Gary Wickham

In this chapter, we discuss the reception of Foucault's work in Anglophone countries and survey the recent work done on his ideas in the twenty-first century. We highlight how Foucault gained traction in those areas, thanks to his novel tools and methods that allowed him to analyze power while distancing himself from Marxism and its followers. Foucault's work on power structures and governmentality offered concrete insights from precise historiographies that changed political and social theory since its inception. Some such analyses, including genealogy and archaeology, helped uncover the threads of power that drew scholars to Foucault's thought. We also offer some criticisms of his work, including how his conception of power and society wasn't so different from the Marxists’ line of thought, as well as how some of Foucault's historiographies tended to exclude certain specificities that endangered parts of his theory. Yet, despite this criticism, we suggest that Foucault belongs in the pantheon of thinkers who have profoundly influenced social and political thought today.

This chapter is an attempt to develop a framework for nonessentialist power analysis. By 'non-essentialist analysis' I mean analysis which does not understand its object in terms of an allimportant essence (like the economy, the state or the creative individual). As Barry Hindess describes it: Essentialism ... refers to a mode of analysis in which social phenomena are analysed not in terms of their specific conditions of existence and their effects with regard to other social relations and practices but rather as the more or less adequate expression of an essence (Hindess, 1977, 95).

Foucault’s work on power, governance, and society holds out the promise of power without dogma. To help the reader to understand the allure of such a promise, I will begin with a sketch of Foucault’s reception in the Anglophone academy (those wanting a sketch of Foucault as an especially French thinker, operating in a French and broader European context, would do well to consult Tribe 2009). My sketch, then, is from the perspective of someone who first encountered Foucault in the late 1970s, who has only dealt with him in translation, who is still a fan, but who now has serious doubts about many aspects of Foucault’s legacy.

Modern neutrality society is defined by the formal neutrality of the state and the judiciary regarding religion and ideology. It developed from the de-confessionalization of politics and law in early modern Europe, as part of the fragile civil peace put in place by the Treaty of Westphalia and similar instruments, whereby religion became a private matter, formally beyond the reach of the law, though only so long as the proponents of the different faiths did not seek to disturb the aforementioned civil peace. This technique for dealing with the explosive violence all too easily generated by rival communities of believers was later adapted, in the countries with which we are dealing (details shortly), to similarly douse the flames of hatreds born of ideological differences. We use the word ‘neutrality” with some caution, recognizing that some governments of some neutrality societies have occasionally pushed the meaning of the word to the breaking point, but we are confident that our readers will know that there is a dividing line between this type of society and the type that is formally committed to a religion, such as the rival Christian societies of early modern Europe or ancient or modern Islamic societies, or to an ideology, such as communist or fascist societies found in different parts of Europe in the twentieth century. Some readers may think that secular” would be a better word for what we have in mind, but as secularity has too often itself become an ideology, even, perhaps, a religion, we prefer “neutrality.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) produced a body of work that is hard to fit within a singular discipline. His own sense of what he was – a philosopher who used fragments of history to examine and disturb the self-evidence of the human sciences – is a clue to the diagnosis of his work as multidisciplinary. A brief examination of his major works shows that a number of disciplines were objects of his inquiries: psychiatry, psychology, criminology, penology, linguistics, economics, biology, medicine and sexology all received major treatments. In addition, a number of themes – philosophical, historical, ethical and sociological – fascinated Foucault at different points in his life: for example, the nature of the relationship between power and knowledge, the status of the self, truth and truth-telling, and the logic surrounding self-mastery and the government of others. Foucault also found time to make forays into art, music and literature. It is difficult to distil from all this activity a singular Foucaultian framework. To most historians and philosophers, for example, Foucault appears an outsider, and his methods and questions alien. The disciplines that Foucault examined do not seem, in the main, to have reciprocated his interest in them. Foucault has more frequently found a home in the ‘meta-disciplines’ – the study of studies – and perhaps especially in that branch of sociology that is philosophically nervous about the status of knowledge. That Foucault's work is diverse, then, we can take as read. What framework can we identify in this diversity, and extract to use as a model for future research? Our approach in this chapter is to do three things. Our first section glosses one of Foucault's areas of interest – the government of self and of others – to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the Foucaultian framework. Our second section tries to reconstruct what Foucault was trying to do one of his major studies, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (Foucault, 1978a). The aim of this section is to uncover the sorts of research questions for which the Foucaultian framework might best be used. In our third section we discuss how, as a writing duo, we became part of an ‘intellectual community’ that deals in ‘Michel Foucault’. The emphasis here is very much on the personal: we offer an account of how this process appeared (and appears) to us. Our aim here is to discover to what sorts of intellectual communities Foucault's work belongs.

This chapter has three main aims - to offer a summary and discussion of what Foucault had to say about law; to offer an introduction to some of Foucault's methods for those interested in learning to use Foucault as a resource for the study of law in society and to offer a discussion of what Foucault's notion of governmentality might mean for this study. The first section deals with the fact that Foucault had little directly to say about law and suggests he thought the category less useful than those of discipline and norms. The second section provides a brief introduction to the tools of archaeology, genealogy, discourse and power-knowledge and indicates how they may be employed in the study of law in society. The third section extends this methodological discussion such that it covers the later notion of governmentality, which has spawned a new and distinct approach within the world of Foucault scholarship.