Michel Foucault, the State and the Social Sciences

Arnault Skornicki, Andrew Brown

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9783031873928
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031873935
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book proposes an original reading of Foucault’s political thought. Far from setting aside the question of the State to focus on the relationships of power “from below”, the Foucauldian approach offers a radical anti-substantialist theory of the State. Concepts such as biopolitics, discipline, pastoral power, and governmentality serve as tools for understanding the statization of power relations. Contrary to some of Foucault's own statements, Skornicki highlights the elective affinities between genealogy and sociology, which enable an in-depth dialogue with Marxism, Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Edward P. Thompson, among others. Unexpectedly, the analytics of power appears thereby as a corrosive and productive science of the State. The author meticulously reconstructs, drawing on Foucault's extensive body of work, how his famous 'microphysics of power' fits into a broader genealogy of the modern State—namely, the processes of political monopolization that have shaped the so-called Leviathan from the Middle Ages to the present. The State thus emerges not as the coldest of all cold monsters, nor simply as a vast apparatus of repression, but rather as both the product and the agent of multiple governmentalities, diverse rationalities, and various religious tendencies—ranging from the modern rule of law to totalitarianism and neoliberal bureaucracy. This is not just a new book about Foucault. It is a book about the State and the enduring possibility of theorizing it—immersed once more in the caustic waters of genealogy.

Table of contents

• Political Philosophy and Public Purpose
• Michel Foucault, the State and the Social Sciences
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Note to the Reader
• Contents
• 1. Foucault, an Unlikely Theorist of the State
• 2. Is Genealogy a Sociology Like Any Other?
• 3. Foucault and the Sociogenesis of Monopolies
• 4. The Mysteries and Undersides of the Legal Order
• 5. The King and the Shepherd
• 6. Of Biopolitics Considered as Bureaucracy
• Conclusion: The Anti-Pastoral Horizon and the Politics of Emancipation
• Bibliography
• Index