Foucault on Power, Law, and Society: A Reappraisal

This book offers a detailed analysis and reappraisal of Michel Foucault’s work on power, law, and society.

Highlighting the ambiguities, tensions, inconsistencies, and transformations in Foucault’s work, the book shows how, in Foucault’s later years, his ideas gradually converged toward a conception of power that was significantly different from the one that emerges from the works and courses of the mid-1970s, and which came to provide the mainstream understanding of his thought. From the vantage point of this later conception, the book is then able to reframe the tensions and inconsistencies in Foucault’s thought as parts of a multiplex but coherent conceptual system. Foucault’s theses on the development of techniques of power since the 18th century, and on the impact of these developments affected the structure of modern law, are then reformulated to offer a more comprehensive and more balanced appraisal of their significance.

Foucault on Power, Law, and Society will appeal to theorists in law, philosophy, and political science, as well as others with interests in the perpetually influential work of Michel Foucault on power.