Book Reviews: BEN GOLDER AND PETER FITZPATRICK, Foucault’s Law. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 160, ISBN 9780415424547, £19.99 (pbk)
| Author | Panu Minkkinen |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663910394458 |
| Published date | 01 March 2011 |
| Date | 01 March 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
20(1) 117–136
Book Reviews
ª The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910394458
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BEN GOLDER AND PETER FITZPATRICK, Foucault’s Law. Abingdon/New York:
Routledge, 2009, pp. 160, ISBN 9780415424547, £19.99 (pbk).
This dense book, compact as it may be, extending over barely 150 pages, was urgently
needed to reinvigorate a stagnated debate. It is a more or less comprehensive reappraisal
of the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s relation to law. Its starting point is the fea-
sibility of what the authors call the ‘expulsion thesis’ that was formulated by socio-legal
thinkers like Alan Hunt, Gary Wickham and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, among others,
over a decade ago (see e.g. Hunt, 1992; Hunt and Wickham, 1994; Santos, 1987) and has
dominated legal scholarship ever since: that law was insignificant for Foucault, and that
it was an outdated modality of power in relation to the disciplinary and governmental
technologies that were at the heart of Foucault’s analyses. The book attempts to argue
that this was not the case, that, indeed, law played a central part in Foucault’s analyses
of modernity even if it never culminated in any unequivocal ‘theory of law’. The argu-
ment requires the authors to not only re-read many of Foucault’s key texts, including the
more recently published and translated Colle`ge de France lectures (e.g. Foucault, 2003a,
2003b, 2004, 2005, 2007), but to also extend the arguments ‘beyond’ Foucault while try-
ing to remain faithful to the gist of his philosophical project.
Accordingly the touchstone against which the merits of the book are measured is how
convincingly the authors argue against the widely accepted and authoritative ‘expulsion
thesis’ and on what grounds. The authors display an impressive acquaintance with the sec-
ondary literature that they are addressing: the bibliography is extensive, and the authors
manage to single out the authoritative interpretations well. The primary Foucault biblio-
graphy is, however, made up of almost exclusively English translations. While the avail-
ability of translations is today more than adequate, the selectiveness of the bibliography
also betrays an Anglophone context within which the authors themselves think. More
contextualization of Foucault within the French tradition to which he belonged and which
he confronted would have, perhaps, provided more nuances, for example Alexandre
Koyre´ and epistemic ruptures (Koyre´, 1957), Paul Veyne and the narrative epistemology
of history (Veyne, 1984, 2010), etc. The...
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