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Political philosophy still must learn how to cut off the head of the king: michel Foucault’s well-known model of power as decentralised and anti-juridical could justly be characterised as a radical conceptual operation accomplishing precisely that theoretical feat. in Foucault’s analysis, political power is not, as in liberal political theory, an alienable property possessed by individual subjects who rationally choose, in the name of a greater good, to cede it to a sovereign entity, vested in the person of a king or an impersonal state apparatus, which then in turn, through the threat of force, guarantees the rights and responsibilities of citizenship for its constitutive members (macpherson). that concept of power, Foucault suggests, is a ruse that masks the mechanisms through which power actually operates–but it can also, we contend, map power’s legitimating fictions, fictions specific to the emergent nation-states of Eurocentric …