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On Foucault and Wolff or from Law to Political Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2012

MATT CRAVEN
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Abstract

Even if Foucault was generally disposed to avoid the category of sovereignty in his genealogy of governmentality, his lectures on the subject nevertheless have much to offer for our understanding of the historical tradition of international legal thought. The purpose of this article is to try to situate Christian Wolff's account of the jus gentium within Foucault's work, focusing in particular upon the way in which Wolff might be seen to exemplify elements of the transition identified by Foucault from government according to raison d'état to a new art of government informed by the emergence of political economy. This, it is argued, not only makes legible certain elements of Wolff's work that have otherwise remained obscure, but points also to the place of international law in the fine-grained materiality of everyday life.

Keywords

Foucaulthistory of governmentalityinternational lawmercantilism and political economyraison d'étatWolff
Type
INTERNATIONAL LEGAL THEORY: Symposium on Foucault
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 627 - 645
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2012

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References

1 See M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76 (2003) (hereafter, SMD); M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78 (2007) (hereafter, STP); M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79 (2008) (hereafter, BoB).

2 Foucault, SMD, supra note 1, at 265.

3 Foucault, M., ‘Truth and Power’, in Faubion, J. (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–84 Volume 3 (1994), 111Google Scholar, at 122.

4 See A. Hunt and G. Wickham, Foucault and Law: Toward a Sociology of Law as Governance (1994).

5 Ewald, F., ‘Norms, Discipline and Law’, (1990) 30 Representations 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tadros, V., ‘Between Governance and Discipline: The Law and Michel Foucault’, (1998) 18 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For an outline of the various accounts, see B. Golder and A. T. Fitzpatrick, Foucault's Law (2009), 11–52.

7 See, e.g., Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, Chapters 1–3, 7, 10–11.

8 Foucault, supra note 3, at 120.

9 Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 277.

10 Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 2–3.

11 Foucault, supra note 3, at 118.

12 Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 248.

13 Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 108–9.

14 Ibid., at 117.

15 Foucault, SMD, supra note 1, at 45.

16 R. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (2004), 116.

17 M. Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, in Faubion, supra note 3, at 15.

18 Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 19–20.

19 See, e.g., Foucault, supra note 3, at 114; M. Foucault, ‘Questions of Method’, in Faubion, supra note 3, at 230.

20 Foucault, ‘Questions of Method’, supra note 19, at 230.

21 See Foucault, M., ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.), The Foucault Reader (1984), 76Google Scholar, at 85.

22 One may note the parallels here with the similar epistemic periodicity identified in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966, translated in 2002) and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964, translated by Sheridan Smith in 1965).

23 Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 248

24 Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 4.

25 Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 115–254.

26 Ibid., at 287.

27 Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 5.

28 Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 297–306.

29 For two contrasting accounts of the ‘myth’, see B. Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (2003); S. Beaulac, The Power of Language in the Making of International Law (2004).

30 W. Grewe, The Epochs of International Law (2000), 279–342.

31 For an early account, see H. Wheaton, History of the Law of Nations in Europe and America (1845), 69–164.

32 Koskenniemi, M., ‘International Law and Raison d'Etat: Rethinking the Prehistory of International Law’, in Kingsbury, B. and Straumann, B. (eds.), The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (2010), 297CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 A. Sorel, Europe under the Old Regime (1947), 17.

34 Ibid., at 9; see also Ruddy, F., ‘International Law and the Enlightenment: Vattel and the 18th Century’, (1968–69) 3 International Law 839Google Scholar; and, more recently, Beaulac, S., ‘Emer de Vattel and the Externalization of Sovereignty’, (2003) 5 Journal of the History of International Law 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Sorel, supra note 33.

36 Cf. Koskenniemi, supra note 32, at 306.

37 See T. Hobbes, Leviathan (edited by R. Tuck) (1991), 90.

38 Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 6.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., at 9.

41 Ibid., at 10–12.

42 For an elucidating account, see E. Jouannet, Emer de Vattel et l’émergence doctrinale du droit international classique (1998).

43 See I. Hont, Jealousy of Trade (2005), 159–84.

44 S. Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo (translated by Oldfather and Oldfather) (1934).

45 T. Hobbes, De Cive (edited by Warrender) (1984), Chapter XIV, sections 4, 5.

46 C. Wolff, Jus Gentium methodo scientifica pertractum, in quo jus gentium naturale ab eo quod voluntarii, pactii et consuetudinarii est, accurate distinguitur (1749, translated 1934) (Jus Gentium).

47 Wheaton was to comment that Wolff's work was ‘marked by an injudicious attempt to apply the phraseology and forms of mathematics to moral sciences which do not admit of this strict method of reasoning’; Wheaton, supra note 31, at 177.

48 E. de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law Applied to the Conduct and Affairs or Nations and Sovereigns (1758, translated in 1796), Preface, at ix.

49 Ibid., at x–xi.

50 Wheaton, supra note 31, at 177.

51 J. Westlake, Chapters on the Principles of International Law (1892), 70.

52 Pufendorf, supra note 44, Book I, Chapter 6, section 9.

53 Ibid., Book II, Chapter 3, section 19.

54 See, further, T. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (2000), 159–69.

55 White Beck, L., ‘From Leibniz to Kant’, in Higgins, K. M. and Solomon, R. C. (ed.), The Age of German Idealism (1993), 5Google Scholar, at 13. For a parallel discussion of the same in Vattel, see I. Hunter, ‘Spatialisations of Justice in the Law of Nature and Nations: Pufendorf, Vattel and Kant’, available online at www.ched.uq.edu.au/Transitions/Hunter.PratoPaper.pdf.

56 Hobbes, supra note 37, Chapter xiv, sections 4, 5.

57 Wolff, supra note 46, Preface, at 5 (‘Nations certainly can be regarded as nothing else than individual free persons living in a state of nature, and therefore the same duties are to be imposed on them’).

58 See Onuf, N., ‘Civitas Maxima: Wolff, Vattel and Republicanism’, (1994) 88 AJIL 280CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 286.

59 Wolff, supra note 46, Prolegomena, section 9, at 12.

60 Something might be made here of Foucault's distinction between ‘revolutionary’ and ‘radical’ conceptions of law and freedom, Pufendorf being seen to articulate the former and Wolff the latter. See Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 41–2.

61 Wolff, supra note 46, section 40, at 27.

62 Ibid., section 42, at 28.

63 Pufendorf, supra note 44, Book VII, Chapter IX, at 566, note 7.

64 Wolff, supra note 46, section 66, at 40.

65 Ibid., section 157, at 84–5.

66 Ibid., section 73, at 43; see also sections 189–90, at 99.

67 Ibid., section 59, at 38.

68 Ibid., section 193, at 101.

69 Ibid., section 75, at 44.

70 Ibid., section 198, at 104.

71 Ibid., section 210, at 110.

72 Ibid., section 214, at 112.

73 See, e.g., T. Mun, England's Treasure by Forraigne Trade (1664).

74 Wolff, supra note 46, section 206, at 107. The demarcation is rough in the sense that Wolff also confirms that the duties of the nation to itself are also owed to others; ibid., section 180, at 94.

75 Ibid., section 189, at 99.

76 Ibid., section 159, at 85.

77 See, e.g., Westlake, supra note 51, at 72–3.

78 Wheaton, supra note 31, at 185.

79 Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 299.

80 Ibid., at 274.

81 Ibid., at 313.

82 Ibid., at 324.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., at 325.

85 Ibid., at 326.

86 See, generally, K. Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse 1750–1840 (1988); Busch, H.-C., ‘Cameralism as “Political Metaphysics”: Human Nature, the State, and Natural Law in the Thought of Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi’, (2009) 16 European Journal of History of Economic Thought 409CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, M., ‘Rights and Functions: The Social Categories of Eighteenth-Century German Jurists and Cameralists’, (1978) 50 Journal of Modern History 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. Wakefield, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (2009).

87 Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 337.

88 Ibid., at 337–8.

89 Ibid., at 339.

90 Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 13; Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 95. See J.-J. Rousseau, ‘A Discourse on Political Economy’, in The Social Contract and Discourses (1755, translated in 1993).

91 Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 14.

92 Foucault, STP, supra note 1, at 344–5, 351–3.

93 Ibid., at 344.

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid., at 15.

96 Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 16.

97 Vattel, supra note 48, Book 1, Chapter VII, at 93–5.

98 Ibid., Book 1, Chapter x, at 104.

99 Ibid., Book 1, Chapter viii, at 95–102.

100 Foucault, BoB, supra note 1, at 40.

101 Wolff, supra note 46, section 65, at 40.

102 Vattel, supra note 48, Book 1, Chapter vi, at 91.

103 Ibid. Cf. Wolff, supra note 46, sections 153–4, at 83.

104 Ibid., Book 1, Chapter vii, at 93.

105 Ibid.