| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Patrick Joyce. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. New York: Verso. 2003. Pp. xii, 276. $26.00.
In his previous works, Patrick Joyce has deepened and complicated our notions of class and the liberal self in modern Britain and the West. Now he has carried out a Michel Foucault-inspired archeology of the nineteenth-century "liberal" city. Focusing primarily on Manchester and London but making brief journeys as well to Vienna, colonial Calcutta, and even contemporary Los Angeles, he seeks to expose the modern city's historical innards, as it were, be they institutional, discursive, or even literal, as in his fascinating minihistory of sewage and the water closet.	1
Joyce's book does not break new ground so much as synthesize a growing literature on urban life and "governmentality" in the modern age that examines the ways in which subjects have come to be governed, and indeed constructed, by the powers, both public and private, that mold their everyday existence. He argues that nineteenth-century liberalism, as manifested in the new industrial city, sought to produce self-monitoring and self-regulating individuals by "freeing" them in various ways. The construction of the "sanitary city" (p. 14), first imagined by urban visionaries such as Robert Vaughn and then engineered by self-appointed health experts such as Manchester's Edwin Chadwick, represents Joyce's most vivid example. The "arrival of running water in the home," he writes, opened "new possibilities for action," not least "the capacity to defecate in private" (p. 12). But in generating such freedoms, the "hygenisation of the city" contributed as well to "the individuation of the self" (p. 73) and to the material and moral self-regulation that invariably accompanies it.	. . .

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