Foucault on Power: A Problem in Radical Translation?

Author(s): Mark Philp

Source: Political Theory , Feb., 1983, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Feb., 1983), pp. 29-52
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/191008

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 FOUCAULT ON POWER

A Problem in

Radical Translation?

MARK PHILP
Jesus College

I 4IHICHEL FOUCAULT'S WORK, his studies of the prison,' of

particular criminals and their crimes,2 of the historical roots of
sexuality,3 and of a range of social scientific,4 medical, and paramedi
discourses,5 may seem at first glance to be, at best, only obtusely
connected with the concerns of both liberal and Marxist political
thought. But to take this view is to fail to appreciate the central concerns
of his work. Nor should we see his recent recognition of the importanc
of power in society simply as a minor concession to the concerns of
traditional political analysis,6 one that leaves his work and objects of
study still essentially idiosyncratic, obscure, and of doubtful relevance
to the "more serious" debates of political theory. An interpretation of
Foucault that fails to recognize that his project is to undermine and
replace the classical liberal and Marxian formulations of the nature of
politics, as an object of study as well as of practice, is one that
fundamentally misunderstands his work. Of course, his attempt to do
this may well be idiosyncratic, and its favor among the disenchanted
radicals of the left may be short-lived; Foucault's work may simply be
the latest fad with little lasting substance-but we cannot simply assume
this. Yet it is quite possible that without an attempt to consider Foucault
seriously outside the somewhat rarified atmosphere of the circles and
publications of his acolytes, the dominant traditions will successfully

A UTHOR'S NOTE: I am most grateful to Charles Taylor, Steven Lukes, Jim Tully,
William Connolly, Wendy Brown, Michael Brint, and Bob Ashcroft for their comments
on earlier drafts of this article. In particular, I would like to thank John Gray for his
continued encouragement and his detailed criticism. Remaining errors are, of course, my
own.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. II No 1, February 1983 29-52

? 1983 Sage Publications, Inc.

0090-5917 83 010029-24$2.65
29

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30 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

consign him to a possibly undeserved obscurity. This article a

provide the beginnings of an assessment of his work. But it does so
without automatically accepting his language, his style, or his theoretical
framework. To this extent it is an attempt at both a radical translation of
Foucault and an assessment. As far as I can ascertain this task has yet to
be performed.7
Two immediate problems with any such attempt are Foucault's style
and language. They are not simply difficult, they are deliberately so.
Foucault's very literary and ornamental style reflects in part his views on
language and knowledge. He sees himself as attempting to articulate a
new discourse, one that subverts traditional concepts and categories.
His style thus serves a rhetorical purpose-it assists in the construction
of a new perspective from which the ordinary objects of analysis and the
accepted unities of thought disappear. Crudely, he gives us a perverse
reformulation and genealogy of our accepted cognitive grasp on the
world. His works can be seen as systematic attempts to throw into
question our unstated premises. He takes the bedrock of our social and
political thought and attempts to dissolve it or rupture it. Given this
approach, there are evident translation problems, since it could be said
that any attempt to translate is an attempt to recoup his work within the
guidelines and upon the bedrock of the dominant languages of political
discourse. We are, then, dealing with a translation from the language of
an extremely reluctant subject; one who wittingly obstructs any such
attempt and who would repudiate any translation offered. With such a
subject should one attempt to translate and to assess? Can any
translation be adequate? Can any translation be useful? On the first
point, we can claim that Foucault at least offers us permission; with
reference to his works he states: "They are, in the final analysis, just
fragments and it is up to you or me to see what we can make of them." 8
On the second point, we can suggest that though translations may
never be perfect (indeed, one wonders how one would know if they
were perfect), they can be better or worse. This article is in some way
an attempt to answer the third question.
In the following discussion I shall concentrate on Foucault's
conception of power, since this seems to be a point that will allow us to
locate his position clearly vis-a-vis the more common positions of
Marxism or liberalism. I shall proceed as follows: I begin by showing
how Foucault fits into a tradition that sees power as a relationship, but
will also show how his commitments differ from those made by Lukes9
and Poulantzas.'0 I follow this with an account of his conception of

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 31

power, using a good deal of quotation but also attempting to render his
thought rather more accessible than it usually appears to be. I then raise
three problem areas in Foucault's account: his conception of the
political, his ideas about repression, and his view of resistance. Finally, I
conclude by asking how far his account of power can be considered as a
contribution to the broader debate on the definition of the concept.

Foucault's view is that power refers to a relationship, but it is a

relational conception of power of some novelty since it differs signifi-
cantly from the formulations of radicals and Marxists. I will begin by
offering an account of relational views of power; I will then show how
Foucault's work departs from the more abstract views.
Lukes criticizes Parsons and other theorists for seeing power as a
systems property. Parsons defines power within a conservative view of
the state as the consensually validated locus of authority acting in
pursuit of collective goals. Such a definition avoids implications of
force, coercion, or conflict; it is conceived as "a generalised medium of
mobilising commitments or obligation for effective collective action." "
Arendt holds a similar view. '2 Both link in with what Foucault refers to
as the "liberal-juridico" concept of powerl3-power is something that
can be held or transferred. I surrender my power to the state, in the
contractarian tradition, or our cooperation produces power that can
then be used legitimately to attain certain ends, as in Parsons and
Arendt. In these accounts of power the focus is, as Lukes puts it, "on the
locution 'power to' ignoring 'power over'. Thus power indicates a
'capacity', a 'facility', an 'ability', not a relationship. Accordingly, the
conflictual aspects of power-the view that it is power exercised over
people-disappears altogether from view."14
It is this conflictual aspect of power that Lukes and Connolly want to
stress. Lukes does so by defining power as follows: "A exercises power
over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B's interests."
Furthermore, he distinguishes his three views of power in terms of the
way they conceive of interests. '5 "Significant affecting" and "interest
are two key components of Luke's view. However, he also adds two
further criteria: (I) the notion of agency, and (2) the counterfactual case.
The two are related. A's exercise of power over B must, for Lukes, be in

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32 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

some sense intentional, and it must also be possible to state that without
A's action, B would have acted differently.

To use the vocabulary of power in the context of social regulations is to speak of

human agents, separately or together, in groups or organisations, through action
or inaction, significantly affecting the thoughts or actions of others (specifically in a
manner contrary to their interests). In speaking thus, one assumes that, although
the agents operate within structurally determined limits, they none the less have a
certain relative autonomy and could have acted differently.... Within a system
characterised by total structural determinism, there would be no place for power. 16

Poulantzas, against whom these comments were mainly directed,

remained largely unrepentant. He retained and argued fiercely for a
relational view of power, but he continued to avoid reference to agency
and it is doubtful that he could generate any coherent account of
counterfactuals to fit his view of structural determinism.

The power of a class refers above all to its objective place in economic, political and
ideological relations-a place which overlies the practices of the struggling classes
(that is, the unequal relations of domination-subordination among classes rooted
in the social division of labour) and which already consists in power relationships.
The place of each class, and hence its power is delimited (i.e., at once designated
and limited) by the place of the other classes. Power is not, then, a quality attached
to a class in-itself, understood as a collection of agents, but depends on, and springs
from, a relational system of material places occupied by particular agents.'7

Putting aside for the moment the fraught question of agency, let us
summarize the point of the relational view of power. Relational views
see power as a term applying to a set of relations in which there are
conflicts of interests, goals, desires, preferences, and so on, and where
one side is able to attain its interests, goals, desires, preferences, and so
on at the expense of the other. We have suggested that there are four
components that a relational theory of power might invoke, the first
two being common to both Lukes and Poulantzas: significant affect-
ing, a characterization of interests (goals, desires, preferences, and
so on), agency/intention, and the counterfactual case.
Although Foucault uses a relational conception of power, he rejects
both Lukes's radical conflict model and Poulantzas's structural conflict
view. He rejects the former on the grounds that it retains an individualist
account of agency, and the latter on the grounds of its assumption of a
general and organized domination. More significantly, he also rejects
both on the grounds that they use the concept of repression, which

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 33

Foucault sees as a misguidedly negative way of characterizing the

operation of power. Of the four possible elements for a relational theory
mentioned above, Foucault adopts only the first. To see why he does so
we need to look more closely at his account.
Foucault tells us what he does not mean by power. It is not

a group of institutions and mechanisms which ensure the subservience of the

citizens of a given state . . . [nor] a mode of subjugation, which in contrast to
violence has the form of the rule ... [nor] a general system of domination exerted by
one group over another. 8

To paraphrase Foucault: The sovereignty of the state, the form of

the law, and the overall unity of domination are not given at the outset-
they are only the terminal forms that power takes. For Foucault, power
must be understood in the first instance: "as the multiplicity of force
relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which
constitute their own organisation."'9
Sheridan appears to translate rapports de force as "relations of
power," but this gives us a short-circuited account. On Sheridan's
reading, "power should be understood as the multiplicity of power
relations in a particular area."20 But this merely states that power
analytically refers to relations, and it gives us no basis for distinguishing
power relations from other relations. The translation of rapports de
force as relations of force, or force relations, avoids this circularity by
construing power relations as those relations in which force is exercised,
but it leaves undefined what is to count as an exercise of force. I prefer
this latter option and will assume that Foucault is saying that power
relations are, in the first instance, relations in which force is exercised.
Foucault continues his definition: Power must be understood

as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms,

strengthens, or reverses them (i.e., the relations of force) [and] as the support which
these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the
contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another;
and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or
institutional crystallisation is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formation of
the law, in the various social hegemonies.2'

We can interpret this as follows. "Power" refers to a set of force

relations, but it refers to more than the sum of these relations of force. It
also refers to the process by which these relations become stable or are

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34 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

changed, to the patterns that may be formed from linking up sets of

force relations, and to the way in which these patterns are rendered
functional to domination through a particular strategy.

Power's condition of possibility ... is the moving substrate of force relations which,
by virtue of the inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are
always local and unstable.22

This "moving substrate of force relations" accounts for the ubiquity of

power: "Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but
because it comes from everywhere." Insofar as it forms a permanent
structure it is simply "the overall effect" that emerges from all these
relations. Power is a "complex strategic situation."
Foucault is essentially saying that from a series of "unbalanced,
heterogenous, unstable and tense force relations" patterns are thrown
up, which are integrated into strategies, which give the appearance of a
central power. Changes in the force relations, and these are endemic,
produce shifts in the overall pattern of power, which can only resist such
changes insofar as sets of relations of force can be mobilized against
them. Power refers to the "6complex strategic situation"-to the field of
force. It does not constitute that field but is, rather, the effect of the
patterns within that field. Because sets of relations of force feed back to
condition their members and inhibit change, stable patterns can emerge.
Power, then, is based on this field of relations of force: "Power is
exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian
and mobile relations."123
But it remains unclear just what Foucault refers to by the term "force
relations." He spends a great deal of effort on putting us right about
power, but never gives us any account of force. He seems to rely at times
on resonances with the terms "force" and "power" as they are used in
physics-and at times he sounds very much like Nietzsche in those
sections of the Will to Power where Nietzsche overstretches the
metaphor by talking of power quanta.24 However, I shall return to this
problem of force at a later point; for the present it is only necessary to
remember that the concept of force is both fundamental to Foucault's
conception of power, and undefined!
Four final points about Foucault's view need to be made briefly (I
shall be returning to each of them at a later stage). First, according to
Foucault, relations of power are not something that operate outside of
other relations (such as economic, sexual, or knowledge relations) but

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 35

are immanent within these: They are the effects of divisions th

these relations "and conversely they are the internal conditions
differentiations."25 Second, Foucault regards power as coming from
below, not above:

The manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the
machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis
for wide ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole.26

Global domination is, then, the end point of an analysis of power, not its
starting point. Third, concerning agency and intention Foucault argues:

Power relations are both intentional and non-subjective. . . there is no power that is
exercised without a series of aims and objectives ... the logic is perfectly clear, the
aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented
them and few can be said to have formulated them.27

These claims relate to the power/knowledge relation that is central to

Foucault's more recent work. The final claim that we need to regard as
integral to Foucault's conception of power concerns resistance:

Resistance is integral to power. The existence of power relationships depends on a

multiplicity of points of resistance which are present everywhere in the power
network. Resistances are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in
the latter as an irreducible opposite.28

II

Foucault's account differs from that of Lukes and Poulantzas

in at least one major respect. If Poulantzas leaves out agency and
counterfactuals, Foucault manages to go one step further to heresy:
He removes the reference to interests. For Foucault, power does
refer to significant affecting, but it is too negative to talk simply in terms
of the suppression of individual, group, or class interests. Power, for
Foucault, is not simply a negative force, it is productive, and it is in this
assertion that he breaks from both radical and Marxist views of power.
The productive nature of power is closely tied to Foucault's account of
the power / knowledge relation. The negative conception of power found
in Marxist and radical writing, where power is seen as repressing,
constraining, distorting, and so on, implicitly presupposes the possi-

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36 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

bility of social relations not marked by the effects of pow

denies this possibility, and he denies it most vehemently with regard
to the production of truth:

Truth isn't outside power, or deprived of power.... Truth is of the world: it is

produced by virtue of multiple constraints.29

In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of
power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these
relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor imple-
mented without the accumulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be
no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth
which operate through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to
the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except
through the production of truth. [In our society] power never ceases its
interrogation, its acquisition, its registration of truth: it institutionalises and
rewards its pursuit.

In the end we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertakings,

destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function of the true discourses
which are the bearers of the specific effects of power.30

It is, then, only at the level of discourse and the production of truth
that the strategies that integrate the relations of force operate. The
intentionality of such strategies is thus discursive, rather than indi-
vidual. Foucault is clearly issuing a challenge to both radical and
Marxist theories. Against Marxism he poses the view that one cannot
simply identify a mode of production and its dominant class and then
deduce from this everything one needs to know about the operation of
power in that society. Domination does not radiate from the peak to the
depths; this is to be too glib. Rather, we need to see domination in terms
of a "microphysics" of power: the way in which particular mechanisms
of power, with particular histories and rationales, are colonized,
invested, utilized, and so on, by ever more general mechanisms, which
built up into forms of global domination. Against liberalism and the
radicals Foucault poses the absence of an originating subject or actor.
Individuals are the effect of power, they are its subjects and its vehicles,
not its point of origin. The intentionality of power is not individual,
though it is articulated through individuals:

The individual is not to be conceived of as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive

atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against
which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it
is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures,

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 37

certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as

individuals.... The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its
vehicle. 31

Foucault offers us a discursive determinism. The power/knowledge

nexus of discourse establishes regimes of truth, which, with their
techniques and practices, discipline the social body. He also suggests
that the strategy of power has undergone a mutation in the last two
hundred years. We began with a system based on the juridical concept of
power, with the central figure of the sovereign, which formulated the
domination of the sovereign in terms of his legitimate rights and the
legal obligation to obey. But the language of sovereignty that we retain
has obscured the fact that sovereignty has given rise to relations of
domination that are inadequately characterized and accounted for by
the juridical model. Although we still conceive of power in terms of
sovereignty ("In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off
the head of the king.")32 the operation of power has changed and
assumed a disciplinary form with two poles: One

centered on the body as a machine; its disciplining, the optimalising of its

capacities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its
docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this
was ensured by the procedures of power that characterised the disciplines: an
anatamo-politics of the human body.33

The other,

focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and
serving as the basis of the biological processes: propogation, births and mortality,
the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can
cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of
interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of population.34

It is this discursive determinism, the view of discourse with its

techniques and practices sanctioned by knowledge claims and con-
ducted within local foyers of power-the consulting room, the school-
room, the courtroom, the sick bed, the child's body, the barracks,
and so on-that allows us to view its practitioners as conforming to a
strategy of domination "yet without hypocrisy."35 It is also this view that
enables Foucault to offer an account of power as significant affecting
while omitting reference to interests, intention, or counterfactuals. In
the following section, I shall suggest that the omission of these factors

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38 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

does create problems for Foucault that remain unresolved. I shall do

this through a discussion of his conception of the political, his account
of repression, and his analysis of resistance.

III

At the time of writing the first volume of his History of Sexuality,

Foucault proposed a conception of the political that appears in a modi-
fied form in that book. In a lecture delivered at the beginning of 1976
he suggests that we might conceive of politics as war continued by
other means. This

implies that the relations of power that function in a society such as ours essentially
rest upon a definite relation of forces that is established at a determinate,
historically specifiable moment, in war and by war.... If it is true that political
power puts an end to war. . . this by no means implies that it suspends the effects of
war or neutralises the disequilibrium revealed in the final battle. The role of
political power, on this hypothesis, is perpetually to re-inscribe this relation
through a form of unspoken warfare: to re-inscribe it in social institutions, in
economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves of each and every one
of us.36

Furthermore, it implies that all political struggles should be regarded as

a continuation of war, and that the end result can only be a final battle.
Foucault admits to having used this war-repression schema in his
previous works,37 but at the end of the lecture he also admits that he has
begun to see both concepts as inadequate and says that he suspects that
they may need to be abandoned. But there is no further discussion of the
question. Although it is unclear whether he gave the lecture before or
after writing the first volume of his History, it seems likely that it
predates the book. In that volume he refers tentatively to the inversion
of the Clausewitzian formula. After suggesting that power is composed
of relations of force and refers to a complex strategic situation, he asks
whether or not we should suggest that politics is war continued by other
means. He replies:

If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we

should postulate that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded-in part but
never totally-either in the form of "war" or in the form of "politics"; this would
imply two different strategies (but one always liable to switch into the other) for
integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations.38

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 39

It seems, then, that Foucault has modified the inversion of Clause-

witz, but that he has done so in such a way as to suggest that both
politics and war are methods for integrating relations of force into
coherent strategies. Yet at the end of the same chapter, Foucault seems to
have returned to the original Clausewitzian formula:

It is one of the essential traits of Western societies that the force relationships which
for a long time had found expression in war, in every form of warfare, gradually
became invested in the order of political power.39

I remain perplexed about what one is supposed to do with such a

statement, for the following reasons. It seems as if Foucault is offering
us an account of the existence of force relations in terms of some basic
human drive. He can only avoid doing so if he regards Western societies
as unique (a) in their prediliction for war, and (b) in that they transfer
this prediliction into politics. Evidently, the saving grace of Foucault's
original formulation, at least for the Marxist, is the view that class war
can end in a final struggle. In the reformulation it looks quite clearly as if
force relations are here to stay, that they are endemic to human socie-
ties. Both politics and war are different ways of organizing this force.
But what Foucault now seems to deny is the possibility of liberation,
and, as we shall see, this does create difficulties for him.
Foucault's reformulation of his conception of the political is
associated with his attitude toward repression. Within both liberal and
Marxist concepts of power there is room for a theory of repression sin
both conceive power in terms of A (some individual, group or class)
affecting B's (individual, groups or class) interests. B's interests may be
seen as repressed: something that cannot be fulfilled because of A's
exercise of power. Such repression may be conceived of in a variety
of ways-psychologically or psychoanalytically, linguistically (as in
Habermas's notion of systematically distorted communication), physi-
cal, or social-and these various forms may be combined in a num-
ber of ways. Thus some Marxists have seen economic exploitation
as effective at the level of the repression of desire.40 Furthermore, at least
within the Marxist perspective, the repression is seen as being, in an
important respect, temporary-in that the objective nature of class
interests will eventually condense, through a systems imperative, into a
practical political struggle. Liberal theorists tend to ignore repression.
Conflicts of interest are seen in terms of conflicts in policy prefer-
ences, which are settled through established procedures the results of
which participants accept as legitimate. Policy preferences are thus

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40 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

subordinated to the higher interest in maintaining the decision pro-

cedure. A broader liberal view, such as the two-dimensional view that
Lukes identifies, may have room to recognize that a decision pro-
cedure may exclude certain potential conflicts of interest from the
policy agenda, and that this may lead to dissatisfaction with or protest
against that procedure. The more radical three-dimensional view of
power does have more room for a conception of repression since it
accepts the categories of latent conflict and objective interests-
objective interests being defined as what individuals would want if they
were unconstrained in their choices.
Foucault's attitude toward repression has to be seen in terms of his
stress on the positive function of power and his associated view of the
"6subject" as a discursive product. If the subject is a product of discourse
it cannot be claimed that he or she has any objective interests. There can
be no position of exteriority for subjects from discourse (to use
Foucault's rather awkward formulation) and his rejection of the
determining effect of the economic structure or "the internal social
dynamics of societies and their modes of production"4' leaves no
possibility of recourse to any notion of objective interests. Given this,
there can be no real conception of repression. Consequently, Foucault is
true to form when he rejects the concept:

I believe that the notion of repression remains a juridical-disciplinary notion

whatever the critical use one would make of it. To this extent the critical application
of the notion of repression is found to be vitiated and nullified from the outset by
the two-fold juridical and disciplinary reference it contains to sovereignty on the
one hand and to normalisation on the other.

If we accept Foucault's conception of power and discourse as the

ether in which subjectivity is formed, and if we have only a view of power
as significant affecting, are we faced with a view of human society as
operating according to discursive laws and discursive rationalities-a
view of discourse as a hermetically sealed unit; a domination that cannot
be escaped? It would seem that Foucault has produced a major
difficulty. Consider, for example:

It seems to me that power is "always already there, that one is never outside it, that
there are no margins for those who break with the system to gambol in.43

But, if there are no margins, is it possible to break from the system at all?
We seem to have a dead end. Foucault offers us three conflicting

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 41

solutions. The first is the least satisfactory since it relies on material

published around the time he first used a concept of power.44 As such it
is full of references to elements that he now rejects: He refers to
something like the repressed45 and to the existence of places outside
power;46 he talks about those people upon whom power is "ex-
ercised"47 and about individuals in a struggle that concerns their own
interests;48 he accepts the proletarian struggle as a revolutionary
movement49 and he talks of a discourse that is against power, 50 and of
the way that power is always exercised at the expense of the people;5'
and, finally, he refers to power as setting up a system of blocks and
prohibitions.52 All these references sit uncomfortably with his later,
more delphic, utterances. In particular, his claims about the struggle for
liberation suggest that this work rests on a much more "naive" view of
power-the productive function of power, the intricate power/ knowl-
edge relation, the rejection of an originating subject, and the associated
concept of the repressed, are all absent:

If the fight is directed against power, then all those on whom power is exercised to
their detriment, all who find it intolerable, can begin the struggle on their own
terrain.... In engaging in a struggle that concerns their own interests, whose
objectives they clearly understand and whose methods only they can determine,
they enter the revolutionary process.... Women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers,
hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle against the
particularised power, the constraints and controls, that are exerted over them.
Such struggles ... are radical, uncompromising and non-reformist, and refuse any
attempt at arriving at a new disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of
masters.53

The second solution to the problem of breaking from the system

directly contradicts the statement quoted above about there being "no
margins for those who break with the system to gambol in"-and it
appears three pages before that statement!

There is indeed always something in the social body, in classes, groups and
individuals which in some sense escapes the relations of power, something which is
by no means a more or less docile or reactive primal matter, but rather a centrifugal
movement, an inverse energy, a discharge. There is ... a certain plebian quality or
aspect .... There is [sic] plebs in bodies, in souls, in individuals, in the proletariat,
in the bourgeoisie, but everywhere in a diversity of forms and extensions, or
energies and irreducibilities.54

One sympathizes with Poulantzas's outrage at this move.55 The

introduction of "plebs" seems at best arbitrary, at worst it contradicts

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42 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

Foucault's whole conception of power as constitutive of subjectivity

(and its associated claim that "there is no position of exteriority from
discourse"). If we ignore for the moment what seems to be an
uncharacteristic move (and most Foucaultians do), we are left with his
account of resistance as the only way out of the hermetically sealed
discursive world:

There are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real
and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power
are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from somewhere else to be
real, nor is it inexorably frustrated through being the compatriot of power. It exists
all the more by being in the same place as power; hence, like power, resistances are
multiple and can be integrated into global strategies.56

Poulantzas is also extremely irritated by this move; he suggests that

the resistances are a "gratuitous assertion" having no foundation, "a pure
affirmation of principle":

For if power is already there, if every power situation is immanent in itself, why
should there ever be resistance? From where would resistance come, and how
would it even be possible?57

Poulantzas regards Foucault as having no basis for evading the

conceptual trap of a domination that cannot be eluded. If everything
takes place within power-even this resistance-then there is no
breaking free from power. Foucault's references to the "plebs" are seen
as a move made in desperation. However, much as we might sympathize
with Poulantzas's ire, since Foucault's argument is at best obscure, the
situation is not quite the way he sees it. That it is not does not, I will
suggest, help Foucault much, but it is important to criticize him at the
right points.
First, let me clarify the nature of the argument. There seem to be two
points at issue: (I) If Foucault is simply offering us an explanatory
account of the functioning of human society, he has failed to indicate the
criteria by which relations of force are to be identified and he has failed
to explain why resistance is generated by the operation of power; (2) if he
is not simply offering an objectivist account/explanation of social
order, it would seem that he requires some basis for justifying, as well as
explaining, resistance-if we do not resist our disciplinary society,
should we?
Foucault has, then, to answer at least the explanatory question; in
addition, if he is to retain his radical laurels, he must answer the question

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 43

of justification. To try to show how far he does either of these things I

will offer an account of Foucault's "theory" of resistance by looking at
four ways in which he could ground either an explanatory or justificatory
account. I will suggest that there are elements of the former but not the
latter, and I will discuss the implications of this absence.
One way to avoid Poulantzas's claim that resistance is a gratuitous
assertion against the ubiquity of power is to stress that power is
predicated upon force relations-"every relation of force implies at the
same time a relation of power"59-and;

Machiavelli was among the few ... who conceived of the power of the Prince in
terms of force relationships.... Perhaps we need to go one step further ... and
decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force
relationships. 59

Stressing this, we might then claim that force and resistance are
related analytically (that to force A to x is just to overcome A's
resistance to x) and thus that, since power is predicated on force
relations, resistance is always evident at points where power is. But this
only moves the process further back to the ill-defined terms "force" and
"resistance." However, although Foucault would probably not accept
this account, there is one that is similar that he might well recognize. We
might suggest that resistance is the "other" of power-just as sickness is
the "other" of health, madness is the "other" of reason, and deviance is
the "other" of normality. In the History of Sexuality, for example,
Foucault shows how sexuality itself is produced through the techniques
of discourse; and in Discipline and Punish he shows in a similar way how
the body of the prisoner is subjected to rigorous discursive control-in
both the individual is made a subject by his or her sexual or criminal
identity. In both cases, however, (and here the "plebs" find an echo) we
can see Foucault as positing a prediscursive unformed primal bodily
matter, which is worked up in discourse into a discursive subject. In this
working up an "other" is created-in creating a subject, those elements
of this primal matter that cannot be incorporated in the discursive
identity are subjugated. A biopolitics of health produces disease; a
discourse of fidelity produces of itself its subjugated other, infidelity;
and as we search for normal sexuality we uncover only ever more
perversion. In this sense, an "other" is always inscribed in discourse-it
is an inescapable conceptual condition of possibility.
But, it remains unclear how far the power-resistance relation really
parallels this process. First, is the "other" of a discourse necessarily a

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44 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

resistant "other"? Are we to assume that mere "otherness" simply is

resistance? Second, is resistance the "other" of power or of force? If
power is to be understood in terms of chains or relays of force relations
organized through discourse, then, although the "shape" of the "other"
is determined by the "shape" of the discourse, the existence of a resisting
other is actually a function of these force relations. Thus the account of
resistance as the "other" of power has no explanatory force because no
account is given of its origins in the basic unit of power-namely, force
relations. Furthermore, it seems that if Foucault is positing this primal
matter and suggesting that it will always provide an "other" to discourse,
then he is no closer to justifying resistance, since there seems no good
reason why the "other" should be welcomed as a liberator. After all,
each liberation involves creating a new "other" (unless, of course, there
is some true, repressed subjectivity) and there cannot be any extradiscursive
grounds for assessing the respective claims of subjects and their
"other." In more practical terms: If de Sade is the subjugated "other" of
normalizing conceptions of sexuality, then who will be the "other" if de
Sade triumphs, thereby producing a new sexuality with its own tyranny-
its own subjugated "other"? And, above all, have we any grounds for
thinking it might be preferable? Indeed, can we have transdiscursive
preferences? Although the concept of the "other" is suggestive, it seems
insufficiently specified to provide us with an adequate explanatory
account of resistance, and it seems to have little to offer the problem of
justifying resistance.
A second account of resistance would see B as resisting because of the
conflict between A's demands and B's discursively constituted identity
and its associated pattern of interests. But Foucault seems to discount
interests and individual wills.60 Furthermore, there is a risk of circularity
since it is difficult to see how discursively constituted wills can form the
basis for resistance to discourse. Certainly, there could be no basis for
saying that B should resist, since B would simply be swapping one dis-
cursive identity for another and there seems no basis for having pref-
erences between discursive identities.
A third possible account of resistance would refer to equality: "Power
is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian
and mobile relations."6' All power relations are relations of inequality
that arise in "economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual re-
lations . . . in families, limited groups and institutions." Such relations,
as far as we can make sense of Foucault's account, involve relations of

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 45

force. The problem that arises is essentially one of whether relations of

force arise in relations of inequality, or whether they are the basis for the
constitution and continuation of such inequalities. If Foucault goes for
the former option, basing relations of force on existing inequalities in
material, sexual, economic, and knowledge relations, it would seem that
he might be able to ground resistance in something like an interest in
equality or justice-as in resistance to exploitation on the basis that it is
unjust. But such a notion is inordinately problematical for someone
with Foucault's view of knowledge. It seems that Foucault would in fact
see inequalities as being produced and maintained by force. But this
means that we still have no account of resistance unless Foucault is
arguing that force, and thus counterforce, is an endemic fact of human
life in society. There are two underlying problems for Foucault with this
formulation: One is that it entails a commitment to the existence of a
universal characteristic of human nature or human society, one that
preexists discursive relations, and this sits ill with his nominalist and
relativist pretensions; the second is that this can never provide the basis
for a justification of resistance-like Hobbes's war of all against all, the
account is completely naturalistic.
For a final possible answer to the question of resistances in Foucault
we can refer to his claim that

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
acceptable if it were entirely cynical? For it, secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse;
it is indispensable to its operation.... Would [those it dominates] accept it if they
did not see it as a mere limit placed on desire, leaving a measure of freedom-
however slight-intact?62

The fact that the juridico-political conception of power as exercised

in law remains dominant in an era when disciplinary power has far
exceeded it in scope and effect is seen by Foucault as a part of the
necessary masking of the effects of power. If we saw the disciplines and
their multiple regimes of truth as merely the operation of force and
power we would resist-as prisoners have resisted-at the level of the
body.63 This suggests that resistance is an inevitable response to the
experience of the materiality of the mechanisms of power. Coercion, in
its manifest form, is necessarily productive of resistance. But the aura of
doom that Poulantzas sees as associated with such a view needs to be
questioned. My resistance to your coercion renders your power over me
unstable. It may be stabilized by linking it to a netwok of other relations

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46 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

of force to form a pattern of strategic domination, but, equall

be overthrown by linking points of resistance and breaking th
effective coercion. This is surely what Foucault means by "shi
mobile relations." Relations of force need to be integrated into
to be effective in maintaining coercion.
But even in this formulation Foucault is still not telling us anything
about why people resist the materiality of power; we are back to the
assertion that they will resist it, but with the added rider, "particularly if
it is visible." Furthermore, I fail to see that Foucault has done anything
to take us away from the conception of politics as war continued by
other means, and this is a naturalistic account. Much of Poulantzas's
critique remains valid in that Foucault has not yet provided us with an
account of why people resist, nor has he shown why they should resist.
But, contra Poulantzas, the problem lies less with the conception of
power than with its root doctrine of force. Nevertheless, we are left with
a view of resistance as an incoherent and libidinal response-an eruption
entwined and reworked within the discourse against which it erupts. To
resolve this problem, Foucault must either abandon all claims to a
practical political orientation, or he must invoke a philosophical
anthropology, which can then be used as a basis for the formation of
coherent political goals.
Foucault does not take the first option, although he does occasionally
imply a strong skepticism to political goals. At the end of the first
volume of his History of Sexuality, he suggests that one day "perhaps, in
a different economy of bodies and pleasures" people will no longer
understand or share our current obsession with sexuality-"our austere
monarchy of sex," which entails an endless search for its secret, and
which ironically involves us in believing that "our 'liberation' is in the
balance."64 But, if our liberation is not to be found in a scrupulous
examination of sex, if that examination is indeed a condition of our
imprisonment, we still retain some conception of liberation, and
Foucault seems to believe that we should do so. His genealogies are
critiques; their very language implies that there is some alternative:

Knowledge does not slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs
from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of
reason; its development is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free
subject; rather it creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence.
Where religion once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for
experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge.65

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 47

Foucault's studies of this progressive enslavement to the will to truth

owe much to Nietzsche. Both show how the things we trust in,
civilization, science, truth, welfare, and a Christian concern for our
fellow man or woman, have their roots in their opposites and continue
to depend on these opposites for their support. Yet Foucault can only
accuse the will to truth of tyranny if, counterfactually, there is another
possible set of states that could have been, or could be, brought about
without this tyranny. Without this, "tyranny" becomes simply meta-
phorical, and is as useful for political thinking as thinking of the English
weather as tyrannical. But the most common candidates upon which to
base some conception of alternative possibilities are ones that involve
some reference to nature, the will, or to interests. Yet:

In general terms I believe that power is not built up out of 'wills' (individual or
collective) nor is it derivable from interests.66

And if power is not built from wills or interests, and resistances stem
from power, then resistance cannot be said to be on the basis of these
factors either. Yet Foucault does seem to have some alternative
conception-how else could he write: "The rallying point for the
counter-attack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex
desire, but bodies and pleasures."67
In summary, on the question of resistance, we can see that Foucault's
methodology makes sense largely in terms of Nietzsche's concept of
genealogy: It is the undercutting of the knowledge claims of the social,
medical, and paramedical sciences by reference to their obscure and
frequently iniquitous origins, and by revealing the normative and
delusive nature of the truths that they produce. The polemical and
political purposes of such an analysis can also be understood: It is an
attempt to break up areas of congealed knowledge by a careful
delineation of the structural cracks within them, and by pulling the ru
of epistemological validity from under their feet. Nietzsche might hav
seen himself as giving a helpful push to the crumbling buildings of
Christianity. But to claim a more practical political motivation, and to
be something more than a nihilistic anarchist, the genealogist must surely
have some conception of the steps to be taken once the dust has settled.
There must be a conception of new horizons, something that could be
generated, for example, by recourse to Nietzsche's will to power.68 But
Foucault rejects this aspect of Nietzsche, and he also rejects the

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48 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

possibility of a society freed from the effects of power and f

does both these things can he offer us any reason for rejecting
disciplinary power, and can he suggest why its removal would not result
in a still more crushing tyranny? The problem Foucault faces is that his
account of resistance and force has become a naturalistic one; conse-
quently, we may help nature along, but, thus far, he has given us no
indication where it might lead us. Certainly he gives no reasons for
believing that there is anything better (in any sense of the word) for us in
the future. And all this makes his status as a radical somewhat question-
able.

IV

In his discussion of power, Lukes argues that "talk of interests

provides a licence for the making of normative judgements of a moral
and political character . . . different conceptions of what interests are
are associated with different moral and political positions."69 Lukes's
doubts about the value of Poulantzas's schema for power are associated
with this view of the essentially contestable character of the term
"power." He suggests that Poulantzas offers us an account of structural
determinism-in C. Wright Mills's language, "'fate"-not an account of
power, because it precludes seeing an exercise of power as associated
with choice, and thus with responsibility. To dissociate power from the
language of choice and responsibility is to offer a naturalistic descrip-
tion of political events that precludes us from seeing it as a sphere for
human action. While it is true that structural Marxism altogether denies
that it makes normative judgments, and also rules out an analysis of
human action, it is grossly stipulative to claim that they are not offering
us a concept of power since they do accept the key factors of significant
affecting and interests. As Gray has shown, power is a theory-dependent
term,70 and the meta-theoretical grounds for arbitrating between theoreti-
cal paradigms remain sufficiently complex and obscure to deter-
mine theory choice and to render the exclusion of a paradigm from the
debate, as Lukes does with structural Marxism, at best stipulative. The
same can be said to apply to any attempt to rule out Foucault's concept
of power.
Having said this, however, we can go further, with Gray, and
recognize that rival paradigms invoke rival philosophical anthropologies,

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 49

in which accounts of human nature and action are given. In effect, rival
paradigms involve different commitments to philosophical positions in
the philosophies of mind, language, action, and so on. Gray's criticism
of structural Marxism points out that it suppresses its anthropological
assumptions, but that the commitments that it would have to have
would undermine the determinism of the approach. The argument is
complex, but we need not pursue it for our present purposes. The points
that Gray makes that are of relevance to our evaluation of Foucault's
work are that accounts of power and social structure involve a range of
metaphysical commitments, that there is room for criticism where there
is a hiatus between those commitments and the account developed, and
that although empirical evidence and debate in the philosophy of mind
underdetermine such commitments, they nevertheless limit the range of
commitments we can make.
My account of Foucault's conception of power has suggested that,
although he maintains what appears to be a view of significant affecting,
he avoids the question of conflicts of interests. He substitutes for this
question the claim that power is productive of resistance. This is not
necessarily incoherent. However, he does radically underspecify such
terms as "force," which leaves us feeling that his claim that resistance
occurs is simply an assertion, unbacked by argument and lacking any
explanatory account to back it up. But even if we were to accept that
Foucault's account of force and resistance could be formulated in an
explanatory form, we are still left with the question ofjustification. Here
his view breaks down, and it breaks down less into incoherence than into
an impenetrable silence. He refuses to elaborate the anthropology that
evidently does underlie his work. Counterfactually, if he holds no such
anthropology, then he is offering us a naturalistic description of the
operation of power that cannot form the basis for a politically relevant
critique of practice. If we are right to see Foucault as seeing himself as a
radical, we must recognize that he remains silent and elusive about the
philosophical position from which he is working.
There is one way in which Foucault might claim to be able to remain
both silent and politically radical. He might wish to argue that
discussions of power and of "Man," except where they are genealogical
in form, contribute to the will to truth, and as such are further instanc
of the domination by that will of Western civilization. But this simply
postpones the real question. If power is ubiquitous, if it comes from
everywhere, if force is everywhere, if, that is, Foucault has rejected a
view of a society without conflict, then are all societies equally valid?

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50 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

The repudiation of the will to truth seems to entail a repudiation of

evaluation: We will act from resistance and revenge but we can only ever
install a new regime of power and a new tyranny of truth. Foucault's
resistance to representation-"the indignity of speaking for others"
and his recognition that knowledge is invested with the techniques of
power leaves him silent about the future. All he can offer is a tolerance
for the violence of the people's justice7' and a few hints about the need to
change.72 But he can only offer us a critique of our disciplinary society if
there is some preferable form, and while he clearly does not accept that
we can eliminate force, power, and conflict, he does seem to believe that
there are ways of dealing with these that we should prefer, and any such
conception must rest on a particular series of philosophical commitments.
Refusing to state such commitments, refusing to talk of the future, and
refusing to offer for our reflection possibilities for the future leaves his
work enigmatic and only suggestive. It also allows him to elude the
debating chamber on power and its nature, together with debates in the
philosophies of mind action and language, which support the former
debate. But in eluding these he eludes also the possibility of rational
discourse between theoretical frameworks: One either speaks Foucault's
language, or one is condemned by it. Recognizing this should help us to
recognize that if there are problems in understanding Foucault, these
arise not because of the language in which Foucault writes, but because
of what he will not say. That is, it is the reluctance of the anthropological
subject to talk about the key concerns of his culture that makes his con-
ception of the world difficult to grasp.

NOTES

1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Allen Lane, 1977).

2. Michel Foucault, ed. 1, Pierre Riviere (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1 An Introduction (London:
Allen Lane, 1979).
4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970).
5. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (London: Tavistock, 1973); idem,
Madness and Civilisation (London: Tavistock, 1967). Further reflections on the last three
mentioned works are to be found in Foucault's methodological treatise, The Archaeology
of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1973). There are three collections of Foucault's essays:
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. D. F. Boucahard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977);
Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. M. Morris and P. Patton (Sydney,
Australia: Feral, 1979); and Michel Foucault: PowerlKnowledge, ed. C. Gordon

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 Philp / FOUCAULT ON POWER 51

(Brighton: Harvester, 1980). Further essays by Foucault, on Foucault, and by

Foucaultians can be found in Ideology and Consciousness, nos. 4, 5, 6 and 7. See also J.
Donzelot, The Policing of Families (London: Hutchinson, 1979); this is a major work
within Foucault's methodological tradition.
6. This development is first indicated in Michel Foucault, L'ordre du Discours
(Paris: Gallimard, 1971); ("Orders of Discourse," Social Science Information 10, 2[197 11
pp. 7-30). Foucault discusses the change in PowerlKnowledge, ch. 6.
7. The most accessible pieces, to my mind, in descending order are: H. V. White,
"Michel Foucault," in J. Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since (Oxford: University
Press, 1979); J. Minson, "Strategies for Socialists? Foucault's Conceptions of Power,"
Economy and Society 9, 1 (1980), pp. 1-43; C. Gordon, "Afterword," in Power/Knowledge.
8. Foucault, PowerlKnowledge, p. 79.
9. S. Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974).
10. N. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books,
1973); idem, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1979).
11. Lukes, Power, p. 28.
12. H. Arendt, On Violence (London: Allen Lane, 1970), Part 2.
13. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 88.
14. Lukes, Power, p. 31.
15. Ibid., pp. 34-35. My references to Lukes do not take into account the very much
broader account of power he gives in his paper "Power and Authority," in T. Bottomore
and R. Nisbet, eds., A History of Sociological Analysis (London: Heinemann, 1979). In
this paper he allows a lesser stress on intention. See W. Connolly, The Terms of Political
Discourse (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1974), ch. 3.
16. Lukes, Power, 54-55.
17. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, p. 147.
18. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 92.
19. Ibid., p. 92.
20. A. Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Knowledge (London: Tavistock,
1980), p. 183. See Michel Foucault, La Volonte de Savior (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp.
121-129.
21. Foucault, History of Sexualityl, pp. 92-93.
22. lbid., p. 93.
23. Ibid., p. 94.
24. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Kaufmann and Hollingdale, trans. (New York:
Vintage, 1968), sections 634-660.
25. Ibid., p. 94.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., pp. 94-95.
28. Ibid., pp. 95-96 (this paraphrases Foucault's argument).
29. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 131.
30. Ibid., p. 93.
31. Ibid., p. 98; emphasis added.
32. Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 88-89.
33. Ibid., p. 139.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 95.
36. Foucault, PowerlKnowledge, p. 90

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52 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1983

37. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

38. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 93
39. Ibid., p. 102.
40. For example, H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (London: Sphere, 1969).
41. G. Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: New
Left Books, 1980), p. 42.
42. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 108.
43. Ibid., p. 141.
44. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, pp. 205-217.
45. Ibid., p. 207.
46. Ibid., p. 211; "the anti-judicial struggle is a struggle against power.
47. Ibid., p. 216.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. lbid., p. 209.
51. Ibid., p. 211.
52. Ibid., p. 207.
53. Ibid., p. 216.
54. Foucault, Power/lKnowledge, pp. 137-138. Foucault also mentions the "plebs" in
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 158, but in a very different way.
55. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism. pp. 150-151.
56. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 142.
57. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, pp. 148-149.
58. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 185.
59. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 97.
60. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 188.
61. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 94.
62. Ibid., p. 86.
63. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 30.
64. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 159.
65. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 163.
66. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 188.
67. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 157.
68. See A. C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press,
1965), chs. 5, 8.
69. Lukes, Power, p. 34.
70. J. Gray, "Political Power, Social Theory and Essential Contestability," in D. Miller
and L. Siedentop, eds., The Nature of Political Theory(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
forthcoming). Gray's criticisms of structural Marxism are indebted to William Connolly,
Appearance and Reality in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Uhiversity Press, 1981); see
the first two chapters in particular.
71. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, Ch. 1.
72. Ibid., throughout; idem, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Part Ill.

Mark Philp is Research Fellow in Social Science at Jesus College, Oxford. He has
published work on the philosophy and sociology of welfare and is currently
engaged in work on William Godwin and British radicalism in the 1790s.

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