'That is of course why the philosophy of right subsequently rewarded Hobbes with the senatorial title of “the father of political philosophy.” When the State capitol was in danger, a goose woke up the sleeping philosophers. It was Hobbes'. Can you perform an exegesis this Foucault quote.

ChatGPT said:

Here’s a close, line-by-line exegesis of that Foucault remark. It’s a deceptively playful sentence that holds together multiple strands of Foucault’s view of Hobbes, sovereignty, and political philosophy as a discipline.

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1. “That is of course why the philosophy of right subsequently rewarded Hobbes with the senatorial title of ‘the father of political philosophy.’”

Foucault’s target here is the tradition of political philosophy, especially the “philosophy of right” (essentially early modern juridico-philosophical thinking on sovereignty, the state, law, legitimacy).

He’s pointing out—ironically—that this tradition retrospectively canonised Hobbes.
Why? Not because Hobbes opened a profound space of political thinking, but because he supplied the philosophical tradition with something it desperately needed:
a justification of the modern state as the solution to disorder.

To call Hobbes “the father of political philosophy” is, for Foucault, less a historical judgment and more a self-congratulatory move by the tradition that depends on Hobbes to ground its own authority.

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2. “When the State capitol was in danger…”

Foucault here invokes the myth of the Capitoline geese of ancient Rome.
According to legend, when Gauls attempted a night raid on the Capitoline Hill, the sacred geese of Juno honked, waking the Roman defenders and thereby saving the state.

The “State capitol was in danger” thus means:
the very institution of the state, the core of political order, was threatened.

And in Foucault’s reading:
The political-philosophical tradition felt endangered because the very foundations of sovereignty (its legitimacy, its necessity, its rationality) were being questioned in early modern Europe.

Civil wars, religious conflict, and the breakdown of medieval order produced a crisis:
What justifies authority?

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3. “…a goose woke up the sleeping philosophers.”

This is the key to the joke.

In the Roman legend, the geese awake the soldiers.
In Foucault’s retelling, Hobbes is the goose, and the “soldiers” are the philosophers of right—the custodians of political order in theory.

The image is deliberately absurd:
Philosophers slept through the danger, oblivious, until Hobbes’s dramatic intervention jolted them awake and gave them a new conceptual weapon: the Leviathan—the idea that sovereignty must be absolute, unified, indivisible, and grounded in fear and contract.

Hobbes provides the “alarm cry” that prevents political philosophy from collapsing along with medieval structures.

Thus:
Hobbes saved political philosophy by giving it the conceptual framework that allowed the modern state to be thinkable.

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4. “It was Hobbes.”

This closing sentence is delivered with deadpan finality.

Foucault is saying:
If anyone saved the state—and the state-oriented political philosophy that depends on it—it was Hobbes.

But this is not praise.

For Foucault, Hobbes’s genius is also his crime.
He is the architect of the juridical identity of modern power:

• Sovereignty as a single locus of power

• Subjects as contractually bound

• The primacy of obedience

• The narrative of “war of all against all” as justification

• The reduction of the political field to sovereign vs. subjects

This is the very framework Foucault is trying to displace.
So the passage is both comedic and deeply diagnostic.

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Putting it together: What is Foucault doing?

1. A Genealogical Move
He is showing that political philosophy as a discipline owes its coherence to a historical accident (Hobbes’s intervention during a moment of crisis), not to timeless truth.

2. A Satirical Move
He mocks the self-importance of political philosophers by casting them as soldiers saved by a honking goose.

3. A Critical Move
He positions Hobbes as the origin of the juridico-sovereign model of power—the very model Foucault wants to critique and surpass in his analyses of discipline, biopower, and governmentality.

4. A Mythological Move
By invoking the Capitoline geese, he suggests that Hobbes’s role is less rational than legendary: the “father” of political philosophy is born out of panic, myth, and noise—not reason.

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The deeper implication

Political philosophy didn’t create the modern state.
It awoke to the state—after Hobbes honked loudly enough.

And from that point onward, political philosophy retroactively treated Hobbes as its own founder, even though:

• Hobbes was reacting to concrete dangers (civil war, religious conflict)

• His system depends on fear and imagination

• His picture of sovereignty is a prophylactic fantasy

• His construction is a kind of myth disguised as rationalism

Thus Foucault is saying:
The supposed “foundations” of political philosophy are themselves founded upon an anxious alarm cry.