Michel Foucault's own ideas, many of which are fundamentally critical of liberalism, are fascinating, but when they are imported into the USA, they are turned into their opposite, support for liberalism, the dominant form of piety here (and increasingly in the rest of the world as well), as his liberal admirers tend to emphasize only his criticism of Marxism. They perhaps do not fully appreciate the fact that, in so far as Foucault was indeed critical of actually-existing Marxism, he was critical of it mainly because he thought that it was, in essence, progressivism, the ideology of progress, the same episteme of modernity as liberalism since the 19th century.
Jonathan Rée says that Foucault "expressed uneasiness about his works being translated into English. They were all written, he said, in opposition to the know-it-all leftism of the Communist Party, and without that framework, there was no telling what effect they might have" ("The Treason of the Clerics," 15 August 2005, <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050815/ree>). Prescient he was.
Today, many are critical of Foucault's writing on the Iranian revolution -- some criticisms are inaccurate, attributing to Foucault the ideas of Iranians that he documented without endorsing, as Rée points out. But his writing on Iran is a useful reminder that Foucault did not think much of _either Marxism or liberalism_, as they were actually practiced in the real world (as opposed to certain ideas of certain liberal and Marxist thinkers, the former of which he could use to criticize Marxism and the latter to criticize liberalism), whether they were practiced by the French or the Iranians. And he was right in not being sold on either. -- Yoshie