Reddit reviews Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977--1978 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France (6))

As much as I know JP (and a lot of people here) have an aversion to postmodernism, I think you should all check out Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France in which he criticized Marx's concept of power. They are lectures so very readable comparatively to his other works. Reading them in order is optimal, but the last two are crucial.

Society Must Be Defended

Security, Territory, Population

The Birth of Biopolitics

Foucault makes most of that arguments of the state being made towards violence. Thus having this disstinction between the positive and negative peace in peace studies. Read his lectures before you criticize
https://www.amazon.com/Security-Territory-Population-Lectures-1977-1978/dp/0312203608

Foucault doesn't do any of that because he is a post structuralist (well kind of), so power is always in various methods, it doesn't have to be 1 - 3. He does agree that there is a power-knowledge in which the mechanisms of power produce different knowledge (in this case the political, economic, and cultural means).


I agree with this idea of power that relates to foucault

1. power is not a thing but a relation
   
   
2. power is not simply repressive but it is productive
   
   
3. power is not simply a property of the State.Power is not something that is exclusively localized in government and the State (which is not a universal essence). Rather, power is exercised throughout the social body.
   
   
4. power operates at the most micro levels of social relations. Power is omnipresent at every level of the social body.
   
   5.the exercise of power is strategic and war-like