Nikolas Rose, a well-established sociologist at the London School of Economics, has become increasingly interested in how the brain sciences and sociology can constructively interact. Like many of us, his own intellectual history reflects this; originally trained as a biologist, he then switched to psychology before finally ending up in sociology. His older research centered on “social and political history of the human sciences, on the genealogy of subjectivity, on the history of empirical thought in sociology, and on changing rationalities and techniques of political power.”

Today, Rose has turned to “biological and genetic psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience, and its social, ethical, cultural and legal implications.” He has a recent book, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Here is one review describes it:

From tattoos to organ transplants, cosmetic surgery to circumcision, obsessive dieting to exercise, the practice of manipulating bodies is increasingly widespread. But have we passed into a new phase of manipulation evidenced by the prevalent use of medicine to adjust our moods, enhance sports performance, slow ageing or alter fetuses? Nikolas Rose . . . argues that a threshold has been crossed into a world of ‘biological citizenship’ in which humans view themselves at the molecular level, medicine is based on customization, and biology poses fewer and fewer limits on life.

On his site, Rose has several downloadable papers on topics such as biological citizenship and Foucault. But I’ll focus on one entitled “Becoming Neurochemical Selves.” As he opens the paper, Rose asks, “How did we come to think about our sadness as a condition called ‘depression’ caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and amenable to treatment by drugs that would ‘rebalance’ these chemicals?” The chapter then presents an historical and sociological treatment of how we have gotten to this point, focused on pharmaceuticals. But as he notes, he could have just as easily started with brain imaging or genomics.

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