Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976

The historico-political discourse is the tradition of historical writing that explained politics as permanent war between two groups—the conquerors and the conquered, the Franks and the Gauls, the Normans and the Saxons. It is a counter-history because it inverts the official, sovereign history that presents the nation as a unified whole. Instead of tracing continuity and reconciliation, it uncovers a hidden war beneath peace. Foucault finds this discourse in seventeenth-century English and French texts—the Levellers, Boulainvilliers, and others—and argues that it functioned as a weapon in political struggles, allowing subordinate groups to contest the sovereign's narrative by claiming to speak from within the war that sovereignty denies .

Foucault traces a double transformation. First, the counter-history of race war, which was originally a discourse of rebellion, is appropriated by the state to justify sovereign power—racism becomes the means by which the state legitimises its domination of internal enemies. Second, in the late nineteenth century, this state racism is articulated with biopower: the enemy is no longer a distinct race to be conquered but a biological threat within the population to be regulated and eliminated. This is the shift from the 'sword' of sovereignty to the 'administration of life.' Foucault argues that Nazi Germany represents the paroxysmal point of this development, where biopower and sovereign power converge in the genocidal project .

The lectures were delivered in 1975–76 but not published in French until 1997, and in English only in 2003 . Their late appearance means they entered debates that had already been shaped by Foucault's published books. The lectures are now regarded as the crucial link between Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, and they are widely cited in critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and biopolitics. Ann Laura Stoler and others have argued that the lectures provided a genealogy of racism that Foucault never fully developed in his published work. The delay in publication is thus doubly significant: it withheld a major source for decades, and it meant that its insights entered the Anglophone debate only after the theoretical landscape had shifted.

Reception has been mixed. A review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews said the lectures were written in a very different style from Discipline and Punish, 'at once more rambling and less dense,' and that Foucault's thesis about the race war discourse 'really sets itself up as a provocation' rather than a rigorous argument . The same reviewer criticized the treatment of the discourse's origins as 'somewhat murky,' calling the archaeology of race war 'not an exhaustive history' . Defenders argue that the lectures are not intended as empirical history but as a genealogy of the present—an attempt to show how the discourse of permanent war shaped modern politics and racism. The stylistic unevenness is inseparable from the lecture format, which Foucault used for exploratory thinking rather than polished exposition.

The lectures and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 are contemporaneous products of the same intellectual moment. Foucault was completing the lectures in early 1976 while preparing the first volume of The History of Sexuality for publication. The lectures' final section introduces the concept of biopower, which Volume 1 develops in its final chapter. The lectures thus show the conceptual genesis of biopower: the shift from sovereign power over death to a power that administers and regulates life. Readers who find the biopower chapter of Volume 1 compressed or programmatic should turn to the lectures for the fuller argument. Together they mark the point at which Foucault's analysis of power shifts from discipline to biopolitics.

The title is deliberately double-voiced. It refers to the war cry of the counter-history: society—the subordinate group, the conquered race—must be defended against the sovereign power that subjugates it. But it also refers to the state's appropriation of this cry: the state claims to defend society against internal enemies, and racism becomes the instrument of that defence. Foucault is not endorsing the slogan; he is analyzing its circulation and its reversal. The phrase marks the point at which a discourse of resistance becomes a discourse of domination, and it captures the lectures' central concern with how words and ideas migrate across political struggles. The title is a diagnosis, not a programme.