… power is tolerable only on condition that it
mask a substantial part of itself. Its
success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. Would power be accepted if it were entirely
cynical? For it, secrecy is not in the
nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation. Not only because power imposes secrecy on
those whom it dominates, but because it is perhaps just as indispensable to the
latter: would they accept it if they did not see it as a mere limit placed on
their desire, leaving a measure of freedom – however slight – intact? Power as a pure limit set on freedom is, at
least in our society, the general form of its acceptability.
There is, perhaps, a historical reason for
this. The great institutions of power
that developed in the Middle Ages – monarchy, the state with its apparatus –
rose up on the basis of a multiplicity of prior powers, and to a certain extent
in opposition to them: dense, entangled, conflicting powers, powers tied to the
direct or indirect domination over the land,, to the possession of arms, to
serfdom, to bonds of suzerainty and vassalage.
If these institutions were able to implant themselves, if by profiting
from a whole series of tactical alliances, they were able to gain acceptance,
this was because they presented themselves as agencies of regulation,
arbitration, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of
these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute
them according to boundaries and a fixed hierarchy. … Doubtless there was more
to this development of great monarchic institutions than a pure and simple
juridical edifice. But such was the
language of power, the representation it gave of itself, and the entire theory
of public law that was constructed in the Middle Ages, or reconstructed from
Roman law, bears witness to the fact.
Law was not simply a weapon skillfully wielded by monarchy, it was the
monarchic system’s mode of manifestation and the form of its acceptability. In
Western societies since the Middle Ages, the exercise of power has always been
formulated in terms of law.
A tradition dating back to the eighteenth or
nineteenth century has accustomed us to place absolute monarchic power on the
side of the unlawful: arbitrariness, abuse, caprice, willfulness, privileges
and exceptions, the traditional continuance of accomplished facts. But this is to overlook a fundamental
historical trait of Western democracies: they were constructed as systems of
law, they expressed themselves through series of law, and they made their
mechanisms of power work in the form of law.[1]
[1] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction,
tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 86, 87.
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