Self-help ideology reframed governance as molding habits rather than granting rights.

Evidence

The book made ‘character’ the object of its study in order to make three arguments, each of which was to contribute to its enormous usefulness in Egypt: (1) that the political task of those who govern is to mould individual habits and morals; (2) that government should not concern itself therefore with further legislation or greater rights, all of which lead to ‘overgovernment’ while failing to make the idle industrious; and (3) that to make the idle industrious requires the discipline and training of an education – the aim of which is not to supply knowledge as a ‘marketable commodity’ whose acquisition makes men ‘better off’, but to train those who must do society’s daily work in the mentality of perseverence and industry. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 352

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the ideological machinery of colonization in miniature: the discourse that makes rule a matter of shaping souls rather than extending rights — dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: connects to: Governance replaces free subjects with managed, responsibilized ones — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 138