Professor Nikolas Rose

Department: Department of Sociology; BIOS centre for the study of bioscience, biomedicine, biotechnology and society; Mannheim Centre for Criminology
Contact details: +44 (0)20 7955 7533; n.rose@lse.ac.uk
LSE Experts: Professor Nikolas Rose

Nikolas Rose joined LSE in 2002 as Professor of Sociology and Convenor of the Department of Sociology. He was originally trained as a biologist before switching to psychology and then to sociology. He is managing editor of Economy and Society, one of Britain's leading scholarly interdisciplinary journals of social sciences. In 1989, he founded the History of the Present Research Network, an international network of researchers whose work has been influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and, together with Paul Rabinow, is currently editing the fourth volume of Michel Foucault's Essential Works.

He has published widely on the social and political history of the human sciences, the genealogy of subjectivity, the history of empirical thought in sociology, and changing rationalities and techniques of political power. One part of this work has focused specifically on law and criminology, exploring the implications for crime control of changing ideas of human subjectivity and abnormality, the logics of risk government and the transformation of strategies of control.

His current research concerns biological and genetic psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience, and its social, ethical, cultural and legal implications. This research, which is partly funded by the Wellcome Trust Programme in Biomedical Ethics, focuses on the political, social and ethical implications of recent developments in the life sciences, notably molecular genetics, neuroscience and psychopharmacology.

In particular, he is looking at the ways in which new types of chemical intervention into the human brain, most famously typified by Prozac and Ritalin, change our ideas about normality and abnormality, abut the distinction between cure and enhancement, and indeed about the borderlines between illness and health. He has argued that we are seeing the emergence of novel ways for the government of human mental life and conduct, which have implications for the control of abnormal and pathological conduct. He has explored this in a number of areas, in particular in relation to changing conceptions of criminal responsibility

Selected publications

• Powers of Freedom: reframing political thought, Cambridge University Press (1999)
  
  
• Governing the Soul (second edition with new preface and afterword), Free Associations Books (1999)
  
  
• 'The neurochemical self and its anomalies', in R Ericson, ed, Risk and Morality, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003
  
  
• 'Society, madness, and control', in A Buchanan, ed, The Care of the Mentally Disordered Offender in the Community, pp 3-25, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2001)
  
  
• 'At risk of madness', in T Baker and J Simon, Embracing Risk, pp 209-37, Chicago: Chicago University Press (2001)
  
  
• 'Community, citizenship and "the Third Way"', in D Meredyth and J Minson, eds, Citizenship and Cultural Policy, London, Sage (2000)
  
  
• 'Governing cities, governing citizens', in E Isin, ed, Democracy, Citizenship and the City: rights to the global city, pp 95-109, Routledge (2000)
  
  
• 'Government and control', in D Garland and C Sparks, eds, Criminology and Social Theory, pp 183-208, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2000)
  
  
• 'Governing liberty', in R Ericson and N Stehr, eds, Governing Modern Societies, pp 141-76, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000
  
  
• 'Assembling the modern self', in R Porter, ed, The History of the Self, pp 224-48, London, Routledge (1996)
  
  
• 'Governing "advanced" liberal democracies', in A Barry, T Osborne and N Rose, eds, Foucault and Political Reason, pp 37-64, London, UCL Press (1996)
  
  
• 'Identity, genealogy, history', in S Hall and P du Gay, eds, Questions of Cultural Identity, pp 128-51, London, Sage (1996)
  
  
• 'Authority and the genealogy of subjectivity', in P Heelas, S Lash and P Morris, eds, Detraditionalization: critical reflections on authority and identity, pp 294-327, Oxford, Blackwell (1996)
  
  
• 'The politics of life itself', Theory, Culture and Society (2001), 18(6): 1-30.
  
  
• 'Normality and pathology in a biological age', Outlines, 2001, 1: 19-34 (Outlines is a Nordic interdisciplinary social science journal, published in English)
  
  
• 'Biopolitics in the twenty first century - notes for a research agenda', Distinktion, 2001, 3: 25-44. (Distinktion is a Danish journal, but this paper is published in English)
  
  
• 'Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual', Economy and Society special issue on configurations of risk (2000), 29 (4): 484-513 (with Carlos Novas)
  
  
• 'The biology of culpability: pathological identities in a biological culture', Theoretical Criminology (2000), 4, 1, 5-34.
  
  
• 'Do the social sciences create phenomena: the case of public opinion research', British Journal of Sociology (1999), 50, 3, 367-396 (with Thomas Osborne)
  
  
• 'Mobilising the consumer: assembling the subject of consumption', Theory, Culture and Society (1997), 14, 1, 1-36 (with P Miller)
  
  
• 'The death of the social? Refiguring the territory of government', Economy and Society (1996), 25, 3, 327-56

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