international anti-corruption movement, of which TI is a prominent member,should be seen as a stalking horse for the neo-liberal reform of non-Westernstates. An alternative, more interesting perspective is suggested by Foucault’sanalysis of Bentham’s Panopticon in Discipline and Punish (1979). This offers asuperb illustration of how the disciplining of individuals can be used to furnishthem with a desirable form of internal regulation, to establish within them, ifyou like, a kind of superego. International anti-corruption campaigns and struc-tural adjustment, the promotion by international financial institutions and pow-erful states of both independent central banks and democracy, along withhumanitarian intervention and the war on terror can be seen in similar terms.While they differ in their explicit objectives, all of these campaigns operate tofurnish states with troublesome superegos of their own.

References

Aristotle. (1988) The Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Foucault, Michel. (1979) Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin.Foucault, Michel. (1998) The Ethic of the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom. In The Final

Foucault, edited by James Bernauer and David Rasmussen. Boston: MIT press, pp. 1–20.Foucault, Michel. (2001) Governmentality. In Power. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3,

edited by James D. Faubion. Allen Lane: London, pp. 201–222.Foucault, Michel. (2007) Security, Territory Population. Lectures at the College de France, edited by

Michel Seneelart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Gill, Stephen. (1995) Globalization, Market Civilization, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism. Millenium

24(3): 399–423.Hindess, Barry. (1995) Discourses of Power. London: Blackwell.Hindess, Barry. (2005) Investigating International Anti-Corruption. Third World Quarterly 26(8):

1389–1398.Hindess, Barry. (2007) Bringing States Back In. Political Studies Review 4(2): 115–123.Klein, Naomi. (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan

Books.Lukes, Stephen. (2005) Power: A Radical View, 2nd edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Nye Joseph S. Jr. (1990) Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American power. New York: Basic

Books.

Foucault, Discipline and Raison d’Etat in EarlyModern Europe

Richard Devetak

University of Queensland

At certain points in his work, Michel Foucault gives the impression that disci-plinary power is antithetical to sovereign power. In the confrontation betweenHobbes’ Leviathan and Bentham’s Panopticon, Foucault (1980:102, 121) urgeseschewing the model of Leviathan and cutting off the king’s head. However,in his research on ‘‘governmentality,’’ Foucault (1991, 2000) dispels theimpression that disciplinary and sovereign power are antithetical, suggestinginstead that they ‘‘can only be understood on the basis of the developmentof the great administrative monarchies’’ of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies (Foucault 1991:102–103). In this essay I wish to sketch some of theintellectual terrain on which this art of government takes shape; namely, sev-enteenth century theories and practices of state absolutism. I argue that

270 Foucault, Discipline and Raison d’Etat in Early Modern Europe

Foucault’s historical research into confinement, discipline, and governmentalitymay be fruitfully conjoined with intellectual histories and state-building literaturesto develop a fuller account of the historical emergence of the early modernstates-system’s distinctive political rationality—raison d’Etat (reason of state)—andits relation to the fashioning of subject-citizens in response to Europe’s wars ofreligion.

In Madness and Civilization Foucault (1965:60) passes an eloquent, if slightlyelusive, comment on seventeenth century confinement practices relating to beg-gars, the poor, the idle, and the insane: ‘‘The order of states will no longercountenance the disorder of hearts.’’1 This can be interpreted as a general com-ment on the formation of disciplined subject-citizens in early modern Europe, aperiod in which rulers grew increasingly concerned about securing well-orderedstates against social disorder and confessional conflict. For example, the 1555Peace of Augsburg, which embodied the notion of cuius regio, eius religio (whoseterritory, his religion), was an early manifestation of this idea that states wouldno longer countenance the disorder of hearts—in this case, heresy. Princes wereauthorized to demand confessional uniformity for the good of the state. But, asDavid Saunders (1997: chapters 8, 9) points out, this ‘‘confessionalization’’ pro-duced ambivalent results politically, for the exercise of spiritual disciplinary prac-tices as instruments of state-building generated considerable confessional andpolitical resistance across Europe. It was in reaction to this confessional conflictthat absolutist states developed governmental rationalities oriented toward thesurvival and security of the state itself.

A similar argument was forcefully made by Reinhart Koselleck (1988), whoargued that by decoupling politics and religion and establishing a civil govern-ment as the supreme authority, the absolutist state was able to neutralize reli-gious zealotry and achieve social peace. Koselleck identifies Thomas Hobbes asthe central figure in this detheologization of politics, but Samuel Pufendorfcould also be nominated. He not only translated many of Hobbes’s ideas forGerman readers, but he also responded directly to the circumstances of the HolyRoman Empire in the context of the Thirty Years War (Schroder 1999). IanHunter (2001) has demonstrated how Pufendorf’s post-scholastic reconstructionof natural law was intended to reinforce civil government against political theo-logy. For Pufendorf, the state’s primary concern was the security of its citizens,not the salvation of souls. The latter would remain the preserve of the Church,but it would be consigned to the private sphere and excluded from civic affairs.

Hobbes and Pufendorf understood that subject-citizens had to be cultivated,they were not naturally formed. In De Cive Hobbes (1983:92) says that men arenaturally (that is, in their ‘‘natural condition’’) unsuited to society; it is disci-pline that transforms them into political subjects or citizens. Pasquale Pasquino(1986:98), a close collaborator and Italian translator of Foucault, also affirms thisreading of Hobbes, for whom the state of nature is not just the absence of legiti-mate coercive power, but the additional absence of discipline and the use of rea-son (Pasquino 1994:16).2 The state, therefore, is predicated upon discipliningindividuals, turning the natural, pre-civil individual into an autonomous, domes-ticated, governable subject. Pufendorf makes the same argument, saying ‘‘it isdiscipline, not nature, that fits a man for such a society’’ (Pufendorf 1934: VII, i,§3). Explicit in his rejection of Aristotelianism, Pufendorf (1934: VII, i, §4) says,‘‘so far from man being by nature a political creature, that is, such as is fitted atonce by his birth to play the part of a good citizen, but a few of them, and thatonly after long discipline, are developed to such a degree.’’

1I have slightly modified the translation.2Pasquino here refers to Hobbes’s preface to De Cive where he says: ‘Homines ... disciplinam et usum rationis a

natura non habent’ [Men do not receive discipline and the use of reason from nature] (quoted in Pasquino 1994:16).

271Richard Devetak

In this respect, thinkers of state absolutism concur with Foucault’s leading the-sis in Discipline and Punish (1977:170) that ‘‘Discipline ‘makes’ individuals.’’There is an important connection therefore between discipline and state absolut-ism that is essential to understanding the distinctive governmental rationalitythat develops in seventeenth century Europe—one that, as Richard Tuck(1993:xiv) suggests, posits raison d’Etat as a political analogue of discipline.

References

Foucault, Michel. (1965) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translatedby Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, Michel. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan.Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Foucault, Michel. (1980) Two Lectures. In Power ⁄ Knowledge, edited by Colin Gordon, translated byColin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, Michel. (1991) Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, editedby Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, translated by Rosi Braidotti and revised byColin Gordon. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Foucault, Michel. (2000) Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason. In MichelFoucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion. Harmonds-worth: Penguin.

Hobbes, Thomas. (1983) De Cive, translated by Howard Warrender. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Hunter, Ian. (2001) Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Koselleck, Reinhart. (1988) Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society.

Oxford: Berg.Pasquino, Pasquale. (1986) Michel Foucault (1926–1984): The Will to Knowledge. Economy and Soci-

ety 15(1): 97–109.Pasquino, Pasquale. (1994) Thomas Hobbes: Stato di Natura e Liberta Civile. Milano: Anabasi.Pufendorf, Samuel. (1934) The Law of Nature and Nations. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Saunders, David. (1997) Anti-Lawyers: Religion and the Critics of Law and State. London: Routledge.Schroder, Peter. (1999) The Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire after 1648: Samuel Pufen-

dorf’s Assessment in his Monzambano. The Historical Journal 42(4): 961–983.Tuck, Richard. (1993) Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Monster Studies

Michael Merlingen

Central European University

There was a time not that long ago when it was possible to speak about the nextstage in theorizing world politics and be taken seriously. While not a new phasein a progressive disciplinary development, Foucauldian thought has much tocontribute to IR. As papers published in this journal so far have shown, such acontribution cannot be located within the protocols of positive social science. Incontrast to explanatory IR, which tends to naturalize the political it analyses, aninternational sociology that uploads Foucault takes the form of an (ideology) cri-tique. As such it has a strong family resemblance with other critical approacheswhich reveal how individuals and communities are subjugated and exploited bythe social construction of what Gayatri Spivak calls the monstrous North ⁄ Southglobal state; they bring into focus the contingency of this process and explorethe ways in which it is, and can be, resisted.

272 Monster Studies