@phdthesis{discovery10155051, school = {UCL (University College London)}, year = {2022}, title = {A Genealogy of Wealtherty through the Lens of Social Policy}, pages = {1--321}, month = {September}, note = {Copyright {\copyright} The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author's request.}, author = {Kerr, Sarah-Jane}, url = {https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10155051/}, abstract = {This thesis is a Foucauldian genealogy of Wealtherty with a focus on policy. I first establish what Wealtherty is - a state of soaring wealth inequality along with democratically damaging levels of contagion between financial and political power. Then I trace moments of descent and emergence in the 18th and 19th century. I situate this 'critical and effective' history in the context of what I suggest are parallel governmental dispositions of scrutiny towards the poor and ignorance or dis-interest towards the rich. I describe how these operate today and describe some 'awkward continuities' with the past. Section 1 (chapters 3-6) answers the questions 'What have we become?', and 'How have we become what we are?' (Tamboukou 1999). I use history to shed light on our present predicament, through an analytics of government (Dean 2010), taking government in a broad sense to mean the conduct of conduct. Against the axes of episteme, techne, visual field and identity formation, I look at situations in which conduct is conducted to establish and sustain authority, continuing my critical historical approach and using a range of contemporary and historical sources. Section 2 (chapters 7\&8) addresses the questions, 'What practices and processes sustain the state we are in?' I consider how the state of Wealtherty is sustained in our now through knowledge networks, and through unequal epistemic relations established and sustained in policy discourse. I end with some ideas for remedy and 'ways out' of our 'intolerable' (Ball \& Collet-Sabe 2021), unequal present through a Wealtherty manifesto.} }