Foucault and the Birth of the Police

Abstract

This article addresses the research of meaning and significance of the concept of police in the works of Michel Foucault. Although Foucault did not offer a theory or a systematic history of the development of the police, we argue that Foucault's concept of police is less part of his archaeological project and the analytics of discursive practices, but more a genealogical one. Foucauldian genealogy of police is about the birth of a network of branched lines of regulation practices. In this paper, our attempt is to show how the historical emergence of police practices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, particularly in France and Germany, was a significant modulation within the two large dispositives of power - the one of sovereignty and the one of discipline. With his genealogy of police practice, Foucault demonstrated how regulatory practices of power/knowledge gradually penetrated the population. The police emerged as a form of regulatory practice pervaded with a new conception of life - the life of population and society or what was later to become the permanent object of the police.