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A review by florisw
Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76 by Michel Foucault
4.0
I'm not much of a Foucault reader, and I don't have any plans to start becoming one any time soon, but I was recommended Society Must Be Defended as the book to read if I was only going to read one. Having finished it I can probably recommend it to others for exactly the same reason. By virtue of essentially being an annotated transcription of his in-person lectures delivered in early-1976, the whole work feels quite conversational and easier to digest. It's well-edited, and comes bookended with two helpful introductory and contextual essays. You still get some of the typically dense scholarly writing you might find in any other academic text, but each chapter is very well signposted and clearly structured (even accounting for his small tangents). Representing a turning point in Foucault's scholarship, it is also useful in giving the reader a good summary of his main research foci of the 1970s.
I found the first and last few chapters of the work the most useful. They include helpful outlines of his previous research (1971-1976) into power and discipline, and his 'future' (1976-1980) research into historicism, war, biopolitics, etc. Chapter 2 in particular gives a great impression of his methodology. Chapter 3 defines what he means by the "(Philosophico-Juridicial) discourse" and how it shifted in the 17th and 18th to focus more on individual rights (a more "racist" discourse - a term he spends most of the book defining). This sets up his analysis - mainly of 17th/18th century French writers, and mainly Henri de Boulainvilliers - of history-writing and war as the analytical lens for understanding history and politics. These middle chapters on Boulainvilliers and French origin stories I found much less gripping to read. Beyond France he only expands a bit to early modern Britain, especially its revolutionary and colonial periods.
The final chapter I found much more readable. It provides an overview of Biopolitics, State racism, sovereignty over life and death, and how the Nazi State embodied (institutionalised) Biopower in a dictatorship. The course summary wasn't super helpful beyond presenting some overarching questions about war as the "analyzer" of politics. The final "Situating" chapter by Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani is maybe a bit too long to be considered a concise contextualisation of Foucault and his lectures in the mid-1970s, but, like the book overall, the beginning and end of it are very useful for giving insight into the lectures in the context of Foucault's scholarship.
I found the first and last few chapters of the work the most useful. They include helpful outlines of his previous research (1971-1976) into power and discipline, and his 'future' (1976-1980) research into historicism, war, biopolitics, etc. Chapter 2 in particular gives a great impression of his methodology. Chapter 3 defines what he means by the "(Philosophico-Juridicial) discourse" and how it shifted in the 17th and 18th to focus more on individual rights (a more "racist" discourse - a term he spends most of the book defining). This sets up his analysis - mainly of 17th/18th century French writers, and mainly Henri de Boulainvilliers - of history-writing and war as the analytical lens for understanding history and politics. These middle chapters on Boulainvilliers and French origin stories I found much less gripping to read. Beyond France he only expands a bit to early modern Britain, especially its revolutionary and colonial periods.
The final chapter I found much more readable. It provides an overview of Biopolitics, State racism, sovereignty over life and death, and how the Nazi State embodied (institutionalised) Biopower in a dictatorship. The course summary wasn't super helpful beyond presenting some overarching questions about war as the "analyzer" of politics. The final "Situating" chapter by Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani is maybe a bit too long to be considered a concise contextualisation of Foucault and his lectures in the mid-1970s, but, like the book overall, the beginning and end of it are very useful for giving insight into the lectures in the context of Foucault's scholarship.