You can see that all these cases-whether it is the market, the confessional, the psychiatric institution, or the prison-involve taking up a history of truth under different angles, or rather, taking up a history of truth that is coupled, from the start, with a history of law. While the history oferror linked to a. history ofproliibitionshas been attempted fairly frequently, I would propose undertaking a history of truth coupled with a history of law. Obviously, a history of truth should not be understood in the sense of a reconstruction of the genesis of the true through the elimination or-rectification of errors; nor a history of the true which wouldconstitute a historical succession of rationalities established through the rectification or elimination of ideologies. Nor would this history of truth be the description of insular and autonomous systems oftruth. It would involve the genealogy of regimes ofveridiction, that is to say, the cODstirntion ofa partiC11l<lI right (droit) oftruth on the basis of a legal situation, the law (droit) and truth relationship finding its privileged expression in discourse, the discourse in which law is formulated and in which what can be true or false is formulated; the regime of veridiction, in fact, is not a law (loi). of truth, [but] the set of rules enabling one to establish which statements in a given discourse can be described as true or false.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 335