Genealogy of the transformations of class strategies: To see, to speak, to know

Abstract

This article is a genealogical research based on the hypothesis on transformations of class strategies of bourgeoisie in the 18th Century Europe. It relies on the Foucault?s genealogical method and general assumption that power has its own history and that deconstruction of ?old? Hobbesian diagram of power and sovereignty opens the possibility for the genealogical research of the class strategies of bourgeoisie. The question is not whether the bourgeoisie is the dominant class, but what discursive strategies and practices of power/knowledge were at stake in the processes of the legitimization of domination. We claim that historical emergence of the class strategies signified new ways of spatializing rationality in Western Europe, but also the new approach to life. Their aim was not to support the status quo in ancien r?gime but to enhance the productivity and to preserve the economic and biological balances. Those hybrid moduses of practices of power/knowledge that we call class strategies were the tools of bourgeoisie in the processes of the establishment of political, legal and state control with the ideological strategies of universalization and rationalization. We conclude that 18th Century in Europe was the period of the appearance of new, subtle forms and practices of class strategies that needed to be implemented in the emergent field of the social, through the processes of institutionalization and etatization. This century was also the time for development of discursive practices identified in terms: to see, to speak, to know.