Omvormingen van het sociaal contract

During history, multiple techniques for social control have been deployed. These techniques were often pragmatic in character. Hobbes wrote in his Leviathan that a society without such control was doomed to result in ‘a war of all against all’ (Hobbes, 2010). Foucault later showed how surveillance techniques discipline society increasingly, in the process transforming individuals into objects of research, which then can be compared with a societal norm (Foucault, 2010). Today, a similar case can be recognised in the process of the re-examination of the ‘Wajonger’. These individuals either have physical and/or mental disabilities and must find new ways to comply to new standards regarding participation in society. The Dutch Social Security Agency (UWV) deploys new surveillance techniques in order to discipline these individuals and hence reduces them to objects of research.