The
power, meaning the sovereignty can be defined as the quality of having
independent authority over a geographic area in theory, and as the power to
rule and make laws according to Jean Bodin. The sovereignty has and is still a
controversial concept. Before Michel Foucault, the majority of philosophes try
to theorise the sovereignty depositary and the sovereignty holder. Jean Bodin
explains clearly that the depositary is the one who has the right to make and
break laws.
With
contract’s philosophies of the age of Enlightenment such as John Locke,
Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, we are used to see the power as a contract between two
parties. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes tries to explain that sovereignty is
compulsory to secure the society. For him, “man is a wolf to man”. It is for
that main reason that people decide to give their power to a sovereign so as
its own individual liberty can be respected. We are far here from the
Machiavelli thesis that declares that the power holder has to get the force of
the Lion and the craftiness of the fox to be maintained. According to Hobbes,
sovereignty is not a coercive power just in the aim to be coercive. The aim of
the sovereignty is to protect people from one to another, because he claims that
the man is its own predator.
But,
Foucault is revolutionary because he is one of the first modern philosophers to
see the power not as a contract but as a power struggle, a hard line, where
politics is just the continuation of war. He drives Machiavelli thesis in the
extreme by saying that politics is such as wars. His main thought is based on
the witticism of Clausewitz’s theory. Clausewitz used to say, “War is the
continuation of politics by other means”. However, Foucault claims the reverse.
He says that politics is the continuation of wars by other means. For him,
sovereignty is just a way for politics to make a quiet war to citizens so as
the power can be maintained.
I
am a little bit confused in front of this kind of theory. I agree with the idea
that today politics is not liberal in Western societies may as well Eastern ones.
Politics is more and more oppressive and as Alain-Gérard Slama said politics
tend more and more to impose a moral order that shows politics against
citizens. But in the same time, I don’t
accept the fact that sovereignty is only a way to make war to citizens.
Nowadays, at least in France, sovereignty is limited. Some philosophers
advocate the idea that sovereignty has to be popular such as Rousseau. Some
others such as Ayn Rand think that sovereignty has to be the possession of
individuals. But for me the real question is not what sovereignty is but whom
today the sovereignty belongs to. The article 3 of the 1958 France Constitution
declares that “national sovereignty belongs to citizens” i.e the society. But
does the society exist really? It is for that reason that I am not sure really
to agree with Foucault’s theory. He claims to defend society, but what is
concretely a society? For me to defend what we may call “society” we have to
defend individual rights. And to defend individual rights, sovereignty is compulsory
so as to protect what Ayn Rand call the unique and most important right: the
right to live. There is not collective freedom without secure firstly
individual one.
No comments:
Post a Comment