A military ideal of society rivaled the philosophers’ social contract dream

Evidence

Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 252

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The counterposing of the military dream (permanent coercions, docility) against the jurists’ contractarian dream is the deep structural opposition underpinning the whole panoptic argument — automatic docility as the anti-social-contract.
• XREF: This military dream maps precisely onto Oceania: the Party’s ‘perfect society’ rests on permanent coercions and automatic docility, the inversion of the contractual philosophy Orwell’s Winston still half-believes in. — connects to: Substituting capital for soldiers gives the state social autonomy; Politics inherited the military model as a means of preventing civil disorder — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 252; Hobbes’s social contract theory suppressed a discourse of permanent civil war — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 115

Broader Connections

• Substituting capital for soldiers gives the state social autonomy #corroborates (0.72)