Social contract theory posed life itself as the foundational stake of sovereignty
Evidence
The jurists of the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century were, you see, already asking this question about the right of life and death. The jurists ask: When we enter mto a contract, what are individuals doing at the level of the social contract, when they come together to constitute a sovereign, to delegate absolute power over them to a sovereign? They do so because they are forced to by some threat or by need. They therefore do so in order to protect their lives. It is in order to live that they constitute a sovereign. To the extent that this is the case, can life actually become one of the rights of the sovereign? Isn’t lite the foundation of the sovereign’s right, and can the sovereign actually demand that his subjects grant him the right to exercise the power of lite and death over them, or in other words, simply the power to kill them? Mustn”t life remain outside the contract to the extent that it was the first, initial, and foundational reason for the contract itself? — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 256
Categorization
- QUESTION: Foucault flags this juristic debate and moves past it; worth chasing how contract theorists actually resolved whether life stays outside the contract.
- XREF: connects to: Sovereign power makes the subject’s very life and death depend on its will — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255; Responsibility-to-Protect discourse shifted sovereignty from nations to individuals; Biopower replaces sovereignty’s power over death with power over life — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 262
Related
- Sovereign power makes the subject’s very life and death depend on its will (similarity 0.84)
- Biopower replaces sovereignty’s power over death with power over life (similarity 0.81)