Subjects of Responsibility : : Framing Personhood in Modern Bureaucracies / / ed. by Andrew Parker, Austin Sarat, Martha Merrill Umphrey.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• MitwirkendeR: Feldman, Leonard,; Greenhouse, Carol,; Jain, S.,; Parker, Andrew,; Reichman, Ravit,; Sarat, Austin,; Umphrey, Martha,; Wertheimer, Eric,
• HerausgeberIn: Parker, Andrew,; Sarat, Austin,; Umphrey, Martha Merrill,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2022]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.)

How and why has the concept of responsibility come to pervade the fabric of American public and private life? How are ideas of responsibility instantiated in, and constituted by, the workings of social and political institutions? What place do liberal discourses of responsibility, based on the individual, have in today’s biopolitical world, where responsibility is so often a matter of risk assessment, founded in statistical probabilities? Bringing together the work of scholars in anthropology, law, literary studies, philosophy, and political theory, the essays in this volume show how state and private bureaucracies play crucial roles in fashioning forms of responsibility, which they then enjoin on populations. How do government and market constitute subjects of responsibility in a culture so enamored of individuality? In what ways can those entities—centrally, in modern culture, those engaged in insuring individuals against loss or harm—themselves be held responsible, and by whom? What kinds of subjectivities are created in this process? Can such subjects be said to be truly responsible, and in what sense?

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- contents -- Introduction -- Contributors -- Part I responsibility, bureaucracy, and accountability in social and political life -- 1. Assuming Responsibility in a State of Necessity -- 2. How to Do Responsibility: Apology and Medical Error -- 3. Responsibility and the Burdens of Proof -- Part II responsibility, risk, and insurance -- 4. Whereas, and Other Etymologies of Responsibility -- 5. ‘‘Death by His Own Hand’’: Accounting for Suicide in Nineteenth-Century Life Insurance Litigation -- 6. Bonded and Insured: The Cautious Imagination -- Notes -- List of Contributors -- Index