Chapter 4 extends the analysis of playgrounds inchapter 3, using contemporary public playgrounds andcommercial play-centres as a vantage point on theframing of play as a right which is codified byArticle 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of theChild. Anchoring the genealogical approach inchapter 3 to a specific context (a National PlayPolicy in the Republic of Ireland), this chaptertakes up a critical perspective on the broaderpolicy landscape, which in Ireland as elsewhere hasbeen shaped by an ongoing process ofneoliberalisation. It is this context that is shownto tension the relation between the right to playand the freedom to pay (to play).

Chapter 2 explores how childhood has become a means ofprojecting the present into the future and of makingsuch imagined futures practical and technical.Drawing from Agamben’s analysis of the modern‘anthropological machine’, the chapter presentschildhood as a threshold spanning animal/human,nature/culture and voice/language, tracking thisthrough a textual analysis of Rousseau, J. S. Mill,G. Stanley Hall, James Sully and Phillip Pettit.This in turn serves as the historical backdrop usedin subsequent chapters, specifically in terms ofexamining how biosocial power is deployed in theform of playgrounds, children’s citizenship andchildren’s health initiatives, as a way ofpreventing or ameliorating disadvantage, and asentrepreneurship education.

This chapter discusses a prominent secular example of ethical codes, the early modern manuals of civil behaviour made famous by Norbert Elias’s notion of a ‘civilising process’ on the road to modernity. Focusing on early modern England, it describes how the new ideal of civility was taught primarily as a series of printed instructions on how those aspiring to gentility should conduct themselves. These rules were set out as precepts to be rigorously followed, but were not enforced by any authority. Rather they were upheld partly by social pressure and the emotions it triggered (embarrassment, shame, a sense of exclusion), partly by the voluntary actions of individuals who chose these modes of conduct for themselves and for their children. In this pedagogical and aspirational aspect, codes of civility fit well the Foucauldian concept of the care of the self. The growing prominence of civility facilitated a major shift in eighteenth-century English society: the decreasing use of legal means to regulate personal behaviour and an increasing emphasis on internal restraints inculcated through education and self-discipline. Ideas of civility meshed with the disciplinary activities of ecclesiastical and secular courts as they sought to raise standards of personal (especially sexual) morality and restrain behaviour among neighbours, at a time when political and religious divisions were undermining the ecclesiastical courts as agents of everyday social discipline.

This chapter deals with the Islamic ‘madhhab-law tradition’ of the Abbasid and Mamluk periods in the Near East. The madhhabs were (and are) a plurality of legitimate schools of legal thought, reflecting the contingent nature of extrapolating rules from their divinely inspired sources. Such pluralism leads to a classic problem of legalism more generally: if there are different legitimate opinions as to the right course of action, then to what extent does one’s own conviction of rectitude morally trump that of other sources of authority? Drawing on a previously unpublished eleventh-century Arabic text, the chapter describes the development of a casuistry of such dilemmas of conscience for legal practitioners, focusing on the example of divorce. What if, for example, a jurist divorced his wife using a formula whose legal effect is disputed, and she then took him to law? If the judge then ruled the divorce null according to one recognised position, but the divorcing jurist thought himself divorced according to another, should the jurist accept the judge’s verdict and return to married life, or refuse to do so as sinful? The Islamic legal tradition acknowledged, even celebrated this multiplicity of legitimate rules and the dispute that it inevitably entailed. Pluralism was to be celebrated in the spirit of scholarly freedom and honesty, but also conquered for the sake of solid rules that people could apply. This ambiguity provided the space for jurists to maintain their own discretion and personal conscience in the context of an increasingly rule-dense tradition.

Chapter 3 commences the task of staging encounters withbiosocial power in the form of social practices. Thechapter begins by reviewing Norbert Elias’s TheCivilising Process, as well as more recent Eliasianperspectives on a ‘de-civilising’ process, usingthis literature as an interpretative lens incommencing a genealogy of playgrounds. Examined as abiosocial technology, the playground is shown tooriginate as a pedagogical practice that (to borrowfrom governmentality theory) attempted to act uponthe actions of children through a blend of carefullycalibrated techniques, bounded space andpurpose-built equipment, the strategic objective ofwhich was to prefigure the future. The empiricalfocus of the chapter is early nineteenth centuryBritain and Progressive Era America.

Chapter 7 examines how ‘disadvantage’ has become apervasive way of framing inequality, tracking thisfrom the United States during the 1960s, where thetheme of cultural deprivation gave rise to a seriesof experiments in compensatory education, through tothe present, showing how the neuroliberal figuringof disadvantage sustains neoliberal enterpriseculture. To this end the chapter explores howneuroliberalism is imbricated inphilanthrocapitalism and the ‘first three years’movement, the core message being that ‘the firstthree years last forever’, and that as a society weeither ‘pay now or pay later’. In this scenario,biosocial power aims to reduce the future costs ofcrime, welfare dependency and teenage pregnancy byoptimising the ‘brain architecture’ of children.

Chapter 1 locates the book within the interdisciplinaryfield of childhood studies. It provides an initialoutline of biosocial power and opens out thequestion of how childhood has been, and continues tobe, figured in the form of normative fictions.Biosocial power is presented as a specific zone ofintensity within the more encompassing arena ofbiopower and biopolitics, which operates at thethreshold of zoē (bare life) and bios (properlypolitical life). Normative fictions are figurationsof power/knowledge that enclose ways of seeing,thinking and doing while foreclosing upon orsubduing other possible worlds. The chapter bringsthese core concepts together through the use ofexamples from film and philosophy, and it concludeswith a short overview of the book as a whole.

In this afterword, James Laidlaw comments on the arguments of the book from his perspective as an ethnographer of Jainism – an eminently ruly ethical tradition – and as one of the leading figures in the recent anthropology of ethics. He reiterates the arguments of Bernard Williams and Michel Foucault that modern Western moral thought has become unhealthily concentrated on law-like obligation. Humanity’s range of moral experience is far wider, as the anthropology of ethics has sought to demonstrate. And yet, that should not lead us to neglect the rich variety of ways in which rules, of various kinds, form an often crucial part of many ethics and many projects of an ethical self, as he details.

Chapter 6 presents a genealogy of reformatory educationand public hygiene, focusing on how ‘health’ hascome to traverse medical and moral conceptions ofchildhood, and how the figure of the healthy child –once configured as a ‘national asset’ – has sincebecome a form of ‘capital investment’. Tracking thisthrough the datafication of childhood, the coreconcern is how neoliberal enterprise culture hasbecome a Procrustean bed, with biosocial power doingthe work of fashioning life by empowering andsupporting children in accordance with prescribed‘outcomes’. The chapter concludes by taking up acritical perspective on the issue of obesity,examining the battle against childhood obesity asone of the ways in which neoliberal enterpriseculture is immunised.

Chapter 8 stages an encounter with biosocial power inthe form of entrepreneurship education, using thehistory of Junior Achievement Worldwide as a pointof departure in examining how entrepreneurshipeducation has become a ‘method’ aimed at cultivating‘non-cognitive entrepreneurial competencies’ inschool-going children from primary educationonwards, and how this prefigures the future as an‘enterprise culture’. Focusing on the relationbetween the normative fiction of an ‘entrepreneurialmindset’ and the material conditions underpinning‘necessity entrepreneurship’, the chapter exploreshow ‘disadvantage’ has become the engine ofenterprise and innovation. In the context of anenterprise culture, equal inequality becomes ahorizon of opportunity.

This chapter takes up a famous argument by historian John Bossy that European approaches to sin changed between the medieval and early modern period from a set of social virtues and vices to a legalistic list of prohibitions. At the heart of this shift lay the introduction of the Ten Commandments as the norm for the evaluation of moral action and conscience in confession. Where medieval confessors conceptualised human action according to the seven vices, early modern confessors examined the Ten Commandments. Not least in the case of the First Commandment that is the focus of the chapter, these rules presented problems both of interpretation and application. If a Christian understanding of the First Commandment was supposed to instil the love of God, a measure of virtue ethics would be needed. The chapter shows how Catholic moral theologians struggled with the new rule-based logic in the confessional and, despite its emphasis on individual religious obedience, retained the community and social virtues as horizons for its understanding. In trying to theorise the Decalogue’s application, they produced an ever-multiplying literature of explanations. Later commentary would judge this as sterile argumentation within an ivory tower, but this is to forget its initial impetus, which was to train theologians to examine and correct sin. The confrontation of the Ten Commandments with confessional practice thus helped foster the early modern casuistry that has become a quintessential case of ethical rule density, but also reminds us of the inextricable nature of rules and virtue.

This chapter discusses the relationship between moral rules and virtue ethics as it appears in ancient Roman exempla. Exempla – heroic tales about their ancestors – were for Romans an important resource for moral learning and development. They most often illustrated, in heightened form, the tension between different values and obligations that moral life in practice entails: the patriotic Horatius killed his sister in a fit of rage at seeing her grief at the death of her fiancé, with whom Rome was then at war; the general Manlius Torquatus executed his son for disobeying his orders in bravely winning a challenge to single combat from a hostile warrior. Here rules, virtues and cases should be seen as complementary rather than contrary genres of moral thought. On the one hand, exempla seem to turn on the implicit moral imperatives generated by the virtues and vices of virtue ethics. On the other, they engage with the multiple rules of ancient Rome’s plurality of ethical systems, from the mos maiorum, ‘the custom of the ancestors’, to Roman law. Exempla often depict extreme scenarios based on agonising conflicts of conscience between different such obligations. The chapter argues that they were used as case studies for thinking through the complexities of the real-world application of rules. Exempla were thus not defined against a rule-based culture, but provided a space for engaging with it.