Power and Law

This chapter brings Foucault’s account of modern power to bear on law. As Foucault suggests, for an appreciation of what is specific to modern law, we need to understand its structure and functioning as shaped by the intertwining and interplay of directive, disciplinary, and governmentalist power. This claim points to what is probably the most important juridico-political transformation of the modern age, namely, the emergence and consolidation of the state’s administrative system, and we key in on aspects of this transformation that tend to be missed from the conceptual and analytical angle from which jurists and jurisprudents typically view and investigate law.