ABSTRACT
Is law the poor relation among the topics of Foucault's work? There has been widespread complaint to this effect, 1 often with the suggestion that the philosopher remained limited here to a narrow, statist view of law and right, a viewpoint largely guided by the Napoleonic codes, which fails to take account of contemporary developments which multiply the possibilities for individuals of legal recourse, including against the state. Foucault, it is claimed, neglected the virtues of political justice, which he discounted as an abstract, transcendental doctrine of traditional political thought, ill-suited for grasping the real functioning of modern power in its two principal forms, ‘disciplinary power’ and ‘biopower’. For this French philosopher, starting with the early modern ‘classical age’, political power over the bodies of individuals operated principally through a physis, as a science of the growth and multiplication of beings, relegating juridical fictions to the prop room.
