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🪵 The Threshold

Elite circles reframe as fashionable vice what the masses punish as crime.

Properties2
tagsja-picks, contrarian_or_surprising, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@arendt_origins_1951, loc. 435

3 min read

Elite circles reframe as fashionable vice what the masses punish as crime.

Evidence

The other inaugurated the theoretical play of an illegality of the privileged; or rather it marked the moment when the political and economic illegalities actually practised by the bourgeoisie were to be duplicated in theoretical and aesthetic representation: the ‘Metaphysics of crime’, a term often associated with Lacenaire. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 435 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

It proved necessary, therefore, to control these illicit practices and introduce new legislation to cover them. The offences had to be properly defined and more surely punished; out of this mass of irregularities, sometimes tolerated and sometimes punished with a severity out of all proportion to the offence, one had to determine what was an intolerable offence, and the offenders had to be apprehended and punished. With the new forms of capital accumulation, new relations of production and the new legal status of property, all the popular practices that belonged, either in a silent, everyday, tolerated form, or in a violent form, to the illegality of rights were reduced by force to an illegality of property. In that movement which transformed a society of juridico-political levies into a society of the appropriation of the means and products of labour, theft tended to become the first of the great loopholes in legality. Or, to put it another way, the economy of illegalities was restructured with the development of capitalist society. The illegality of property was separated from the illegality of rights. This distinction represents a class opposition because, on the one hand, the illegality that was to be most accessible to the lower classes was that of property – the violent transfer of ownership – and because, on the other, the bourgeoisie was to reserve to itself the illegality of rights: the possibility of getting round its own regulations and its own laws, of ensuring for itself an immense sector of economic circulation by a skilful manipulation of gaps in the law — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 143 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Bourgeoisie aestheticized crime to mask their own practiced illegalities — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 435; Society transforms chosen crime into imposed, inherent vice; Popular illegality formed a continuum running from tolerated evasion to outright crime — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 139 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

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