Boulainvilliers pioneered economico-political rather than juridical historical analysis

Evidence

The reason why the Franks were able to survive in the land they had conquered is that the first precaution they took was not only not to give the Gauls arms, but to confiscate their weapons. Which left a military caste that was both clearly differentiated from other castes and quite isolated from the rest of the country. It was a military caste, and it was purely Germanic. The Gauls no longer had any weapons , but on the other hand, they were left in actual possession of their lands, precisely because warfare was the only occupation of the Germans or Franks. The Franks fought, and the Gauls remained on their land and farmed it. They were merely required to pay certain taxes to allow the Germans to carry out their military functions. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 166 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Historical intelligibility also had a third meaning; it meant getting beyond these tactical displacements and all these historico-ethical misappropriations in order to demonstrate that a certain relationship of force was both right and fair. Boulainvilliers was concerned with the true relationship of force—in the sense that he had to rediscover a relationship of force that was not ideal but real, and that had, in this case, been recorded and inscribed by history in the course of a decisive ordeal by strength: the Frankish invasion of Gaul. A relationship of force, then, that was historically true and historically real and which was, secondly, a good relationship of force because it could be extricated from all the distortions to which betrayals and various displacements had subjected it. The theme of his search for historical intelligibility was this: to rediscover a state of affairs that was a state of force in its primal rightness. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 206 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Boulainvilliers’s historico-political discourse defines itself against the jurists’ and economists’ ‘savage’ — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 209; Boulainvilliers read history to rediscover a primal rightful relationship of force — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 206; Boulainvilliers explains Frankish dominance through caste division of labor — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 166 (+1 more)

Related

• Boulainvilliers’s historico-political discourse defines itself against the jurists’ and economists’ ‘savage’ (similarity 0.88)
• Boulainvilliers explains Frankish dominance through caste division of labor (similarity 0.87)
• Boulainvilliers read history to rediscover a primal rightful relationship of force (similarity 0.83)
• The Third Estate inverted the Frankish conquest thesis against noble privilege (similarity 0.79)
• Boulainvilliers read Frankish conquest as the origin of feudalism rather than Roman sovereignty (similarity 0.79)
• Boulainvilliers sought a relationship of force both historically real and ethically right (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Boulainvilliers explains Frankish dominance through caste division of labor #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 166
• Boulainvilliers’s historico-political discourse defines itself against the jurists’ and economists’ ‘savage’ #corroborates (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 209
• Boulainvilliers read history to rediscover a primal rightful relationship of force #complicates (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 206