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Abstract

This article intends to recover Michel Foucault's discussion of the tradition of the Modern Political Theory with regard to the issue of power, presenting an historical reflection about its modern practices in the Western world. In this sense, it counterposes an analytical and microphysical perspective to the
"juridical-discoursive" approach to power, hegemonical in the modern political thought, pointing at some historical matrices of theoretical and practical order, genealogically associated to some political practices which are charac- teristic of modernity, the disciplines and the anatomical policy of the bodies, the biopolitics of demographic regulation and control; the government of behaviours and the Christian parish view.