In Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault characterizes the permanent, conflictual relationship that exists “between the two groups that constitute the social body and shape the State [as] in fact one of … permanent warfare” (2003: 88). Foucault argues that acknowledging that “race wars” constitute the substructure of the state enables a new conception of power, one that is simultaneously implicated in knowledge regarding the source of that power: re-conceptualizing the bases of power also demands a shift in knowledge practices. This problem (of power/knowledge) was administrative/managerial from the start: it constituted the conditions of possibility for the exercise of sovereign power, and was itself sovereign-like. “The administration allows the king to rule the country at will, and subject to no restrictions. And conversely, the administration rules the king thanks to the quality and nature of the knowledge it forces upon him” (ibid.: 128–29). Foucault asserts that historical knowledge is produced at precisely this juncture, as a form of counter-knowledge that is the outgrowth of a race war or class war, in which the nobility seek to defend society—their society—from new challengers, “the people,” for example, as well as from the sovereign himself. Thus, modern history germinated as a form of knowledge against absolutist sovereign power, but it was grafted onto the edifice of the state to buttress the sovereign's threatened legitimacy. Thus, “From 1760 onward we see the emergence of institutions that were roughly the equivalent of a ministry of history” (2003: 130 ff).