War and politics are two codings of the same force relations

Evidence

“Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war pursued by other means? H we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded— in part but never totally—either in the form of ‘war’ or in the forms of ‘politics’; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, uastable, and tense force relations."" wa — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 296

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clausewitz reversed: politics is war pursued by other means — a foundational inversion for the war-model genealogy Foucault develops.
• XREF: connects to: Gramsci distinguishes one-off ‘war of manoeuvre’ from long-term ‘war of position’; Passive revolution is the political form of a war of position; Political struggle continues after military defeat on political terrain (+7 more)

Related

• Gramsci distinguishes one-off ‘war of manoeuvre’ from long-term ‘war of position’ (similarity 0.89)
• War is the continuation of politics, not its own autonomous sphere. (similarity 0.88)
• The overall balance of forces imposes the form of war (similarity 0.87)
• Passive revolution is the political form of a war of position (similarity 0.87)
• Foucault proposed war as the model for understanding political power (similarity 0.84)
• War of position replaced war of movement in modern democratic politics (similarity 0.84)
• War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law (similarity 0.83)
• Civil society may be structured by perpetual war between forces (similarity 0.80)
• War of position targets civil society’s institutions rather than a single decisive breach. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle #expands (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179