Modern liberal governance works through managed statecraft, not individual self-discipline.

Evidence

Is this account persuasive? Some doubts arise at this point. Surely, the payment of taxes and induction into the army depend not on selfenforcement but on enforcement by the state? “Some degree” of participation in governance (by which Taylor means taking part in elections once every four or five years) explicitly refers to a statistical measure of the entire population and not to a measure of how strong individual motivation is. … It depends, therefore, on the political skill with which large numbers are managed—including the organization and financing of electoral campaigns—rather than on the ethics of individual self-discipline. The distinctive feature of modern liberal governance, I would submit, is neither compulsion (force) nor negotiation (consent) but the statecraft that uses “self-discipline” and “participation,” “law” and “economy” as elements of political strategy. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 24

Categorization

• SEED: A potential essay: liberal democracy’s ‘participation’ is managerial population control, not citizen ethics — connecting Taylor’s idealized self-enforcement to the actual machinery of electoral campaign management.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s governmentality concept (Asad is drawing on it) and to the Milgrom law-merchant material on how institutions manage large numbers via reputation rather than values. — connects to: New Liberalism embraced state management as a positive duty, not a necessary evil — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 313; Modern governmentality rules populations at a distance rather than by command. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 223