Boulainvilliers’s historico-political discourse defines itself against the jurists’ and economists’ ‘savage’

Evidence

Second aspect: When he is looking for the constituent point— EE which is both good and true—what is Boulainvilliers trying to do? It is quite obvious that he refuses to look for that constituent point in the law, but he also refuses to find it in nature: antijuridicalism We (which is what I have just been telling you about), but also naturalism. The great adversary of Boulainvilliers and his successors 1s nature, or natural man. To put it a different way, the great adversary of this type of analysis (and Boulainvilliers’s analyses will become instrumental and tactical in this sense too) is, if you like, natural man or the savage. “Savage” is to be understood in two senses. The savage— noble or otherwise—is the natural man whom the jurists or theorists of right dreamed up, the natural man who existed before society existed, who existed in order to constitute society, and who was the element around which the social body could be constituted. When they look for the constituent point, Boulainvilliers and his successors are not trying to find this savage who, in some sense, exists before the social body. The other thing they are trying to ward off is the other aspect of the savage, that other natural man or ideal element dreamed up by economists: a man without a past or a history, who is motivated only by self-interest and who exchanges the product of his labor for another product. What the historico-political discourse of Boulainvilliers and his successors is trying to ward off is both the savage who emerges from his forests to enter into a contract and to found society, and the savage Homo economicus whose life is devoted to exchange and barter. The combination of the savage and exchange 1s, I think, basic to juridical thought, and not only to eighteenth-century theories of right—we constantly find the savage-exchange couple from the eighteenth-century theory of right to the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both the juridical thought of the eighteenth century and the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the savage is essentially a man who exchanges. He is the exchanger: he exchanges rights and he exchanges goods. Insofar as he exchanges rights, he founds society and sovereignty. Insofar as he exchanges goods, he constitutes a social body which 1s, at the same time, an economic body. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 209

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the conceptual opposition: the juridical ‘savage as exchanger’ vs. the historico-political ‘barbarian as dominator’.
• XREF: The savage-exchange couple recurs in Said’s critique of Orientalist anthropology and in colonial discourse theory’s account of how the colonized is constructed as subject of exchange. — connects to: Boulainvilliers pioneered economico-political rather than juridical historical analysis; Historical discourse functioned as an instrument forged in struggles over power. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 151

Related

• Boulainvilliers pioneered economico-political rather than juridical historical analysis (similarity 0.88)

Broader Connections

• Historical discourse functioned as an instrument forged in struggles over power. #expands (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 151