Society Must Be Defended

What Foucault Actually Said in Those Lectures

Society Must Be Defended is the common English title for Michel Foucault's 1975-1976 course at the Collège de France. The original French title is "Il faut défendre la société." It's the third in his series of annual lectures there, sitting between "Security, Territory, Population" and "The Birth of Biopolitics." The lectures were recorded, transcribed, and eventually published by Gallimard and Seuil in 1997, with the English translation coming out the same year by Henry Bertens and others. The core argument tracks how the concept of "race war" got repurposed in European political thought. Foucault starts with a provocative reading of Boulainvilliers, an 18th-century French nobleman who used the idea of an ongoing racial struggle between the Norman conquerors and the Gallo-Roman population to explain the origins of the French state. That framework later got absorbed into broader ideological machinery, eventually showing up in 19th-century racial theories and state racism. Foucault is tracking the genealogy here, not endorsing any of it.

Where to find Society Must Be Defended

The French edition is widely available through Gallimard. The English translation by Graham Burchell was published by Picador and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You can pick it up through standard retailers or academic distributors. There are also several open-access PDFs circulating from course notes and transcription archives, though those vary in accuracy since Foucault's lectures were originally delivered orally and the transcriptions occasionally miss nuances in his phrasing. For the actual lecture recordings, the Collège de France hosts some of them on their website. The audio quality is rough since it's archival tape from the 1970s, but it gives you a sense of how Foucault actually delivered these arguments in real time, which is different from reading the polished text.

Why People Read This Instead of Just Citing It

Most people encounter references to Society Must Be Defended in political theory, critical race studies, or discussions of state violence without having read the actual lectures. The book gets cited constantly in papers about biopolitics, racism, and the history of sovereign power, usually as a stepping stone to the biopolitical framework he develops more fully in the next course. That means a lot of secondhand engagement with the material, and a lot of misreadings that compound over time. One thing beginners consistently get wrong is the relationship between sovereign power and disciplinary power. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault mapped out how disciplinary mechanisms emerged alongside sovereignty. By Society Must Be Defended, he's complicating that picture. He introduces what he calls "biopower" as a third mechanism, one that operates at the level of populations rather than individual bodies. The triad isn't a clean replacement. All three coexist and overlap in practice, which makes reading Foucault on power more messily useful than any textbook summary suggests. I ran into this problem firsthand when advising someone on a dissertation chapter about state surveillance. They'd built their entire framework around disciplinary power because that was the model they'd internalized from secondary sources. When we went back to the actual lecture, Foucault was explicitly arguing that surveillance in the modern state isn't primarily disciplinary. It's biological. It's about managing risk at the population level through statistics, insurance models, and what he later called governmentality. The whole chapter needed restructuring, but it was a useful correction.

The Key Mechanism: Racialization as a State Tool

Foucault's central move in these lectures is to show how the concept of race becomes a technology of state power. This isn't about individual prejudice or ideology. It's about how states organize populations by creating divisions within the body politic that then justify intervention, protection, and exclusion. The famous line "the function of racism is to introduce a break into the domain of biopower" is often quoted out of context. Foucault isn't saying racism is good or necessary. He's describing a mechanism: the state needs a way to fracture the population it claims to protect, and racism provides that fracture. What most readers miss is that Foucault distinguishes between two forms of racism here. There's the crude biological racism of fascism and extermination policies, and there's a more subtle state racism that operates through legal and administrative categories. The latter is what he finds more interesting because it's more durable. The French Revolution didn't abolish race-based thinking. It transformed it into civic categories that still produced hierarchies. Another counter-intuitive point: Foucault argues that the modern state didn't simply suppress the language of race wars. It absorbed and redirected it. The Jacobins used it. Napoleon used it. The framework persisted because it was useful for organizing political allegiance and justifying state violence. This contradicts the common assumption that racist discourse simply declined after the Enlightenment and resurfaced only in the 19th century. The continuity is stronger and more institutional than that narrative allows.

Problems with the Text

The lectures are not a smooth read. They're lecture notes with digressions, repetitions, and moments where Foucault is clearly working through an argument in real time. The English translation is adequate but occasionally stiff. The transcription from audio introduces ambiguities that don't appear in Foucault's handwritten notes, which are archived at the Collège de France. If you're doing serious scholarly work with this material, check the French original where possible and cross-reference with the lecture transcripts. There's also a genuine limitation to relying on these lectures alone. Society Must Be Defended is foundational but incomplete. Foucault himself treated it as a bridge between his earlier work on discipline and his later work on governmentality. Reading it in isolation gives you an important piece without the full picture. You need Security, Territory, Population for the governmentality angle, and The Birth of Biopolitics for how neoliberalism extends these mechanisms. The individual lectures are dense but not self-contained. If you're looking for a more accessible entry point into the same material, I'd recommend starting with the interviews Foucault gave around this period, particularly "Truth and Power" and "The Question of Method." They distill some of the same arguments in a more direct format. Then go to the lectures if you want the full development. But don't expect Society Must Be Defended to be readable as a conventional political philosophy text. It's an archive of an argument in progress, and that's partly why it's useful.