"Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976

Michel Foucault

Macmillan, Jan 2, 2003 - History - 310 pages

An examination of relations between war and politics

From 1971 until his death in 1984, Michel Foucault taught at the Collège de France, perhaps the most prestigious intellectual institution in Europe. Each year, in a series of 12 public lectures, Foucault sought to explain his research of the previous year. These lectures do not reduplicate his published books, although they do have themes in common. The lectures show Foucault ranging freely and conversationally over the implications of his research.

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault deals with the emergence in the early 17th century of a new understanding of society and its relation to war. War was now seen as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines a genealogy of power/knowledge that was to become a primary concern in his final years.

Contents

• JANUARY 1976: 1
• JANUARY 1976: 23
• JANUARY 1976: 43
• JANUARY 1976: 65
• FEBRUARY 1976: 87
• FEBRUARY 1976: 115
• FEBRUARY 1976: 141
• FEBRUARY 1976: 167
• MARCH 1976: 189
• MARCH 1976: 215
• MARCH 1976: 239
• Course Summary: 265
• Alessandro Fontana: 273
• Index: 295

About the author

Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, and was educated at the Sorbonne, in Paris. He taught at colleges all across Europe, including the Universities of Lill, Uppsala, Hamburg, and Warsaw, before returning to France. There he taught at the University of Paris and the College of France, where he served as the chairman of History of Systems of Thought until his death. Regarded as one of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault's interest was in the human sciences, areas such as psychiatry, language, literature, and intellectual history. He made significant contributions not just to the fields themselves, but to the way these areas are studied, and is particularly known for his work on the development of twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge, sexuality, illness, and madness. Foucault's initial study of these subjects used an archaeological method, which involved sifting through seemingly unrelated scholarly minutia of a certain time period in order to reconstruct, analyze, and classify the age according to the types of knowledge that were possible during that time. This approach was used in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for which Foucault received a medal from France's Center of Scientific Research in 1961, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault also wrote Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the ways that society's views of crime and punishment have developed, and The History of Sexuality, which was intended to be a six-volume series. Before he could begin the final two volumes, however, Foucault died of a neurological disorder in 1984.

Bibliographic information

• Title: "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976; Lectures at the Collège de France; Modern classics; Volume 1 of Philosophy / Political science
• Author: Michel Foucault
• Editors: Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, François Ewald, David Macey
• Translated by: David Macey
• Contributor: Alessandro Fontana
• Edition: reprint, revised
• Publisher: Macmillan, 2003
• ISBN: 0312203187, 9780312203184
• Length: 310 pages
• Subjects: History / Social History; Philosophy / General; Philosophy / History & Surveys / Modern; Philosophy / Political; Political Science / History & Theory