In this historical discourse, freedom is an urban, not imperial, phenomenon
Evidence
Freedom is therefore a phenomenon that is compatible with Roman absolutism (and this is, I think, the first time this argument appears in these historical analyses); it is a Gaulish phenomenon, but it is above all an urban phenomenon. Freedom belongs to the towns. And it is to the precise extent that it belongs to the towns that freedom can struggle and become a political force. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 5916
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: The town as the seat of freedom prefigures the later bourgeois/Third Estate claim to urban autonomy — connects to the reader’s scaffolding interest in how class claims get legitimized genealogically.