Foucault on power

Later in his life, Foucault explained that his work was less about analysing power as a phenomenon than about trying to characterise the different ways in which contemporary society has expressed the use of power to "objectivise subjects." These have taken three broad forms: one involving scientific authority to classify and 'order' knowledge about human populations. A second, and related form, as been to categorise and 'normalise' human subjects (by identifying madness, illness, physical features, and so on). The third relates to the manner in which the impulse to fashion sexual identities and train one's own body to engage in routines and practices ends up reproducing certain patterns within a given society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault#Thought

Hegemony

Hegemony, apart from being different from dominance, is complicated by the non-singular establishment of power involving the state and other elite interests . It manifests itself as a vector set of forces that could perhaps achieve singular goals that serve the ruling polity, but is itself in dynamic competition and engagement with other forms and manifestations of power, including what James Scott has famously defined as ‘weapons of the weak.’ To illustrate,….patriarchy… faith…division of labour…

Elite Discourse

One of the questions to explore are elite formations and their modes of power. In particular, how is power embodied, established and communicated in elite discourse? Particularly in the Indian context, these formations are deeply embedded in contemporary historical memory and to a significant extent constitute the angst about speaking historically at all and to thereby be at risk of erasing the nation...

Chapter 1, verse 40

Chapter 1, verse 40, Bhagvad Gita. 

adharmabhibhavat krsna

pradusyanti kula-striyah

strisu dustasu varsneya

jayate varna-sankarah

Here, the roots ‘praduSta’ and ‘duSta’ could be translated as ‘polluted,’ ‘defiled’ or ‘corrupted,’ signifying an important slippage of meanings.

Marginalist Economic Thought and Social Facts

Social ‘facts’ in the Durkheimian sense appear largely outside the purview of marginalist economic thought; even institutional analysis, which has made its dramatic re-entry within the domain recently, is heavily stripped down from its sociological complexity to represent analytically abridged phenomena,

Corruption as value judgment

Corruption is a value judgment about deep social injustice, often in a given context, but an important issue with regarding to defining the word or, more importantly, identifying particular instances as displaying corruption, is whether this normative assessment can be defended at some level of universality. That would require accepting an ethic, which in this case, could be solidarity. Solidarity presents itself as the bare social fact of community but is also rarely operable as such over sustained periods. The hegemony (of community) that it implies could for instance be probed for the extent and types of power formations and resulting violence. The origin of corruption is the deepening of injustice that proliferates across society, beyond such an extent that further pretexts of solidarity cannot be sustained. It implies fracture at compound sites or neatly into narrow oligarchies and the rest, but the recognition of this of fissure could itself take generations.

Rainer Forst

A universal ethic could be minimalist, as in Rainer Forst’s right to justification. The liberal ethic demands more commitment in reasoning, but may be more commonly applied in fact than one might believe – sympathy’s positivism confirms this[1].

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[1] Animal studies too.