The problem they had to resolve was the following: given the existence of a legitimate state, which is already functioning in the fully and completely administrative form of a police state, how can we limit this existing state and, above all, allow for the necessary economic freedom within it? The problem the Germans had to resolve was the exact opposite: given a state that does not exist, how can we get it to exist on the basis of this non-state space of economic freedom?

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 560