Michel Foucault and Digger Biopolitics

In his series of lectures delivered at the Collège de France in 1975–76, "Society Must Be Defended," Michel Foucault turned to Thomas Hobbes and the Diggers to find an alternative to sovereignty as an analytic for power. These seventeenth-century sources figure prominently in his discovery of biopower and biopolitics. In this article, I examine Foucault's reading of Leviathan (1651), in which Hobbes struggles between war and right; I then turn to a path not taken in the lectures: a thorough investigation of Gerrard Winstanley's work, in which community emerges as a substantial alternative to law and right.