Foucault, Discipline andRaison d’Étatin Early Modern Europe

Abstract

At certain points in his work, Michel Foucault gives the impression that disciplinary power is antithetical to sovereign power. In the confrontation between Hobbes’ Leviathan and Bentham's Panopticon, Foucault (1980:102, 121) urges eschewing the model of Leviathan and cutting off the king's head. However, in his research on “governmentality,”Foucault (1991, 2000) dispels the impression that disciplinary and sovereign power are antithetical, suggesting instead that they “can only be understood on the basis of the development of the great administrative monarchies” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Foucault 1991:102–103). In this essay I wish to sketch some of the intellectual terrain on which this art of government takes shape; namely, seventeenth century theories and practices of state absolutism. I argue that Foucault's historical research into confinement, discipline, and governmentality may be fruitfully conjoined with intellectual histories and state-building literatures to develop a fuller account of the historical emergence of the early modern states-system's distinctive political rationality—raison d'État (reason of state)—and its relation to the fashioning of subject-citizens in response to Europe's wars of religion.