Foucault: the power and the law

Abstract

The idea of crisis of Law that can be found in the great part of the contemporary legal literature is based on a deeper question related to the crisis of the classical concepts of Rationality and Representation. Thies paper shows how the Foucauldian´s analysis of the crisis of the liberal legal rationality explains the advent of new forms of legal rationalities, based on the concepts of Norm and Normality, in the, so called, Social Law. Thues, the main concepts involved in the archaeology of legal Knowledge and genealogy of legal powers in the Welfare State society are analysed. Finally, the paper pays special attention to the concept of sovereignty.