Rereading Marx, Weber, Gramsci and, more recently, Foucault, Beatrice Hibou tackles one of the core questions of political and social theory: state domination. Combining comparative analyses of everyday life and economics, she highlights the arrangements, understandings and practices that make domination conceivable, bearable, even acceptable or reassuring. To carry out this demonstration, Hibou examines authoritarian situations--especially comparing the paradigmatic European cases of fascism, Nazism and Soviet socialism and those of contemporary China or North and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Author Biography

Beatrice Hibou is CNRS Director of Research at CERI-Sciences Po, France. Her comparative research in political economy explores, from a Weberian perspective and a Foucaultian conception of power, the political significance of economic reform, state trajectories and the exercise of domination, based on cases from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and Europe. Her major publications include The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era (2015), The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (2011), and Privatizing the State (ed., 2004).