869-1939 (Routledge, 1984), Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self  (Routledge, 1989, Second Edition, Free Association Press, 1999), Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and The Politics of Life Itself : Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2006). His work has been translated into Swedish, Finnish, Danish, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Romanian, Portuguese and Spanish.

His current research concerns biological and genetic psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience, and its social, ethical, cultural and legal implications. This is the topic of a three year ESRC funded Professorial Research Fellowship and a linked programme of research. The research programme focuses on the political, social, legal and economic implications of recent developments in the brain sciences and neurotechnologies, and the concomitant changes in ideas about normality and abnormality, in the distinction between cure and enhancement, and in the borderlines between illness and health. In particular, the research examines the emergence of novel ways for the government of human mental life and conduct and their consequences.

Selected publications

Sole authored books

The Politics of Life Itself, Princeton University Press (forthcoming 2006)

Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge University Press (1999)

Governing the Soul (Second edition with new Preface and Afterword), Free Associations Books (1999)

Inventing Our Selves, Cambridge University Press (1996)

The Psychological Complex, Routledge (1985)

Co-edited books 

Foucault and Political Reason, UCL Press (1996) with Andrew Barry and Thomas Osborne

The Power of Psychiatry, Polity (1986) with Peter Miller

Recent chapters in edited collections

‘Writing the History of the Present’, in Jonathan Joseph, ed., Social Theory: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005 (with Andrew Barry and Thomas Osborne) (Reprint of selections from Introduction to Foucault and Political Reason, 1996.)

Biological Citizenship, in Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, eds., Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, pp. 439-463. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005 (with Carlos Novas)

Introduction to The Essential Foucault : Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, New York: New Press, 2004 (with Paul Rabinow)

Becoming Neurochemical Selves, in Nico Stehr, ed. Biotechnology, Commerce And Civil Society, Transaction Press, 2004

The neurochemical self and its anomalies, in R. Ericson, ed, Risk and Morality, pp. 407-437. University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Power and psychological techniques, in Y. Bates and R. House, eds. Ethically Challenged Professions, pp. 27-46. Ross-on-Wye:  PCCS books, 2003.

Society, madness, and control, in A. Buchanan, ed., The Care of the Mentally Disordered Offender in the Community, pp. 3-25, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2001)

At Risk of Madness, in T. Baker and J. Simon, Embracing Risk, pp. 209-237, Chicago: Chicago University Press (2001)

Community, Citizenship and 'The Third Way', in D. Meredyth and J. Minson, eds., Citizenship and Cultural Policy, London, Sage (2000)

Governing Cities, Governing Citizens, in E. Isin, ed., Democracy, Citizenship and the City: Rights to the Global City, pp. 95-109, Routledge (2000)

Government and control, In D. Garland and C. Sparks, eds., Criminology and Social Theory, pp. 183-208, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2000)

Assembling the modern self, in R. Porter, ed., The History of the Self, pp. 224-248, London, Routledge (1996)

Governing 'advanced' liberal democracies, in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose, eds., Foucault and Political Reason, pp. 37-64, London, UCL Press (1996)

Identity, Genealogy, History, in S. Hall and P. du Gay., eds., Questions of Cultural Identity, pp. 128-151, London, Sage (1996)

Authority and the genealogy of subjectivity, in P. Heelas, S. Lash and P. Morris, eds., Detraditionalization: Critical reflections on authority and identity, pp.294-327, Oxford, Blackwell (1996)

Spatial Phenomenotechnics: Making space with Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2004, 22: 209-228 (Thomas Osborne).

Neurochemical selves, Society, November/December 2003, 41, 1, 46-59.

'Kontroll', Fronesis, 2003, Nr. 14-15, 82-101.

The politics of life itself, Theory, Culture and Society (2001), 18(6): 1-30.

Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual, Economy and Society Special Issue on configurations of risk (2000), 29 (4): 484-513. (with Carlos Novas).

The biology of culpability: pathological identities in a biological culture, Theoretical Criminology (2000), 4, 1, 5-34.

Do the social sciences create phenomena: the case of public opinion research, British Journal of Sociology (1999), 50, 3, 367-396. (with Thomas Osborne)

Mobilising the consumer: assembling the subject of consumption, Theory, Culture and Society (1997), 14, 1, 1-36 (with P. Miller).

The death of the social? Refiguring the territory of government, Economy and Society (1996), 25, 3, 327-356

Governing at a Distance: Some Modest Thoughts on Information Technology, Democracy and Security, Part of the i-Studio 5 Seminars - series two (18 March 2003).

Political Power Beyond The State: Problematics of Government, British Journal of Sociology (1992), 43(2): 172-205.

Power and Subjectivity: Critical History and Psychology 

Power in Therapy: Techne and Ethos

Biopower today (with Paul Rabinow), Vital Politics: Health, Medicine and Bioeconomics into the Twenty First Century, London School of Economics, 5-7 September 2003.

Fetishism and ideology: a review of theoretical problems, Ideology and Consciousness, 1977, 2, 27 - 56.

The psychological complex: mental measurement and social administration, Ideology and Consciousness, 1979, 5, 5 - 68

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