Law and order*: these two notions, [to which] I will try to retu~ next w~-_· and whose destiny in the thought of the American Right you are familiar with, are not just slogans for a stubborn Atuerican extreme Right born in the Midwest. Law and orderoriginally had a very precise meaning which can be traced back well beyond the liberalism I am talking about.t Law and order means that the state, the public authorities, win only ever intervene in the economic orderintl1e-formohhelawana.,lf _ the public authorities really· are limited. to these legal interv~ntiofi5, within this law an economic order will be able to emerge which will be at the same time both the effect and principle of its own regulation.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 939