For Michel Foucault war is the problem of political modernity par excellence. He broached the problem of war while gradually extending his analysis of power from disciplinary to biopolitical regimes and the phenomenon of governmentality. Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, was significant for its early examination of the role and development of the military sciences in the disciplining of individual bodies.1 The History of Sexuality attempted a more ambitious theory of the relations between war and biopower.2 Facing death, Foucault declared that “if God grants me life, after madness, illness, crime, sexuality, the last thing that I would like to study would be the problem of war and the institution of war in what one could call the military dimension of society.”3 The depth of these intentions is clear from lectures given at the Collège de France in 1976, recently published for the first time in English as Society Must Be Defended. Here we discover Foucault posing fundamental questions.
