Michel Foucault: "Power Is Everywhere"
*last updated on February 3, 2026
Michel Foucault’s understanding of power has been essential to the way I think about power and powerlessness as intertwined. What I take from him—most of all—is a challenge to binary thinking about power: the habit of imagining that power is simply what some people have while others lack it. In my reading, Foucault pushes against the idea of power as a thing that belongs to anyone in particular. Power is better understood as relational and mobile: it circulates, shifts, concentrates, disperses, and takes shape through countless interactions rather than emanating from a single center.
This page is not an attempt to settle what Foucault “really” meant, nor to argue that one tradition has interpreted him correctly while another has not. I am not a specialist in Foucault, and his work invites multiple interpretations. My goal is more limited and more practical: to show why certain formulations in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: The Will to Knowledge have been useful to my own framework, especially where they illuminate the intertwining of power and powerlessness within the same individuals, social relationships, and systems.
This page is not an attempt to settle what Foucault “really” meant, nor to argue that one tradition has interpreted him correctly while another has not. I am not a specialist in Foucault, and his work invites multiple interpretations. My goal is more limited and more practical: to show why certain formulations in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: The Will to Knowledge have been useful to my own framework, especially where they illuminate the intertwining of power and powerlessness within the same individuals, social relationships, and systems.
Because his writing can be dense, I quote him in clearly marked passages and then pause to translate those passages into my own terms—especially the idea that power can be “everywhere” not as a mystical claim, but because it is produced through relations, including unequal relations, across the whole social field.
In Media Is Us, I develop this concern in a chapter titled “Paradoxes of Power.” I argue that we should take injustice seriously and work to reduce suffering, while also resisting the temptation to explain social problems by dividing people into villains who have power and victims who lack it. Blame can feel satisfying because it implies a clear map of agency and control. But when power is treated as a simple possession held by “them,” the underlying patterns that sustain a system—including patterns that involve ordinary participation—can become harder to see. Foucault’s insistence on power as relational and circulating supports this non-binary starting point.
Foucault’s writing style and the scope of his project leave room for different—and sometimes conflicting—readings of his account of power. In some contexts, elements of his work can be mobilized in ways that seem to reinforce binary narratives of domination rather than complicate them. I note this not to settle an interpretive dispute, but to clarify my own use: I am drawing on the strands of Foucault that emphasize decentered, relational power and the analytic limits of “rulers vs. ruled” as a primary map of social life.
Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge contains an oft-quoted phrase: “Power is everywhere... because it comes from everywhere.” What might this mean? To me, Foucault’s most crucial contribution is that he challenged what I call binary thinking about power. In other words, he challenged the idea that power is simply what some people have while others don’t. Instead of seeing power as concentrated (centered) in certain social institutions or in some people’s hands, Michel Foucault can be read as arguing that power is de-centered, circulating through relations rather than belonging to any single actor. He wrote that power is not a static system but rather a kind of ever-changing flow. At the same time, he did not say that power is equally distributed throughout society at any given moment.
If you want an external summary of this reading, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a helpful gist of Foucault’s argument: “We should not try to look for the center of power, or for the individuals, institutions or classes that rule, but should rather construct a ‘microphysics of power’ that focuses on the multitude of loci of power spread throughout a society: families, workplaces, everyday practices, and marginal institutions. One has to analyze power relations from the bottom up and not from the top down, and to study the myriad ways in which the subjects themselves are constituted in these diverse but intersecting networks. Although dispersed among various interlacing networks throughout society, power nevertheless has a rationality, a series of aims and objectives, and the means of attaining them. This does not imply that any individual has consciously formulated them.”
The Will to Knowledge is a book about sexuality. Foucault’s own life included same-sex relationships, and he became one of the most influential analysts of how sexuality is shaped through power and knowledge. However, rather than focusing here on examples tied to sexuality, I want to make sense of de-centered power through a deliberately stark comparison: a king vs. his subject (for example, a peasant). I like this comparison because it is one of the most extreme examples that come to mind when one thinks about power as a binary: the king is the powerful one, while the peasant is powerless.
The binary thinking about power goes like this: those who have power (e.g., kings) use it to (a) keep this power and (b) make others (e.g., peasants) do things that those others often do not enjoy doing. So the king will write laws to make sure that, if peasants are unhappy, they will not come and take his crown away. This repressive power does certainly exist, according to Foucault, but that’s not necessarily the kind of power that deserves most attention. There is only so much you can do by force.
Foucault suggested that we should analyze power relations not just from top down (how the king controls his subjects) but also from bottom up (how his subjects’ actions make monarchy possible). Focusing only on the repressive power used by the king (e.g., chop off the head of anybody who conspired against him) gives us only half of the story. We should also explore how power grows from the bottom up—for example, how some peasants’ sincere veneration of the king, despite laws and decisions that hurt them, supports the monarchy as a system.
In other words, power is not only embodied in and wielded by the king. Paradoxically, power that the king uses is not entirely his to begin with. This power is made possible through actions of many other individuals, from the very bottom of society to its very top. In some ways, the king is not in control of his own power because he was born into his social position the same as the lowliest peasant was. The king is often a prisoner of society’s rules that he did not create, does not fully understand, and does not even always benefit from (I explore these ideas in more detail in the essay about Louis XIV).
This helps clarify what I take Foucault to be rejecting. If we imagine power as something that spreads from the very top to the least powerful layers of the social system, we will tend to interpret society mainly as a top-down chain of command. In this sense, Foucault could say that it was Louis XIV’s wishful thinking to imagine himself as Sun King (le Roi Soleil), with power emanating from his authority like light from the sun, moving to those close to him and from them further and further away until the rays reached the deepest layers of society.
Foucault’s alternative is not a denial of inequality. It is a different map of where power “is,” and how it operates. Here is what the oft-quoted phrase looks like in context. (I am quoting two short segments and then translating them into my own terms.)
“[Power] is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”
In my terms, “everywhere” does not mean evenly distributed, benevolent, or identical in every setting. It means that power is continuously generated through the everyday functioning of relationships, institutions, norms, and expectations—including relationships that are clearly unequal. Power is not “stored” in one place; it is produced and reproduced through the ongoing web of relations.
A few lines later, Foucault continues: “Power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away. Power is exercised from innumerable points in the interplay of non egalitarian and mobile relations.”
This is one of the clearest intersections with my own claim that power and powerlessness are intertwined. Even when constraints are real and harmful, the systems that impose them are typically sustained through many forms of participation, dependence, compliance, belief, habit, and adaptation—some chosen, some coerced, some not fully conscious. That does not “blame the powerless.” It changes what we are looking at when we ask how a system holds together, and therefore what might be required to change it.
Foucault also insists that power is not only about prohibition or punishment. Power should not be imagined only as a king punishing his subjects for transgressions. Power is productive: it creates rather than simply negates and limits. In the king example, everyday actions of the king’s subjects—customs, expectations, rituals of recognition, practical routines of administration, patterns of deference and fear—can make monarchy possible just as much as (and perhaps more than) the punishment of those who dare to question the king’s authority.
Foucault challenges binary thinking about power quite literally by saying: “Power comes from below. That is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations.”
I read “from below” as a structural claim rather than a moral claim. It does not mean that those “below” are always free, safe, or responsible for what is done to them. It means that power relations are not built only by commands issued from the top; they are also sustained by the many practices and dependencies that make command effective in the first place. This does not mean that the king’s subjects do not suffer from his laws and decisions, or that the king does not enjoy his authority. It would be wrong to interpret Foucault as suggesting that because there is no binary opposition at the root of power relations, there are no inequalities. Rather, the point is that the root of these inequalities is not best understood as a simple, top-down possession of power by one side.
One of the most difficult but important phrases in this section is the following: “Power relations are both intentional and non subjective.”
This can be interpreted as Foucault saying that people—both kings and their subjects—are not automatons: they have plans and they make decisions. Power relations are “intentional” in the sense that actions pursue aims. And yet power is “non subjective” in the sense that nobody is entirely in control of the situation even if it seems that they have quite a bit of power to change things. This is one point where Foucault’s account intersects with my interest in paradoxes of free will: people act, choose, and strategize, and yet the broader pattern that emerges is not authored by a single will.
The following passage appears to support this interpretation (I am breaking it into shorter quoted segments and commenting between them):
“There is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject. Let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality.”
This is a warning against treating society as if it were designed and run like a single mind. Even when patterns are intelligible—when we can see what they “do” and what they “tend to produce”—we may not find a single author of those patterns.
Foucault then expands this point: “Neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society and makes it function.”
Again, this is not a claim that no one has influence, or that institutions do not matter. It is a claim about explanation: if we look only for a single center that “directs the entire network,” we will misunderstand how systems actually operate and endure.
He then describes how local tactics can connect and scale: “The rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed... tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting and propagating one another but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere end by forming comprehensive systems.”
This is one of the most practically useful ideas on this page. A system does not require one mastermind to become coherent. Practices can be explicit and purposeful at a local level, while the larger system that results is a product of many intersecting actions and constraints—actions that often feel “normal” or “necessary” from the inside.
Finally, Foucault concludes with a formulation that is easy to misread if we treat it as an excuse rather than an analysis: “The logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable. And yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them and few who can be said to have formulated them.”
To me, the point here is not that nobody can be held accountable. The point is that accountability and change cannot rely only on the fantasy of identifying a single culprit who controls everything. If power is produced through innumerable relations—many of them unequal—then any serious attempt to reduce suffering has to attend to patterns, incentives, fears, dependencies, norms, and institutions, not only to individual villains.
This brings me to the questions that motivate my own theory of power. If no individual is completely responsible for how society functions, why is society the way it is? If nobody is fully in control, can anybody be held accountable for some individuals’ discomfort or sufferings? If power is not simply located in a single center, how can we hope to change things? These are some of the questions that I attempt to answer with my own framework—one that insists on holding two realities together at once: human agency is real, and constraints are real; power and powerlessness can be intertwined within the same relationship, the same person, and the same social system.
In Media Is Us, I develop this concern in a chapter titled “Paradoxes of Power.” I argue that we should take injustice seriously and work to reduce suffering, while also resisting the temptation to explain social problems by dividing people into villains who have power and victims who lack it. Blame can feel satisfying because it implies a clear map of agency and control. But when power is treated as a simple possession held by “them,” the underlying patterns that sustain a system—including patterns that involve ordinary participation—can become harder to see. Foucault’s insistence on power as relational and circulating supports this non-binary starting point.
Foucault’s writing style and the scope of his project leave room for different—and sometimes conflicting—readings of his account of power. In some contexts, elements of his work can be mobilized in ways that seem to reinforce binary narratives of domination rather than complicate them. I note this not to settle an interpretive dispute, but to clarify my own use: I am drawing on the strands of Foucault that emphasize decentered, relational power and the analytic limits of “rulers vs. ruled” as a primary map of social life.
Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge contains an oft-quoted phrase: “Power is everywhere... because it comes from everywhere.” What might this mean? To me, Foucault’s most crucial contribution is that he challenged what I call binary thinking about power. In other words, he challenged the idea that power is simply what some people have while others don’t. Instead of seeing power as concentrated (centered) in certain social institutions or in some people’s hands, Michel Foucault can be read as arguing that power is de-centered, circulating through relations rather than belonging to any single actor. He wrote that power is not a static system but rather a kind of ever-changing flow. At the same time, he did not say that power is equally distributed throughout society at any given moment.
If you want an external summary of this reading, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a helpful gist of Foucault’s argument: “We should not try to look for the center of power, or for the individuals, institutions or classes that rule, but should rather construct a ‘microphysics of power’ that focuses on the multitude of loci of power spread throughout a society: families, workplaces, everyday practices, and marginal institutions. One has to analyze power relations from the bottom up and not from the top down, and to study the myriad ways in which the subjects themselves are constituted in these diverse but intersecting networks. Although dispersed among various interlacing networks throughout society, power nevertheless has a rationality, a series of aims and objectives, and the means of attaining them. This does not imply that any individual has consciously formulated them.”
The Will to Knowledge is a book about sexuality. Foucault’s own life included same-sex relationships, and he became one of the most influential analysts of how sexuality is shaped through power and knowledge. However, rather than focusing here on examples tied to sexuality, I want to make sense of de-centered power through a deliberately stark comparison: a king vs. his subject (for example, a peasant). I like this comparison because it is one of the most extreme examples that come to mind when one thinks about power as a binary: the king is the powerful one, while the peasant is powerless.
The binary thinking about power goes like this: those who have power (e.g., kings) use it to (a) keep this power and (b) make others (e.g., peasants) do things that those others often do not enjoy doing. So the king will write laws to make sure that, if peasants are unhappy, they will not come and take his crown away. This repressive power does certainly exist, according to Foucault, but that’s not necessarily the kind of power that deserves most attention. There is only so much you can do by force.
Foucault suggested that we should analyze power relations not just from top down (how the king controls his subjects) but also from bottom up (how his subjects’ actions make monarchy possible). Focusing only on the repressive power used by the king (e.g., chop off the head of anybody who conspired against him) gives us only half of the story. We should also explore how power grows from the bottom up—for example, how some peasants’ sincere veneration of the king, despite laws and decisions that hurt them, supports the monarchy as a system.
In other words, power is not only embodied in and wielded by the king. Paradoxically, power that the king uses is not entirely his to begin with. This power is made possible through actions of many other individuals, from the very bottom of society to its very top. In some ways, the king is not in control of his own power because he was born into his social position the same as the lowliest peasant was. The king is often a prisoner of society’s rules that he did not create, does not fully understand, and does not even always benefit from (I explore these ideas in more detail in the essay about Louis XIV).
This helps clarify what I take Foucault to be rejecting. If we imagine power as something that spreads from the very top to the least powerful layers of the social system, we will tend to interpret society mainly as a top-down chain of command. In this sense, Foucault could say that it was Louis XIV’s wishful thinking to imagine himself as Sun King (le Roi Soleil), with power emanating from his authority like light from the sun, moving to those close to him and from them further and further away until the rays reached the deepest layers of society.
Foucault’s alternative is not a denial of inequality. It is a different map of where power “is,” and how it operates. Here is what the oft-quoted phrase looks like in context. (I am quoting two short segments and then translating them into my own terms.)
“[Power] is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”
In my terms, “everywhere” does not mean evenly distributed, benevolent, or identical in every setting. It means that power is continuously generated through the everyday functioning of relationships, institutions, norms, and expectations—including relationships that are clearly unequal. Power is not “stored” in one place; it is produced and reproduced through the ongoing web of relations.
A few lines later, Foucault continues: “Power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away. Power is exercised from innumerable points in the interplay of non egalitarian and mobile relations.”
This is one of the clearest intersections with my own claim that power and powerlessness are intertwined. Even when constraints are real and harmful, the systems that impose them are typically sustained through many forms of participation, dependence, compliance, belief, habit, and adaptation—some chosen, some coerced, some not fully conscious. That does not “blame the powerless.” It changes what we are looking at when we ask how a system holds together, and therefore what might be required to change it.
Foucault also insists that power is not only about prohibition or punishment. Power should not be imagined only as a king punishing his subjects for transgressions. Power is productive: it creates rather than simply negates and limits. In the king example, everyday actions of the king’s subjects—customs, expectations, rituals of recognition, practical routines of administration, patterns of deference and fear—can make monarchy possible just as much as (and perhaps more than) the punishment of those who dare to question the king’s authority.
Foucault challenges binary thinking about power quite literally by saying: “Power comes from below. That is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations.”
I read “from below” as a structural claim rather than a moral claim. It does not mean that those “below” are always free, safe, or responsible for what is done to them. It means that power relations are not built only by commands issued from the top; they are also sustained by the many practices and dependencies that make command effective in the first place. This does not mean that the king’s subjects do not suffer from his laws and decisions, or that the king does not enjoy his authority. It would be wrong to interpret Foucault as suggesting that because there is no binary opposition at the root of power relations, there are no inequalities. Rather, the point is that the root of these inequalities is not best understood as a simple, top-down possession of power by one side.
One of the most difficult but important phrases in this section is the following: “Power relations are both intentional and non subjective.”
This can be interpreted as Foucault saying that people—both kings and their subjects—are not automatons: they have plans and they make decisions. Power relations are “intentional” in the sense that actions pursue aims. And yet power is “non subjective” in the sense that nobody is entirely in control of the situation even if it seems that they have quite a bit of power to change things. This is one point where Foucault’s account intersects with my interest in paradoxes of free will: people act, choose, and strategize, and yet the broader pattern that emerges is not authored by a single will.
The following passage appears to support this interpretation (I am breaking it into shorter quoted segments and commenting between them):
“There is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject. Let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality.”
This is a warning against treating society as if it were designed and run like a single mind. Even when patterns are intelligible—when we can see what they “do” and what they “tend to produce”—we may not find a single author of those patterns.
Foucault then expands this point: “Neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society and makes it function.”
Again, this is not a claim that no one has influence, or that institutions do not matter. It is a claim about explanation: if we look only for a single center that “directs the entire network,” we will misunderstand how systems actually operate and endure.
He then describes how local tactics can connect and scale: “The rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed... tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting and propagating one another but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere end by forming comprehensive systems.”
This is one of the most practically useful ideas on this page. A system does not require one mastermind to become coherent. Practices can be explicit and purposeful at a local level, while the larger system that results is a product of many intersecting actions and constraints—actions that often feel “normal” or “necessary” from the inside.
Finally, Foucault concludes with a formulation that is easy to misread if we treat it as an excuse rather than an analysis: “The logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable. And yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them and few who can be said to have formulated them.”
To me, the point here is not that nobody can be held accountable. The point is that accountability and change cannot rely only on the fantasy of identifying a single culprit who controls everything. If power is produced through innumerable relations—many of them unequal—then any serious attempt to reduce suffering has to attend to patterns, incentives, fears, dependencies, norms, and institutions, not only to individual villains.
This brings me to the questions that motivate my own theory of power. If no individual is completely responsible for how society functions, why is society the way it is? If nobody is fully in control, can anybody be held accountable for some individuals’ discomfort or sufferings? If power is not simply located in a single center, how can we hope to change things? These are some of the questions that I attempt to answer with my own framework—one that insists on holding two realities together at once: human agency is real, and constraints are real; power and powerlessness can be intertwined within the same relationship, the same person, and the same social system.