Politics & Power Quote by Michel Foucault

Foucault’s most unnerving move here is to relocate fascism from the black-uniformed fringe to the familiar furniture of the self. He’s not denying the historical regime; he’s insisting that the conditions that make it seductive don’t arrive only with a coup. They arrive as habits: the small, daily cravings for certainty, hierarchy, and permission to stop thinking. By naming fascism as “strategic adversary,” he frames politics less as a battle against a party than against a recurring logic that can colonize any ideology, including movements that claim to be liberatory.

The line that bites is “the fascism that causes us to love power.” It’s a reversal of the comforting story in which power is merely imposed from above. Foucault’s subtext is that domination often works because it recruits desire. People don’t just endure systems; they invest in them, aesthetically and emotionally, because order feels like relief and authority can feel like identity. “To desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” reads like a diagnosis of complicity without moral grandstanding: not a confession of guilt, but an anatomy of attachment.

Context matters: this is the late-20th-century French moment when the aftershocks of World War II, colonial violence, and bureaucratic modernity made “fascism” more than a historical label. It becomes a warning about how institutions, expertise, and even “common sense” can smuggle coercion into everyday life. Foucault’s intent isn’t to blur distinctions between liberal states and fascist regimes; it’s to explain how easily the desire for clean solutions can prepare a society to welcome the boot.