Marco Brigaglia's Foucault on Power, Law, and Society: A Reappraisal

Queen Mary’s Centre for Law, Democracy, and Society is delighted to host a symposium on Professor Marco Brigaglia's book (Routledge 2026). We kindly ask those wishing to attend to reserve a place. Please find below further information about the book, the author, and the event.

Foucault on Power, Law, and Society offers a detailed analysis and reappraisal of Michel Foucault’s work on power, law, and society. Highlighting the ambiguities, tensions, inconsistencies, and transformations in Foucault’s work, the book shows how, in Foucault’s later years, his ideas gradually converged toward a conception of power that was significantly different from the one that emerges from the works and courses of the mid-1970s, and which came to provide the mainstream understanding of his thought. From the vantage point of this later conception, the book is then able to reframe the tensions and inconsistencies in Foucault’s thought as parts of a multiplex but coherent conceptual system. Foucault’s theses on the development of techniques of power since the 18th century, and on the impact of these developments affected the structure of modern law, are then reformulated to offer a more comprehensive and more balanced appraisal of their significance.

Marco Brigaglia is a Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Palermo, Italy. He is the author of three books and various articles on topics such as the theory of the material constitution; law and power; constitutive rules; the psychology of normativity; rule-based reasoning; the naturalization of normativity and jurisprudence. He has led the European projects Recognise – Legal Reasoning and Cognitive Science and ABIDE – Rule of Law and the Problem of Responsible Obedience.

• Professor Marco Brigaglia, University of Palermo.
• Dr Gavin Byrne, University of Birmingham.
• Dr Jacopo Martire, University of Bristol.
• Dr Isobel Roele, Queen Mary University of London.

• Dr Noam Gur, Queen Mary University of London.

• 14:00-14:15: Presentation by Professor Brigaglia.
• 14:15-15:10: Comments by Dr Byrne, Dr Martire, and Dr Roele.
• 15:10-15:30: Response by Professor Brigaglia.
• 15:30-16:00: Open floor Q&A session.

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