Book symposium: Marco Brigaglia's Foucault on Power, Law, and Society: A Reappraisal

On the book

Foucault on Power, Law, and Society offers a detailed analysis and reappraisal of Michel Foucault’s work on power, law, and society. Highlighting the ambiguities, tensions, inconsistencies, and transformations in Foucault’s work, the book shows how, in Foucault’s later years, his ideas gradually converged toward a conception of power that was significantly different from the one that emerges from the works and courses of the mid-1970s, and which came to provide the mainstream understanding of his thought. From the vantage point of this later conception, the book is then able to reframe the tensions and inconsistencies in Foucault’s thought as parts of a multiplex but coherent conceptual system. Foucault’s theses on the development of techniques of power since the 18th century, and on the impact of these developments affected the structure of modern law, are then reformulated to offer a more comprehensive and more balanced appraisal of their significance.

On the author

Marco Brigaglia is a Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Palermo, Italy. He is the author of three books and various articles on topics such as the theory of the material constitution; law and power; constitutive rules; the psychology of normativity; rule-based reasoning; the naturalization of normativity and jurisprudence. He has led the European projectsRecognise – Legal Reasoning and Cognitive ScienceandABIDE – Rule of Law and the Problem of Responsible Obedience.