The first English-language volume of Michel Foucault’s lecture courses at the Collège de France appeared as Society Must be Defended (Foucault 2003a), covering lectures given between 7th January and 17th March, 1976.1 As Surokiecki (2005, no pagination) notes, the book covers ‘a topic’ – in short, the relationship between history, war, politics and power – that is ‘not [one] Foucault wrote on at length in any of his previously published work, so the lectures include a lot of new, compelling material’. An exception for an Anglophone audience is the first two lectures, which were translated as the ‘Two Lectures’ chapter in the Power/Knowledge collection (Foucault 1980a; in Gordon 1980). The course was given at an intriguing moment in Foucault’s thinking, sandwiched between the publications of Surveiller et punir (Foucault 1975; translated as Discipline and Punish, 1977) and the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité (Foucault 1976; translated as The History of Sexuality, Vol.1, 1979a).2 Its contents reflect a significant shift in his understanding of power from a disciplinary version to one concerned with the various levels of biopower, individual and collective, operating alongside – note, not instead of – the swarming disciplinary mechanisms. What also occurs is a return to Foucault’s older fascination with

questions of discourse and knowledge, in which this book might be seen as a hinge between the conventionally demarcated ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ phases of Foucault’s oeuvre. Indeed, this book arguably embodies continuity between these two stances on intellectual inquiry, rather than discontinuity, and Stone (2004, 79) suggests that ‘the[se] lecture courses offer the archaeological analysis that is implicit (or sometimes completely missing) from the published works’. A further implication is that Foucault sketches here the ground of what he terms ‘political historicism’, a politicized approach to history that necessarily tracks between the archaeological and the genealogical, and one usefully complementing what have since been cast as his ‘critical and effective histories’ (Dean 1994).