Society Must Be Defended

Society Must Be Defended is Michel Foucault’s 1975-1976 lecture course on war, sovereignty, race, discipline, and biopower. It matters here because it explains a modern power that presents itself as managing life, health, population, and security.

Text Status

The raw source is an Internet Archive OCR ingest of the Picador English edition translated by David Macey. It includes the course lectures and editorial apparatus as OCR.

Argument Map

The lectures begin from a methodological break with juridical sovereignty. Foucault asks how power operates through domination, discipline, and historical struggle rather than only through law and contract.

The March 1976 lectures develop Biopower: a modern form of power addressed to populations, life, health, birth, death, and risk. It does not simply replace sovereign killing power; it overlays and reorganizes it.

Place in This Wiki

For the state-as-parasite thesis, Foucault adds a disguise layer different from libertarian ideology critique. The modern state can present extraction and control as care for the population’s health, welfare, security, and life-process. That is a non-libertarian critique, but it maps well onto the thesis’s symbiosis-disguise claim.

See Also

• Michel Foucault - author reference
• Biopower - central concept from the later lectures
• Discipline and Punish - sibling Foucault source on discipline
• Disciplinary Power - disciplinary power concept that biopower builds alongside
• State of Exception - Schmitt comparison point on sovereignty
• Critiques of Sovereignty and Power - topic collecting non-libertarian power critiques
• State Power and Intervention - broader state-power concept
• The State as Parasite: A Thesis - thesis briefly updated with the biopower layer

Sources

• Society Must Be Defended - Internet Archive OCR ingest