Rob Schaap on Foucault

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Tue Jun 12 08:04:22 PDT 2001


But the idea that F has a poor or no account of class is different from the idea that his discussion of prison reform is outmoded because it attacks a humanitarianism that is passe in this retributive age. Although I am indeed a liberal, a fan of Hayek, and pretty right wing compared to most here. with my touching faith in free markets, constitutional government and such like, I am not prepared to ditch class analysis, as you well know. My point was not that we should adopt Foucault of D&P in the place of historical materialism, but that we should use Foucauldian-style institutional analyses to fill in the gap in historical materialist explanation between the abstract truth that class relations determine ideas in some way, and the particular determinations that emerge in concrete contexts. As for Foucauldian pessimism, any Marxist who is optimistic in this day and age is blind or fanatical. --jks


>
>Earlier in the thread, you said that "F the SoK [Foucault the
>Sociologist of Knowledge] is Weberian of a high order," & Jim
>Farmelant mentioned that "In his last years, Foucault began to take
>an interest in liberal thought, and he wrote on such people as
>Hayek." While Foucault's description of instances of panopticism,
>bio politics, governmentality, etc. is compelling in the sense that
>he captures a political logic of the modern welfare state (full-blown
>especially in the era of high social democracy -- _the era that has
>already passed_), Foucault suggests that what he found offensive is
>_inherent_ either in modernity (a la Weber) or in anything more than
>the minimal state (a la Hayek). So, Foucault's theory has a
>pessimistic cast especially in his Weberian strain, for he
>practically argues that modernity represents no progress whatsoever
>over the pre-modern state of affairs & that there is no way out of
>the iron cage that he describes, only an ever-present dialectic of
>power & resistance to it. That -- substitution of modernity for
>class relations as the cause of un-freedom -- is a theoretical error.
>
>Yoshie

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