Book Review: A Foucauldian Interpretation of Modern Law: From Sovereignty to Normalization and Beyond
| Author | Marco Piasentier |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919884203 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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Habermas J (2015) The Lure of Technocracy. Malden: Polity Press.
Kratochwil F (2014) The Status of Law in World Society: Meditations on the Role and Rule of Law.
Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Luhmann N (2016) A Sociological Theory of Law, Albrow M (ed.). Abingdon: Routledge.
JACOPO MARTIRE, A Foucauldian Interpretation of Modern Law: From Sovereignty to Normalization
and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 248, ISBN 9781474445726,
£19.99 (pbk).
In a famous 1976 interview, Foucault argues that ‘truth is a thing of this world: it is
produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint and it introduces regular effects
of power’ (Foucault, 2000: 131). Jacopo Martire argues we should treat the law in the
same manner as Foucault treats truth, and thus consider it as ‘a thing of this world’. In A
Foucauldian Interpretation of Modern Law: From Sovereignty to Normalization and
Beyond, Martire outlines a thoughtful and provocative genealogy aimed at ‘demonstrat-
ing that the very concept of law that we moderns silently accept and incessantly utilize is
not a transhistorical reality, but rather an evolving eminently historical formation, oper-
ating according to distinctive discursive rules’ (p. 2).
To understand the distinctive historical character of modern law also involves challen-
ging the ‘expulsion thesis’. Hunt and Wickham (1994) maintain that the interpretation of
modernity elaborated by Foucault tends to expel law from the locus of power, in so far as
he considers itas a remnant of the pre-modern political horizon which, with the decline of
sovereign authority, has become instrumentally subordinated to modern discipline and
governmentality. According to Martire, Foucault’s toolboxprovides the critical means for
an alternativeinterpretation: modern law can be considered as ‘a sui generis apparatus’ (p.
27) which ‘establishes rules of formation that concern,at the same time, the knowledge of
the political truth of the subject and the production of said political truth’ (p. 104). In
oppositionto the thesis which marginalizesits role in modernity, law is hereintended as an
‘apparatus of subjectivation’ which sets up a complex dynamic of interaction with disci-
pline and governmentality. Borrowing a concept from science and technology studies, in
particular from the work of Sheila Jasanoff, Martire explains such a dynamic asa form of
co-productionin which law is neither colonized nor impenetrableby other apparatuses,but
it is at once a product and a constitutive factor of modernity (pp. 113–119). The result of
this process of co-production is the ‘normalizing complex’, which constitutes the ontolo-
gical grammar of modern societies. As with every ‘ontology ofactuality’, so the ontology
of normalization is an historical invention and, Martire argues, one perhaps nearing its
end. The rest of the book explores, in a precise and inventive way, the dawn and the
twilight of the modern regime of normalization from the point of view of law.
The second and third chapters are dedicated to the genealogy of modern ‘political
truth of the subject, understood both as an individual and as a member of society’
154 Social & Legal Studies 29(1)
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