Daily Inspiration Quote by Michel Foucault

Justice, for Foucault, is never a finished product you can frame and hang in a courtroom. It is a moving target that should distrust its own certainty, because certainty is exactly how power disguises itself as common sense. The line lands like a warning shot at anyone who treats “justice” as a stable moral essence: once justice stops interrogating itself, it risks becoming an efficient tool for managing people rather than protecting them.

The subtext is quintessentially Foucauldian: institutions do not merely apply justice; they manufacture the categories that justice claims to neutrally arbitrate. Criminal, sane, deviant, rehabilitated, citizen. Those labels feel descriptive, but they are also productive, creating the kinds of subjects a society can govern. So “question itself” isn’t self-help advice for the legal system; it’s a demand to expose the hidden scaffolding of expertise, procedure, and surveillance that lets justice present its outcomes as inevitable.

Context matters. Writing in the wake of postwar bureaucratic expansion, prisons-as-policy, psychiatry-as-authority, and the political aftershocks of 1968, Foucault watched modern states perfect a softer, more pervasive discipline. “The work” society does on itself is not optional; it is the constant revision of its own machinery. That’s why the sentence pairs justice with society: both survive only through self-critique, because the alternative is institutional inertia - the slow petrification of norms into “nature.” Foucault’s intent is to make complacency feel dangerous, especially when it calls itself order.