"Society must be defended" : lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76
"From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault taught at the College de France, one of the most unique and renowned institutions of higher learning in the world. The College enrolls no students and confers no degrees. Professors are required to deliver lectures to the general public on topics from their ongoing original research. During his tenure at the College, Foucault's teaching, which reached audiences that frequently numbered in the thousands, profoundly influenced a generation of scholars." "These lectures, reconstructed from tape recordings and Foucault's own notes, are now being made available in English for the first time. Under the guidance of series editor Arnold I. Davidson, Picador will publish all thirteen volumes of the lectures in North America." "In "Society Must Be Defended," the inaugural volume in the series, translated by David Macey, Foucault traces the genealogy of the problem of war in society from the seventeenth century to the present. Inverting Clausewitz's famous formulation - "War is politics by other means," Foucault explores the notion that "politics is war by other means" in its relation to race, class struggle, and, of course, power. Providing us with a new model of political rationality, he overturns many of our long-held ideas of sovereignty, the law, and even truth itself. The full significance of the dictum "Society must be defended" becomes clear when Foucault's examination culminates in an extraordinary discussion of modern forms of racism."--Jacket
xxiii, 310 pages ; 21 cm
9780312422660, 9780312203184, 0312422660, 0312203187
52963247
Foreword / François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
Introduction / Arnold I. Davidson
7 January 1976. What is a lecture? ; Subjugated knowledges ; Historical knowledge of struggles, genealogies, and scientific discourse ; Power, or what is at stake in genealogies ; Juridical and economic conceptions of power ; Power as repression and power as war ; Clausewitz's aphorism inverted
14 January 1976. War and power ; Philosophy and the limits of power ; Law and royal power ; Law, domination, and subjugation ; Analytics of power: questions of method ; Theory of sovereignty ; Disciplinary power ; Rule and norm
21 January 1976. Theory of sovereignty and operators of domination ; War as analyzer of power relations ; The binary structure of society ; Historico-political discourse, the discourse of perpetual war ; The dialectic and its codifications ; The discourse of race struggle and its transcriptions
28 January 1976. Historical discourse and its supporters ; The counterhistory of race struggle ; Roman history and biblical history ; Revolutionary discourse ; Birth and transformations of racism ; Race purity and State racism: the Nazi transformation and the Soviet transformation
4 February 1976. Answer to a question on anti-Semitism ; Hobbes on war and sovereignty ; The discourse on the Conquest in England: royalists, parliamentarians, and Levellers ; The binary schema and political historicism ; What Hobbes wanted to eliminate
11 February 1976. Stories about origins ; The Trojan myth ; France's heredity ; "Franco-Gallia" ; Invasion, history, and public right ; National dualism ; The knowledge of the prince ; Boulainvilliers's "Etat de la France" ; The clerk, the intendant, and the knowledge of the aristocracy ; A new subject of history ; History and constitution. 18 February 1976. Nation and nations ; The Roman conquest ; Grandeur and decadence of the Romans ; Boulainvilliers on the freedom of the Germans ; The Soissons vase ; Origins of feudalism ; Church, right, and the language of State ; Boulainvilliers: three generalizations about war: law of history and law of nature, the institutions of war, the calculation of forces ; Remarks on war
25 February 1976. Boulainvilliers and the constitution of a historico-political continuum ; Historicism ; Tragedy and public right ; The central administration of history ; The problematic of the Enlightenment and the genealogy of knowledges ; The four operations of disciplinary knowledge and their effects ; Philosophy and science ; Disciplining knowledges
3 March 1976. Tactical generalization of historical knowledge ; Constitution, Revolution, and cyclical history ; The savage and the barbarian ; Three ways of filtering barbarism: tactics of historical discourse ; Questions of method: the epistemological field and the antihistoricism of the bourgeoisie ; Reactivation of historical discourse during the Revolution ; Feudalism and the gothic novel
10 March 1976. The political reworking of the idea of the nation during the Revolution: Sieyès ; Theoretical implications and effects on historical discourse ; The new history's grids of intelligibility: domination and totalization ; Montlosier and Augustin Thierry ; Birth of the dialectic
17 March 1976. From the power of sovereignty to power over life ; Make live and let die ; From man as body to man as species: the birth of biopower ; Biopower's fields of application ; Population ; Of death, and of the death of Franco in particular ; Articulations of discipline and regulation: workers' housing, sexuality, and the norm ; Biopower and racism ; Racism: functions and domains ; Nazism ; Socialism
Course Summary
Situating the Lectures / Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani
Translation of: Il faut défendre la société