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🪵 The Threshold

Natural right functions as history's perpetual defeated 'other'

Properties2
tagsja-picks, definitional_content, singleton, xref, category/definitional-content
aliases@foucault_society_1997, loc. 44

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Natural right functions as history’s perpetual defeated ‘other’

Evidence

From the Middle Ages onward, the essential role of the theory of right has been to establish the legitimacy of power; the major or central problem around which the theory of right is organized is the problem of sovereignty. To say that the problem of sovereignty is the central problem of right in Western societies means that the essential function of the technique and discourse of right is to dissolve the element of domination in power and to replace that domination, which has to be reduced or masked, with two things: the legitimate rights of the sovereign on the one hand, and the legal obligation to obey on the other. The system of right is completely centered on the king; it is, in other words, ultimately an elimination of domination and its consequences. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 44 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

I have been trying to do the opposite, or in other words to stress the fact of domination in all its brutality and its secrecy, and then to show not only that right is an instrument of that domination—that is self-evident—but also how, to what extent, and in what form right (and when I say right, I am not thinking just of the law, but of all the apparatuses, institutions, and rules that apply it) serves as a vehicle for and implements relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but relations of domination. … Right must, I think, be viewed not in terms of a legitimacy that has to be established, but in terms of the procedures of subjugation it implements. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 45 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: The rights declarations replaced historical rights with rights deduced from human nature.; Histories of conquest functioned as groundings of public right alongside natural law — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 140; Right is best understood as implementing subjugation rather than establishing legitimacy — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 45 (+1 more)

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