We Have Yet to Cut Off the Head of the King

Using workplace gender relations and sexual harassment as its case, this essay argues that formal equality and procedural justice, the classical liberal conception of power as individual liberty, are inadequate for contemporary power relations. It examines two post-liberal critiques, Catharine MacKinnon's theory of male dominance and Elizabeth S. Anderson's republican account of the workplace as "private government," crediting both for exposing power's concealment and internalization.

However, the argument further contends that each of these remain trapped in a juridical model of power that treats it as something to be possessed by pre-existing groups and wielded over others. Turning to Foucault, the essay argues that power is better understood as productive, constituting subjects and normalizing conduct so thoroughly that people police themselves and experience domination as freedom. Acknowledging Foucault's central limitation that no normative or prescriptive program exists, it concludes that his genealogy nonetheless offers the most comprehensive account of how power actually operates in modern society, and that genuinely confronting domination demands the radical reconceptualization even liberalism's sharpest critics have yet to achieve.