Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French writer on various but related topics of power, knowledge, discourse, history of thought, ethics, politics, and so on. His name to some summons negative associations of French intellectual fashion, incomprehensibility, and refinements of Marxist anti-liberty positions.
However, his influence in various fields has become too lasting, and too much taken up by people who do not fit into the categories just mentioned, for such reactions to be considered adequate. Foucault himself resisted and mocked labels, which was a serious issue for him because in his work he tried to question the absolute authority of any one system of knowledge and the authority of isolated great thinkers.
He said that once he had written something it was no longer what he thought, which is in part a playful attempt to resist labelling, but also a rather serious point deeply embedded in his thought, about the nature of subjectivity, how it is always more than what we say or more than the identity that power relations impose on us.
It seems to me that any ethics of subjectivity has pro-liberty implications, and despite the image some might have of Foucault as morally irresponsible or indifferent, he increasing developed the idea of self-invented subjectivity, based on care of the self, the art of existence, and related terms.
The self-invention does not mean that Foucault thought we can arbitrarily will our self to be anything, it does mean that he thought we have possibilities to cultivate ourselves to live in a way that relates to, and challenges our existing strengths and goals.
Despite the image for some of intellectual fashion round Foucault, these ideas were partly developed through study of Ancient Greek and Roman ideas about ethics and style of living, which included interaction with scholars in the field.
Another theme he developed through his interests in antique knowledge and culture was that of ‘parrhesia’, Greek word that refers to free speaking, which in the context of ancient city states, particularly the Athenian democracy, had strong overtones of courage in truth telling before the city assembly, a prince of any other source of power.
The ethic of truth telling relates to Foucault’s own work on the language of knowledge and the history of science, as well his political ideas. He did not believe in absolute final systems of knowledge, autonomous of context, but he did believe that trying to find truths within whatever perspectives was an ethical enterprise connected with the kind of self cultivation he advocated.
Foucault’s own father had been a doctor and on at least one occasion Foucault suggested his own work was a continuation of the doctors work that evidently combines ethical and scientific aspects. It must also be said that Foucault was a great critic of the authority of experts, including doctors, so he might also be seen as struggling with the memory of his father.
The ambiguity and the personal involvement in ideas suggested there is very much at work throughout Foucault’s writing, in its tension and energy. It is part of his ‘difficulty’, which also comes from the philosophical and literary interests he had, which relate to the creative possibilities of linguistic disruption. We can see that in the most obvious way when he quotes literary texts of Borges, Beckett and so on.
The existential commitments in Foucault’s work is clear if we think about the book that made him famous, History of Madness (also known as Madness and Civilisation), and his personal experience of mental ill health and psychiatric treatment, particularly in his student years.
We can also think about his constant critique of power and his individual willingness to physically confront power, as in the beatings he received from the police at demonstrations for rights in both France and in Tunisia (where he taught for a few years just after becoming a celebrity public intellectual in France).
Returning to the topic of experts and power, one of Foucault’s most pervasive ideas now is of ‘biopolitics’, that is the way that power expresses itself through prolongation of life. As the state has moved from a basis in the power of death over criminals and other supposed enemies, to a promotion of population, public health, and prolongation of life, it has demanded corresponding powers of intervention and control.
At the extreme this means the ‘racial hygiene’ ideas that German National Socialists used to justify the Holocaust, and in a more routine way means expanding state activity justified by public health goals. We can readily see the contemporary significance of Foucault’s ideas here in relation to ever expanding state and ‘expert’ attempts to limit smoking, drinking alcohol and supersized fizzy drinks, eating sugary and fatty foods, and so on.
The ideas about biopolitics builds on the discussion of modern power in maybe his most widely read book, Discipline and Punish, which deals with the way that the prison becomes the central means of punishment after the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and suggests the dangers of Enlightenment becoming a controlling form of rationalism.
The way the prison works, around observation, or surveillance, of prisoners to ensure adherence to prison routine was the model of modern power for Foucault including factories, schools, and armies, in a model of ‘disciplinarily’. Again Foucault’s intellectual interests correspond with life commitments, as he was a prominent campaigner for prisoner rights, under the inspiration of the man with whom he shared his life, the academic sociologist Daniel Defert.
Foucault’s analyses in Discipline and Punish, and related material, draw on the ‘classical sociology’ of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber with regard to norms and authority, as his views on the emergence of the modern state draw heavily on the ‘pre-sociology’ to be found in the historical and social work of the classical liberal thinkers Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron of La Brède and Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville.
There is some drawing on Marx, but one should be wary of those left socialist inclined advocates of Foucault who emphasise this strongly, since they don’t mention the other points of orientation so much. The same applies to remarks Foucault made about the importance of the twentieth century Marxist theory of the Frankfurt School, as those who emphasise such remarks ignore accompanying remarks about the importance of Max Weber and ‘Neoliberalism’ (i.e. classical liberal and libertarian thought since the Austrian Liberal school of Menger, Hayek, Mises etc).
Strange as it might seem, Foucault suggests we take Marx, Weber, the Frankfurt School, and Neoliberalism together as attempts to explore liberty and power. Maybe it shouldn’t seem so strange, however awful the consequences of Marxist ideas coming in power have been, that does not mean we should ignore Marx and Marxism, which starts by drawing heavily on classical liberalism and does have some noteworthy things to say about constraints on liberty in a capitalist society, even if offering bad solutions.
Certainly Foucault is not your man if you think a pro-liberty position means uncritical embrace of the links between private enterprise and state power, but since the liberty tradition has in a very significant way been concerned with criticism of rent seeking and crony capitalism, of the drives within capitalism to betray itself, then I don’t think we need to reject Foucault in this area. Indeed it is even a part of the liberty tradition to reject ‘capitalism’ as tied to the state and concentrations of power and argue for markets, property, and association rights liberated from state alliances with economic power.
This is the core of left-libertarianism, and even Foucault’s most Marxist leaning fans would find it hard to deny that left-libertarian is an appropriate label for Foucault. Clearly he was a natural maverick and critic of all power, including state socialist power. I suggest his life, his activism, and his writing, can be taken as an inspiration for all liberty-inclined people. Even on the more conservative side, Foucault’s thoughts about self-cultivation are a version of virtue theory, of an emphasis on cultivating virtue, so Foucault has a lot to offer to all streams of liberty thought.
Those Foucault texts most relevant to political thought about liberty
Monographs
History of Madness (also published as Madness and Civilisation)
Discipline and Punish
History of Sexuality (3 volumes: Will to Knowledge, The Uses of Pleasure, The Care of the Self)
Collected lectures
(Foucault’s rather early death means that much of his work was in lectures that would have been later revised into published material. The task of bringing those lectures into print is still underway).
Fearless Speech
The Government of Self and Others
The Birth of Biopolitics
Security, Territory, Population
Hermeneutics of the Subject
Society Must be Defended
Notes On Liberty 
Reblogged this on Stockerblog.
I’m enjoying these very much, I hope there are more to come.
[…] the Middle Ages” more, so they are tied for first place. DONE! I also enjoyed his posts on Michel Foucault and Francesco […]
Reblogged this on Foucault News.
Reblogged this on Progressive Geographies and commented:
Barry Stocker on Foucault and liberty.
“His name to some summons negative associations of French intellectual fashion, incomprehensibility, and refinements of Marxist anti-liberty positions.”
Yes. You can redeem almost anything if you try hard enough.
In my limited experience – which almost certainly involves bad sampling – American scholars who think well of Foucault don’t know French. The problem with English translations of high-fallutin French intellectuals is that they actually improve on the originals.
Clare, Stuart. Thanks for the reblogs. Jacques. I’ve read Foucault in French and English, can’t say I’ve noticed much much difference in comprehensibility. I don’t regard Foucault’s more ‘obscure’ texts as obscure without reason, there is genuine purpose in exploring the more difficult aspects of expressing the questions concerned, not an empty desire for pseudo-profundity
Ok, Barry. I stand corrected on the translation issue but I still don’t understand why anyone would care. I don’t know what the “genuine purpose” is. Of course, it could be that I am like the deaf man denying the existence of music. Why not serve us a small sample here?
Jacques, I’ll try to rise to that challenge, but it’ll need some thought, not really an instant response in the comment thread sort of task. I’ll just note for the moment that Foucault can be placed in a French tradition of writing philosophy in a literary way, which goes back to Montaigne. It is of course not the only way that notable French philosophers have written, but there is more of that in France than in Britain. Foucault was also picking up on a German way of of doing the same, which most obviously includes Nietzsche but goes back to the late 18th century. Another way of placing Foucault’s style is in relation to Vico. Foucault does not say much about him, but is evidently impressed with the Viconian idea that the earlier stages of history fearue a more poetic language and consciousness. The idea of the limits of language in literature as being related to the limits of thought and experience has strong sources in the late 19th century/early 20th century and evidently Foucault was taken with this approach, which had already fed into some philosophy in Germany and France. None of this justifies Foucault’s style, but it does show that it comes out of a tradition of some kind. Some prefer the lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France, because they lack the kind of limit of language style which can be found in published texts, though even in the published texts not in such a radical way as some French thinkers. Anyway,maybe you’d find the lectures of some interest, if you haven’t already had a look and formed your own opinion.
Barry: You are giving me much more and much less than I hoped for. First, let me say that I don’t doubt Foucault comes out of some French philosophical tradition. Most 20th century French philosophers whose names the general reading public knows have one thing in common: They read the German philosophers – including Marx – in a bad translation that stuck with with them. (They were not able or did not want to recognize bad translation.)* As far as form is concerned, Foucault is certainly not an offspring of Montaigne, a model of clarity in expressing complex ideas.
My narrow challenge was this: Give us a quotation from Foucault of a level of obscurity such that it would befuddle your average reasonable well-educated person such as myself (” l’homme moyen honnete” ) and tell us why such a person should take the trouble to decipher it. There are two nested parts to this challenge: 1 Does Foucault ever say anything new not abundantly available elsewhere? 2 Is that something so precious that it justifies the decrypting?
I believe you will not be able to meet this challenge but I am educable. Freeing old men of their prejudices is a noble task though a little frivolous since they will soon be gone!
* The popular success of Bernard-Henri Levy – a mediocre French philosopher, or not one at all, I think you might say – may be traceable entirely to the fact that the thousands of people for whom he writes understand him.
Well Jacques, my last comment was not supposed to be the full reply to your preceding comment, as I tried to make clear. As I said I needed time to think before posting anything from Foucault. I was just preparing the way with comments on the background to Foucault’s style. On Montaigne, how easy is Montaigne? Maybe he seems clear to you and other French people who read him in the Lycée. I teach a lot of Montaigne in Istanbul and students don’t find him easy. Maybe his style at a sentence by sentence level is clearer than Foucault, but I would say only Foucault at his most supposedly obscure. Montaigne can seem clear because he writes in a conversational way, appearing to just comment informally on something in his mind. However, his essays are endlessly digressive and shifting in viewpoint and claim within just one essay, some of which are very long and very detached from the starting point. He mixes quotations from classics, historical illustrations, unreliable anecdotes, and personal memories, in ways which could be often said to obscure as much as clarify any underlying claim, though sometimes a relatively simple maxim seems to be the point. Even there, one really has to think about the relation between the apparent maxim and Montaigne’s shifting point of view to get the underlying point/points. The way that the style interacts with Montaigne’s mind and the uncertainties of his point of view, and the persistent anxieties about saving his world of experience from extinction in death, all have some echoes in Foucault and in various ways it seems to be me that Foucault works on a basis in Montaigne, even if adding the kind of abstract language, vocabulary and sentence construction coming from a mixture of German philosophy since Kant, and poetic-literary language since the Romantics.
Now for a couple of quotations. The first is a random selection from the book that first made him famous, History of Madness. The second is a less random selection from his late essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’.
History of Madness, page 29 (2006 Routledge edition translated by Murphy and Khalfa)
Rising up in spirt towards God and sounding the bottomless depts into which we find ourselves plunged are one and the same, and in Calvin’s experience madness is the measure of man when he is compared to the boundless reason of God.
In its finitude, man’s spirit is less a shaft of the great light than a fragment of shadow. The partial and transitory truth of appearances is not available to his limited intelligence; his madness discovers but the reverse of things, their dark side, the immediate contradiction of their truth. In his journey to God, man must do more than surpass himself—he must rip himself away from his essential weakness, and in one bound cross from the things of this world to their divine essence, for whatever transpires of truth appearances is not its reflection but a cruel contradiction.
‘What is Enlightenment?’ (as published in Michel Foucault Essential Works vol 1, ed. Rabinow, 2000), p 315
We must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, and through a historical ontology of ourselves.
1. This philosophical ethos may be characterised as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analysing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question must was that of knowing what limits knowledge must renounce exceeding, it seems to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over.
In the first passage above, Foucault uses a language recognisable to anyone who has read much Heidegger to discuss the thought of the 16th century religious reformer Calvin. Since Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time has some roots in Reformation theology this maybe a particularly intriguing way of using Heidegger. The finitude of man compared to God is something that alludes to Heidegger’s understanding of the essential mortality, finitude, temporality of humanity. It also brings out how for Calvin, madness is an aspect of the limitation of human consciousness compared with that of God. In this passage Foucault is bringing together 16th century religious thought, the way that some 20th century philosophy approaches the themes of earlier philosophy and religion when concerned with questions of the limit of experience, how the question of defining ‘madness’ relates to the questions of defining consciousness, experience and limits from the viewpoints of the dominant ways of thinking and organising experience at the time, the ideology operating in the institutions and laws which are applied to the ‘mad’. What Foucault also brings out is that madness’ was closely related to a positive idea of transcending human bounds, so that the stigmatisation of madness then as now is intimately associated with altered states of consciousness that are given value. The use of a ‘mad’ perspective in 20th century Surrealism is one of the aspects that Foucault is alluding to here, an the ways that such aestheticised encounters with the limits of consciousness and rationality relate to earlier religious ideas of exalted spiritual states.
In the second passage above, Foucault is still concerned with the limit and while individual passages in Foucault may seem obscure, he had a very persistent interest in limits of experience, and related questions over some decades, so it is possible to build up an accumulating familiarity with Foucault’s treatment of the issue. The ‘message’ in that passage is the value of moving from Enlightenment of a Kantian kind, which places limits on the claims of universality, to a a kind of Enlightenment based on exploration of the non-necesisty of limits, the exploration of the plurality of individual instances unlimited by rationalistic limitations. This is a very Montaigne like thought, even if the language is more ‘obscure’. There is a commitment to a ‘historical ontology’, that is the understanding of ourselves as individuals and of the ‘human’ in general as the product of contingency and circumstances rather than a deep self or deep humanity detached from experience and history. This is both a proposal for the study of human institutions and discourses as Foucault already had been doing for decades and a proposal for an ethics which values subjectivity in its variability and different contexts. There is no clear limit to knowledge or consciousness, just as there is no clear limit between different areas of knowledge or experience. Foucault’s idea of Enlightenment knowledge and ethics is to keep exploring and pushing at the limits that have been assumed, which is a way of showing their continent constructed nature as well as the way that consciousness is always dealing with a sense of inside and outside that is open to transformation.
In both passages above, I would argue, Foucault uses allusion and compression of multiple allusions, to show connections and differences, and to make us think about those connections and differences. Calvin’s thought about theology has implications for defining ‘madness’, Enlightenment scientific inquiry is related to assumptions about limits of reason and experience. The ‘obscurity’ arises from the way that the syntheses, allusions, and challenges to a priori boundaries are put in a language which shows these things at work rather than just saying that they exist and makes us aware that the language we constantly use is structured and energised by the unions and tensions contained within these thoughts.
If one simply wants the ideas about institutions, history, discourse and so on in Foucault, without the ‘obscure’ language, then to some degree these can be found in Foucault’s lectures, and then maybe more so in those commentators committed to a clarification of Foucault for those not immersed in the use of philosophical language to convey meaning beyond the most literal transmission of messages, commentators including Gary Gutting, Ian Hacking, and Hans Sluga. I recommend them to anyone who finds Foucault’s style to be a chore but wants to find out about ideas which have certainly influenced a lot of work in the humanities and the social sciences.
Barry: Thank you. You answered fully; you responded completely to my request. I think you also made my point abundantly about obscurity. But, like a man who does not hear music and who considers the possibility that he may be deaf, I will not deny the existence of music! But, the passages you quoted in response to my request are unintelligible on their own except if one is deeply interested. Perhaps, F. uses a technical language that I am no more expected to understand than I understand the language of physics.
I find a beginning of an understanding of my possible deafness in your description of Montaigne’s style. I don’t disagree with it at all and yet, his writings are clear to me. I mean in French, of course; I never had the curiosity to try and read him in English, obviously. You may be right that comprehension may depend on one’s intellectual diet as a young person. Yet, it would be paradoxical if I understood Montaigne better than your Turkish students mostly because I first encountered him when I was a bad high school student in France suffering from acute testosterone poisoning!
As you may have guessed, I am permanently on the war path against what I think is the inability of recent French thinkers to express their thought clearly and to gain cachet from their very obscurity. Treating them seriously is a disease in American Modern Languages departments, I believe. Perhaps, it was contracted from the UK, an interesting speculation. Since you operate in Istanbul, far from my playing fields, I will refrain from persecuting you. Go in peace!
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One more thing: All English language writers, including you, Barry, should stop using honorifics when they refer to French intellectuals and scientists. Montesquieu’s name is “Montesquieu,” not “Baron de.. (followed by the name of some cow shit stained little field in some obscure part of France.) Montesquieu was great because of his keen analyses; his being an aristocrat made no contribution.
The French cut off some heads, including the head of a king, to get rid of this kind of nonsense. If there is one part of the bloody French revolution that was positive, that is it. English titles are different because some of them are earned. It’s a small thing but following my advice will improve your credibility instantly with common users of the French language.
I know I sound exercised by this small thing. That’s because the phenomenon I denounce here is closely associated with one of the reasons I emigrated (and, tragically, left behind “rilletes de canard”). It’s an issue of intellectual decency, of the kind abundantly demonstrated by the French Annales school.
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[…] [23] Barry Stocker, “Another Liberty Canon: Foucault,” Notes on Liberty, July 14, 2014, https://notesonliberty.com/2014/07/17/another-liberty-canon-foucault/ […]