Histories of conquest functioned as groundings of public right alongside natural law

Evidence

The common feature—and I think it is important—is that invasion, with its forms, motifs, and effects, became a historical problem to the extent that it involved an important politico-juridical issue. It 1s up to the invasion to define the nature, rights, and limits of monarchical power, it is up to the history of the invasion to define the role of royal councils, assemblies, and sovereign courts. It is up to the invasion to define the respective roles of the nobility, the rights of the nobility, royal councils, and the people, as opposed to the king. In short, the invasion is being asked to define the very principles of public right. At the very time when Grotius, Pufendorf, and Hobbes were trying to ground the rules that constitute the just State in natural law, a wide-ranging contrapuntal historical investigation was getting under way into the origins and validity of the rights that were actually being exercised—and it was looking at a historical event or, if vou like, at a slice of history that was, m both juridical and political terms, the Most sensitive region in the entire history of France. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 140

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the ‘historical narrative as political jurisprudence’ mechanism that later chapters on biopolitics and the war-society thesis build on; also connects to how nation-states weaponize origin stories of conquest to legitimize exclusion. — connects to: The rights declarations replaced historical rights with rights deduced from human nature.; History once served to sing the praises and legitimize the State’s sovereignty; Natural right functions as history’s perpetual defeated ‘other’ (+9 more)
• QUESTION: This contrapuntal relationship between natural-law grounding of sovereignty and historical-investigation grounding of rights is a distinction worth tracing when it resurfaces in later lectures on race war and biopolitics.

Related

• Natural right functions as history’s perpetual defeated ‘other’ (similarity 0.88)
• History once served to sing the praises and legitimize the State’s sovereignty (similarity 0.85)
• Historical narratives function as disguised lessons in constitutional law (similarity 0.80)
• War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law (similarity 0.79)
• Boulainvilliers read history to rediscover a primal rightful relationship of force (similarity 0.78)
• Tracing feudalism’s origins to religious-racial war legitimated the social order externally (similarity 0.78)
• The Third Estate inverted the Frankish conquest thesis against noble privilege (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial dominion was justified as the natural right of those capable of ruling #expands (0.80)
• Origin myths function as political arguments about power, not historical records #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 132
• Historical narratives function as disguised lessons in constitutional law #expands (0.78) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 141
• Tracing feudalism’s origins to religious-racial war legitimated the social order externally #expands (0.78) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 141