Summary

From the Reading Notes of Michel Bauwens, 2006:

This book is a transcript of his more lively lectures at the College de France in 1975-76, and deals with power.

The judicial edifice around power in the West was always about royal control, its prerogatives or limits, by those for and against monarchical power. Since the 'middle of the Middle Ages', it used Roman law. The theory of right aimed at providing legitimacy to that power, and to mask 'domination'. It is framed in terms of sovereignty and obedience, and Foucault wants to show how it is about domination and subjugation. He does so by looking at the extremities and margins, where violence is exercised.

His approach is also bottom-up, starting from the daily exercise in a local situation, and so up the chain towards overall domination processes. Who are the concrete agents, what apparatus do they use, these are his questions.

- "An important phenomena occurred in the 17th-18th centuries. A new mechanism of power appeared to be incompatible with sovereignty, which applies to bodies and what they do, rather than to land and what it produces."

It extracted time and labour, rather than commodities and wealth. It was exercised constantly through surveillance rather than periodically through tax and obligation. This non-sovereign power is disciplinary power.

So we have a right of sovereignty, used as justification, with the mechanisms of discipline, concealed by the former. The disciplines used their own discourses and apparatuses of knowledge and norms, rather than law.

Today, with norms invading all fields, resistance uses the language of rights to defend itself against 'norm-alisation', but this is a mistake, says Foucault. We should look to a new right that is not based on sovereignty, and is also anti-disciplinary. What he wants to do then is analyzing relations of domination, and see whether these are based on force, and ultimately, on war. Politics, as a continuation of war, rather than as its Clausewitzian opposite.

Foucault explains this historically: before the acquisition of the power of war by states, war infected the whole social body. It is only the state which cleansed the social body of it, and displaced it to its frontiers (17th-18th cy). At that time, a discourse became important that said that the law was not only born from war, but still suffused with it. "Peace is waging a secret war", peace is a coded war, waiting to be decoded. The discourse is binary (us vs them), and its proponents saw themselves not as universal subjects, but as adventurers of another force (thereby rejecting a universalist tradition that started in Greece). He sees this discourse emerging in 1630 England with the Levellers and the Puritans, then amongst the aristocrats opposing Louis XIV in France, eventually becoming the ideology of a race war.

It is also a discourse of class struggle, but will eventually become the dominant discourse of Power itself, when it wants to use the State for normalisation against a sub-race, using eugenics, etc .. But it is only at the end of the 19th cy that it became 'racism'. Before that, it had an interesting 'counter-historical' function., useful against a official history which was a justification and glorification of power.

Foucault call the official history a 'Roman history', while the new forms are of a prophetic type, more related to the Biblical, which it sometimes uses, i.e. it was a matter of positioning 'Jerusalem' against 'Rome'. Roman history wants to pacify, counter-history wants a war on unjust power and declares new rights.

Foucault shows that in the minds of the men of the Middle Ages, the were still continuing Roman history, they were still in Antiquity, and furthermore, following Indo-European modes of order. Only in the 16th cy would a break occur. What Foucault is describing is how race struggle histories (Franks against Greeks), became class struggle histories. Marx explicitely acknowledged his debt to the French bourgeois class struggle historians. The latter were seen as revolutionary, a reaction to the racial purity narratives.

- "Whereas the discourse of the struggle between races was a weapon to be used against sovereignty - which was no longer guaranteed by magico-juridical rituals, and thus needed medico-normalizing techniques - the new discourse defended sovereignty.

The originality of Nazism was to reinvent State racism into a story of race struggles. The Soviets converted class struggle into a kind of class racism.

Turning to Hobbes, Foucault summarizes his constitution of sovereignty theories :

   - 1) by 'institution' i.e. representations tired of permanent struggle: the people let themselves be represented
   - 2) by acquisition: the defeated, in their will to live, accept it
   - 3) 'natural thesis': metaphor of child vs parents

Foucault insists that Hobbes in fact ignores war or no war, sovereignty is always accepted. In fact, Leviathan can be seen as a polemic against the discourse of war, prevalent in the English Civil War. He then describes the internal historical situation in England, and how the debates reflected the different views on the conquest, and the respective primacy of Saxon rights vs. "Normandisation". The Stuarts argued the Conquest gave them absolute rights; the parliamentarians insisted that William had accepted to uphold Saxon laws; while the radical Levellers and Diggers argued that Conquest had started a conquest of non-right, a 'political historicism' that Hobbes wanted to defeat.

Foucault then discusses the history of public right, and the competing explanations:

Society Must Be Defended

Summary

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