Nov 24
The Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) has just published La lógica de la disciplina: el capitalismo global y la arquitectura del gobierno. Preview the book on Google Books. This is a translation of my 2010 book The Logic of Discipline, with a new introduction by Mauricio Dussauge Laguna. Kindle version now available on Amazon.
On the website Le Grand Continent, Lorenzo Castellani discusses my 2010 book The Logic of Discipline. Read the article.
A new article by Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood in the journal New Political Science discusses my 2010 book The Logic of Discipline. “Roberts’s major study of the proliferation of technocratic governance shows that, paradoxically, hyperdepoliticization has occurred at the same time as hyper-democracy.” Read the article.
The journal Historical Materialism has published a review of The Logic of Discipline by Safi Shams. Link to the review.
On October 16, I’ll be giving a talk based on my book The Logic of Discipline at Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions. Details here.
Honored that the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) will publish a Spanish language edition of “The Logic of Discipline” next year.
The Fall 2014 issue of n+1 magazine includes a review essay by Jamie Martin discussing The End of Protest and The Logic of Discipline. “The 2008 crash and its aftermath have amounted, as the legal scholar Alasdair Roberts argues in The End of Protest, to little more than a ‘quiet crisis.'” Read the review.
In the June 2 issue of The Nation, Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk write an essay on the state of democracy that discusses The Logic of Discipline and several other books. “There are three principal reasons for democracy’s deepening crisis of legitimacy,” write Meaney and Mounk. “The first is rooted in what Alasdair Roberts has called the ‘logic of discipline,’ which refers to the strictures that the draftsmen of global capitalism introduced into the blueprints of national governments during the past three decades.” Read the essay.
These notes were prepared for a talk at Victoria University of Wellington on May 14. Many scholars of public administration characterize the three decades between 1978 and 2008 as a period when we reconsidered the best way to organize public services. In fact, the stakes were higher than that. The essential question was an old one: in a democratic system, should power be put in the hands of technocrats, or citizens and their elected representatives? There was certainly a powerful global movement for democratization during that period. But there was an equally powerful, and ultimately more successful, movement for the shift of power into the hands of technocrats. Read more
The current issue of Policy & Politics provides a special collection of papers on depoliticization, governance and the state edited by Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood. In the final paper, Colin Hay of Sciences Po discusses The Logic of Discipline in the context of the recent financial crisis. “Yes, there has been a widely acknowledged crisis,” says Hay. “But, as the contributions in this collection all make clear, the tendency in the wake of the crisis has been to reaffirm and further consolidate a ‘logic of discipline’ over a logic of public accountability and/or democratic choice.” Free access to Hay’s article: Depoliticisation as process, governance as practice.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
