Laws and property are a permanent war waged by conquerors, not peace

Evidence

With the Levellers we find an almost literal version of the very thesis of royal absolutism itself. What the Levellers will say 1s this: “The monarchy ts perfectly right to say that the mvasion, defeat, and Conquest did take place. It’s true, the Conquest did take place, and that has to be our starting point. But the absolute monarchy interprets the fact that the Conquest took place as providing a legitimate basis for its mght. We, on the other hand, interpret the fact that the Conquest did take place, and that the Saxons really were defeated by the Normans, as meaning that the defeat marked, not the beginnings of right—absolute nght— but of a state of nonright that invalidates all the laws and social differences that distinguish the aristocracy, the property regime, and so on.” … Lilburne said that William and his successors “made Dukes, fi i “4 5 3 Earles, Barrons and Lords of their fellow Robbers, Rogues and Thieves.” It follows that today’s property regime is sull the wartime regime of occupation, confiscation, and pillage. All property relations—like the entire legal system—must therefore be looked at again, from top to bottom. Property relations are completely invalidated by the fact of the Conquest. … Laws, power, and government are the obverse of the war they are waging against us. Rebellion is therefore not the destruction of a peaceful system of laws for some reason. Rebellion is a response to a war that the government never stops waging. Government means their war against us; rebellion is our war against them. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 123

Categorization

• XREF: This is the genealogical inversion of right that Foucault claims defined his own project — connects to the series on war-as-analysis-of-power and anticipates the biopolitics/necropolitics toolkit. — connects to: Colonial sovereignty means power exercised outside the law, with peace as endless war. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 74; Capital relates to society as sorcery and challenge, not contract. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 59; Perverted justice under legal forms still constitutes a state of war — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 28
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘war discourse’ of history: that law is not a peace treaty but a continuation of conquest by other means.

Related

• War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law (similarity 0.79)