Abstract

Poulantzas and Foucault on Power and Strategy. Following the events of May 1968, Foucault and Poulantzas both sharpened their analyses of power, developing in their different ways a sophisticated relational analysis of power relations, exploring both their microfoundations and their macrosocial strategic codification. This article focuses on these developments from a Marxist rather than Foucauldian perspective by presenting and critiquing Poulantzas’s own critical appropriation of Foucault’s arguments in Surveiller et Punir and Volonté de Savoir. In particular, it reveals the force of the criticisms of Foucault levelled by Poulantzas in L’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme and the extent to which Foucault’s theoretical development from 1976 onwards could be read as an indirect, unintended response to these criticisms. Having identified the parallels, convergences, and continuing differences between the work of Poulantzas and Foucault, the article then argues that neither theorist offered an adequate solution to the problem of the relation between micro-diversity and macro-necessity – with Foucault still privileging the former, Poulantzas the latter. The concluding section of the article proposes an alternative solution