Modern self-government requires legally remaking entire subject populations.

Evidence

Nevertheless, a modern autonomous life (which is, paradoxically, regulated by a modern bureaucratic state and enmeshed in a modern market economy) requires particular kinds of law as well as particular kinds of subjects of law. It is because the ideology of self-government seems also to call for the “civilizing” of entire subject populations through the law that the authority of the law and its reconstructive power come to be taken as supremely important. Ideally that project requires the installation of a particular conception of ethics and its formal separation from the authority of law, both also delinked from “religion.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1220

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘civilizing through law’ project parallels Foucault’s disciplinary power and the essay on sacrifice as a stabilizer of stratified societies. — connects to: A mass repatriation can be managed through hundreds of adaptive laws. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 496