Stuart Elden, “Foucault, Dynastics and Power Relations”, Philosophy, Politics and Critique, Vol 2 No 1, 2025, 40-57.

Michel Foucault’s historical approach is usually understood as moving from archaeology to genealogy, the former describing his work of the 1960s and the latter the 1970s. From the mid-1970s Foucault certainly describes his work as genealogy, and he explicitly relates this to Nietzsche’s project, which he had critically explored in lectures and the famous ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ essay published in 1971. But in lectures and one interview from the early 1970s, Foucault uses another term to describe the complementary approach to archaeology, which is that of dynastics, a mode of analysis he relates to both power and knowledge. Tracing the usage of these terms over time, this article explores their relation. Foucault uses the term dynastics to describe his approach after his explicit engagement with Nietzsche, and before settling on genealogy as the appropriate term. Foucault’s use of dynastics is interesting for many reasons, including the way he glosses this as dunamis dunasteia. Foucault is here thinking about a range of senses, from dynamics or power to dynasties, heredities, and lineage. Even after he drops the term to describe his approach, Foucault is perhaps invoking the notion of dynastics every time he subsequently writes about power relations.

This piece took a long time to come together – it was presented in much shorter form in 2021 and 2022; the first of which led to a shorter online piece. It was then submitted to this journal and accepted back in 2023 – it’s a new journal and the first volume was committed to theme issues. So it’s good to have it finally out.

The article requires subscription, but as ever please email me if you don’t have access and would like a copy.