Foucault on Power
![handle is hein.journals/umkc78 and id is 743 raw text is: FOUCAULT ON POWER
Isaak Dore*
I. INTRODUCTION
Michel Foucault's theory of power can in some senses be viewed as a
response to the challenge of the great sociologist Max Weber that power has its
reasons that reason cannot understand.' It should not be surprising, therefore,
that scholars in sociology as well as political and legal theory have showed
renewed interest in the thought of Foucault as they try to explain the social role
of power. Despite this interest, there is no systematic or unified account of
Foucault's sociology of power or of its relationship to law. Among the reasons
may well be that Foucault is not always easy to read. Even when he gives
tantalizingly cryptic definitions, they are more often than not declaratory of what
Foucault does not mean by power. Thus, if one wants to restate his ideas in a
positive way, one can only do so through a series of essentially negative
inferences. The result is that Foucault's philosophy of power is either
oversimplified or just misunderstood. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that
Foucault never presented his theory of power in a single work or a set of works.4
Thus, it is necessary to reconstruct his theory from the body of his thought. Yet
when this is done, it becomes obvious that the idea of power, its nature, its
diffusion and its use, are, collectively, a central theme of his general philosophy.
This essay is an examination of the philosophy of Foucault with a view to
presenting a unified theory of his concept of power.
Needless to say, no philosopher writes in isolation, without being buffeted
by the philosophic currents before and during his time. Foucault was no
exception; his thought was influenced by Nietzsche and Marx. These influences
will become self-evident below, although this is not the focus of the essay.
Section II begins with Foucault's critique of conventional notions of power
and an outline of his own relational theory of power. This serves as a good
introduction to Foucault's views on the relationship between power and
domination, discussed in Section III. Section IV examines the relationship
between power and truth through Foucault's essentially Nietzschean
genealogy. Section V continues the exploration of power through Foucault's
own genealogy of law and politics.
From these diverse strands of Foucault's philosophy emerges a more or less
unified theory of power. It also shows the place of law within a political system.
Also self-evident will be Foucault's plea to move beyond the traditional notions
of law as having physical or economic force; indeed, of law having essentially
negative effects, a force that meets resistance at every instance of its exercise.
Professor of Law. Saint Louis University School of Law.
PETER HAMILTON, 3 MAX WEBER: CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS 138 (1991).
2 See, e.g., Ascanio Piomelli, Foucault's Approach to Power: Its Allure and Limits for
Collaborative Lawyering, 2004 UTAH L. REv. 395.
3 E.g., MICHEL FOUCAULT, THE HISTORY OF SExuALITY: AN INTRODUCTION 92 (1980) (prefaces
discussion of power by saying that it is easily misunderstood, and states [b]y power, I do not
mean...).
4 See Hugh Baxter, Bringing Foucault into Law and Law into Foucault, 48 STAN. L. REv. 449, 451
(1996) (describing Foucault's work as scattered and inconsistent).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/umkc78&div=28&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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