Michel Foucault claimed, ‘Political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign’ (Foucault and Gordon, 1980). In saying this, he critiques Western political thought for the focus scholars have collectively held on sovereign power, or the ‘macro-level’ consisting of governmental figures and institutions in formal power over a nation-state. In The Politics of Truth he elaborates:
It seems to me that there has been in the modern Western world … a certain way of thinking, speaking, and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to society, to culture and also a relationship to others that we could call, let’s say, the critical attitude (Foucault, Rajchman, Hochroth …show more content…
This echoes Foucault’s theory mentioned previously that Western Europe simply outgrew sole sovereign power to adopt disciplinary power when the nature of the quest for power changed from possessing military and completely dominating a territory to governance, or having both the power and knowledge to be able to take care of the population and capital (Mills 2003). The same concept can be applied to counter state movements, or revolutions: Foucault attributes them as opposing public arena manifestations of a ‘codification of power relations’ against the state (Foucault and Rabinow, …show more content…
Because political theorists cast the state, sovereign and its institutions as a given in politics and therefore imply a uniformity of objectives therein, Foucault critiques them both for overvaluing the state and, paradoxically, reducing the roles of the states by limiting its functions. Mills writes on Foucault’s disagreement on the concept of uniformity of the state:
But the state, no more probably than at any other time in its history, does not have this unity, this individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor to speak frankly, this importance: maybe the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicised abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think.
It seems to me that there has been in the modern Western world … a certain way of thinking, speaking, and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to society, to culture and also a relationship to others that we could call, let’s say, the critical attitude (Foucault, Rajchman, Hochroth …show more content…
This echoes Foucault’s theory mentioned previously that Western Europe simply outgrew sole sovereign power to adopt disciplinary power when the nature of the quest for power changed from possessing military and completely dominating a territory to governance, or having both the power and knowledge to be able to take care of the population and capital (Mills 2003). The same concept can be applied to counter state movements, or revolutions: Foucault attributes them as opposing public arena manifestations of a ‘codification of power relations’ against the state (Foucault and Rabinow, …show more content…
Because political theorists cast the state, sovereign and its institutions as a given in politics and therefore imply a uniformity of objectives therein, Foucault critiques them both for overvaluing the state and, paradoxically, reducing the roles of the states by limiting its functions. Mills writes on Foucault’s disagreement on the concept of uniformity of the state:
But the state, no more probably than at any other time in its history, does not have this unity, this individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor to speak frankly, this importance: maybe the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicised abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think.