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The social must be limited

Some problems with Foucault's approach to modern positive power

Murdoch University, G.Wickham{at}murdoch.edu.au

Focusing on Foucault's distinction between an older, superseded model — the juridical/sovereignty model — and a newer one — which he refers to by a variety of names, such as disciplinary bio-power, art of government and governmentality — this article seeks, first, to demonstrate that his account of modern positive power is an unsatisfactory explanation of this type of power. It does this by contrasting it with an account that locates modern positive power in a set of early modern limiting mechanisms, mechanisms that actually produced the modern limited domain of the social, the principal object of sociology, initially only as a domain of respite from raging religious violence. On the back of this argument, the article also seeks to show that Foucault's account is politically problematic, in two ways: one, that it is rooted in a tradition of unengaged `critique' and, two, that it is tied, albeit inadvertently, to totalitarianism.

Key Words: governmentality • law • politics • society • sovereignty

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