Where was I wanting to go? I wanted to analyze a certain system of power: disciplinary power. It seemed to me, in fact, that we live in a society of disciplinary power, that is to say a society equipped with apparatuses whose form is sequestration, whose purpose is the formation of a labor force, and whose instrument is the acquisition of disciplines or habits. It seems to me that since the eighteenth century there has been a constant multiplication, refinement, and specification of apparatuses for manufacturing disciplines, for imposing coercions, and for instilling habits. This year I wanted to do the very first history of the power of habits, the archeology of those apparatuses of power that serve as the base for the acquisition of habits as social norms.
Let’s consider this notion of habit. If we look at it in eighteenth century political philosophy, habit has a primarily critical use. This notion makes it possible to analyze law, institutions, and authority. The notion of habit is used for knowing the extent to which something that appears as an institution or authority can be founded. To everything appearing thus founded, the following question is put: You claim to be founded by the divine word or by the sovereign’s authority, but are you not [quite simply] a habit? This is how Humean criticism works, using the notion of habit as a critical, reductive instrument, because habit, on the one hand, is only ever a result and not an original datum—there is something irreducibly artificial in it—and, on the other hand, while unable to lay claim to originality, it is not founded by something like a transcendence: habit always comes from nature, since in human nature there is the habit of contracting habits. Habit is both nature and artifice. And if this notion was used in the political and moral philosophy of the eighteenth century, it was in order to get away from anything of the order of traditional obligations founded on a transcendence, and to replace these obligations with the pure and simple obligation of the contract; in order to replace these traditional obligations, which are shown to be only the effects of habit, with a game of obligations in which the will of each will be voluntarily bound and actualized in the contract. To criticize tradition through habit in order to contractualize social bonds, such is the essence of this use of the notion of habit.
Now it seems to me that the use of the term habit in the nineteenth century is different. In political literature, it ceases being regularly used in a critical way. On the other hand, it is used prescriptively: habit is what people must submit to. There is a whole ethics founded on habit. Far from habit limiting the sphere of morality, of ethics, a whole politics of habit is formed that is transmitted by very different sorts of writing—writings of popular moralization or tracts of social economy.--Michel Foucault The Punitive Society: Lectures at the College de France 1972-1973, translated by Graham Burchell, 28 March 1973, pp. 237-238. [Emphasis in original.]
The first quoted paragraph above is about as lucid a description of the political significance of Foucault's projects throughout the 1970s. We can describe Foucault's project as the exploration of the social mechanisms that make us unselfconscious rule followers not the least that make us productive agents. (Notice that he is not interested in individual habits; just the habits that instantiate or effectuate social norms.)
But in the next paragraph he inscribes this project, which could easily have been the start of an ethnographic or sociological project (with social psychology mixed in), into what we might call a 'natural history' of the development of the conceptualization of habit. It could be instructive to try to connect this natural history of habit with Foucault's more famous natural history of homo economicus in his Birth of Biopolitics lectures. And the ground-zero of this project is Hume's philosophy which generates "Humean criticism" in political philosophy.
In their footnotes, the editors of The Punitive Society usefully refer to some key passages in Hume's philosophy to explain what Foucault may have in mind. But they don't venture any suggestions on who these Humean critics in political philosophy might be. This is a shame. Because Foucault explicitly mentions the analysis of "law, institutions, and authority," I suspect Foucault is thinking of Beccaria, who is a Humean in several ways (albeit not only Humean): for example, "the power of habit," Beccaria writes, "is universal over every sensible being. As it is by that we learn to speak, to walk, and to satisfy our necessities, so the ideas of morality are stamped on our minds by repeated impressions." (Crimes and Punisments, Chapter 28) Since Beccaria plays a very prominent role in The Punitive Society, this would be my best guess. However, I have been unable to find any other use of 'Humean criticism' in Foucault's thought so this is quite speculative.
However, it is not purely speculative because thinking of Humean criticism in terms of Beccaria can explain something otherwise deeply puzzling, interconnected features about Foucault's claim. As is well known Hume was a critic of the social contract. And, in fact, many have read Hume's philosophy and (especially) history as friendly to the conservative principles of the Tories and critical of the Whig and Lockean social contract theory. Something accentuated by Hume's argument in his (1752) essay "Of the Original Contract." So, it is odd to see Foucault attribute to the Humean a desire "to get away from anything of the order of traditional obligations founded on a transcendence, and to replace these obligations with the pure and simple obligation of the contract; in order to replace these traditional obligations, which are shown to be only the effects of habit, with a game of obligations in which the will of each will be voluntarily bound and actualized in the contract. To criticize tradition through habit in order to contractualize social bonds, such is the essence of this use of the notion of habit."
To be sure, one can read Hume as undermining the grounds of many (if not all) "traditional obligations founded on a transcendence" (and certainly the suspicion he does so cost him the Chair at Edinburgh). But there is no reason to attribute to Hume (the stereotypical liberal view) of ascribing to "a game of obligations in which the will of each will be voluntarily bound and actualized in the contract." It's also not obvious Hume is really criticizing tradition through habit (as opposed to diagnosing habit as the source of tradition).
But Beccaria does combine a Humean moral psychology and social theory with a social contract theory! Beccaria introduces it in chapter 3 as follows:
The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes; and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact...If every individual be bound to society, society is equally bound to him by a contract, which, from its nature, equally binds both parties. This obligation, which descends from the throne to the cottage, and equally binds the highest and lowest of mankind, signifies nothing more, than that it is the interest of all, that conventions, which are useful to the greatest number, should be punctually observed. The violation of this compact by any individual, is an introduction to anarchy.
What's interesting about Beccaria's social contract theory is not just its incipient utilitarianism, which alongside the social compact is not really analyzed in any great depth (and probably is in tension with the Humean elements in his social theory), but rather that the contract itself is between the individual and society. (Beccaria has moved quite a bit a way from Locke's account of society and is anticipating a more Smithian/Fergusonian approach.) And as the final sentence of the quoted passage already reveals, the purpose of law, then, is, as Beccaria makes explicit in chapter 35, "only intended to maintain the social compact, and not to punish the intrinsic malignity of actions." (This feature Foucault comes to admire in Bentham and in Becker and Stigler.)
And, indeed, as Foucault has noticed, the obligation that is generated by the (implied) social contract is to follow social norms, especially those social that serve the majority. And, as Beccaria argues at much greater length in Crimes and Punishments, if the institutions of society are properly designed, or function well (and, as he notes in chapter 40, the laws don't incentivize norm violation), than citizens can be counted on doing so from habit.
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