The frugality-of-government question displaced the constitutional question

Evidence

The question of frugality has, if not replaced, at least overtaken and to an extent forced back and somewhat marginalized a different question which preoccupied political reflection in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even up to the start of the eighteenth century, which was the problem of the constitution. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 307

Categorization

• SEED: A strong counter-genealogy: the obsessive constitutional debates of early modernity were marginal to what actually organized power in the liberal era.
• XREF: connects to: Federalism arguments are usually veils for substantive policy goals — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3801