Habit's Pathways: Repetition, Power, Conduct [Hardcover]

Habit has long preoccupied a wide range of theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. InHabit’s PathwaysTony Bennett explores the political consequences of the varied ways in which habit’s repetitions have been acted on to guide or direct conduct. Bennett considers habit’s uses and effects across the monastic regimens of medieval Europe, in plantation slavery and the factory system, through colonial forms of rule, and within a range of medicalized pathologies. He brings these episodes in habit’s political histories to bear on contemporary debates ranging from its role in relation to the politics of white supremacy to the digital harvesting of habits in practices of algorithmic governance. Throughout, Bennett tracks how habit’s repetitions have been articulated differently across divisions of class, race, and gender, demonstrating that although habit serves as an apparatus for achieving success, self-fulfillment, and freedom for the powerful, it has simultaneously served as a means of control over women, racialized peoples, and subordinate classes.USTony Bennett offers a sweeping political history of habit and its use to govern conduct across a range of past and contemporary regimes of power.Tony Bennett is Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and Honorary Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. Among his many books areMaking Culture, Changing Societyand, as coauthor,Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government.“Habit’s Pathwaysmakes a valuable contribution to discussions and theories of habit in its assemblage and detailed analysis of all the important thinkers on the subject, from Augustine, Kant, and Dewey to Deleuze, Foucault, and Malabou, devising what surely must be the new standard account of habit in contemporary Western thought. lÓA