| Summary/Abstract |
Economy of Force is not about the ‘economics of war’, or not in any straightforward sense. Rather, it retrieves the older, but surprisingly neglected, history and theory of oikonomia, the ancient Greek term for ‘household governance’. The book is a study of oikonomia in the use of military force, but also as underlying distinctly social forms of governance more broadly. There is a very long tradition of thinking about households-as-government and a great deal of scholarship in literary and gender studies on practices and ideologies of domesticity. Oikonomia is the origin of the language of modern ‘economics’, but more importantly and revealingly almost all writing about government in the West. International and much political theory is out of touch with these literatures, which has resulted in blindness to a crucial reality about modern governance forms. The large-scale household administration of life processes plays a remarkably central role in international and imperial relations.
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