The Genealogical Conception of Power I: Fields and Networks

Abstract

In the last chapter I attended to parallels between Foucault and the received analysis of power only insofar as the basic skeleton or core assumptions were concerned. Further parallels can be drawn and will be taken up below at least at those points where such allusions can serve to illuminate or strengthen the Foucauldian position. In any case, even the parallels referred to up to this point suffice to show that Stephen Lukes’s assessment of Foucault’s theory of power as radically different from Lukes’s own tradition, more precisely, as “diffuse” and as unable to allow for any links between the attribution of power and the attribution of “causal or moral… responsibility”, is exaggerated at best (Lukes 1986a: 15).⁶