ABSTRACT
What strange times we live in and through. After lifetimes spent trying to argue for a proper balance between state responsibility and individual liberty, now in the regions of twenty-rst-century austerity, states appear increasingly irritated by the burdens of their populations. Instead we are deemed to be too expensive, too ageing or aged, too needy, too unproductive, too many, too useless for the demands of the contemporary economy. After a twentieth century when much of Europe devised ways of organising social support in a manner that brokered a compromise between the needs of employers and the aspirations of workers, it is shock all round to understand that we are considered surplus to requirements. In this chapter, I try to explain why I think we should consider the twenty-rst-century austerity of Europe and North America as an attempt to radically remake the relationship between state and population and what this suggests for those of us concerned to understand the construction of popular consciousness.
