I don't know that it's worth dwelling as much on Foucault as some academics like to do, but I was nonetheless interested to learn that there is a stream of criticism that he was too much of a neo-liberal. That's news to me:
More recently, leftist thinkers have cast Foucault as a neoliberal, arguing that the kind of politics incipient in his thought paved the way to the hollowing out of the welfare state that took place under the signs of Reaganomics and Third Way liberalism. This counterintuitive assertion is the principal argument of The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution. The collaborative work of Mitchell Dean, a scholar at Copenhagen Business School, and Daniel Zamora, a sociologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, a version of the book was first published in French in 2019 before being adapted into English this year.
Appearing with the radical publisher Verso, it offers a generous consideration of Foucault’s dalliance with neoliberal thought, coming to the conclusion that the French philosopher used the work of the so-called “New Philosophers” and American neoliberal thinkers in order to question what he perceived as the sclerotic totems of the welfare state. In so doing, they bring together a growing scholarship on the topic, including Foucault and Neoliberalism, a 2016 volume coedited by Zamora to which Dean contributed. Ultimately, though, The Last Man Takes LSD questions the lingering significance of Foucault’s work today, highlighting a greater gap in Foucauldian thought: the absence of a well-developed theory of the state.
Thats definitely the case. I can't speak for Foucault but people criticise him for bringing in a kind of idea that his social contract was in effect "give us free sex and we won't complain about the low wages." So if thats true he's part of the completely perverted leftism we have now. Instead of leftism to help the poor its a weird leftism where dumb left hobby horses are more important than the working poor, and particularly the white working poor.
ReplyDeleteSo the impossible and idiotic goal of getting trucks to run on batteries is more important than a wage rise of an income subsidy.
So the impossible and idiotic goal of getting trucks to run on batteries is more important than a wage rise of an income subsidy.
ReplyDeleteGood point Graeme. It highlights my longstanding gripe against the modern Left which has abandoned the traditional emphasis on lifting up the working poor. So many in the Labor Party emerge from university with those pitiful degrees that are for the purposes of credentialism than learning and understanding the world. They are more interesting in appearing smart than being smart. They prefer the company of the coffee shop crowd with their pretentious pronouncements for virtually signaling purposes than addressing the ever growing of poor in this country. We are heading towards a homelessness crisis with the real estate market going sky high and no party has a solution to this problem nor do they want a solution because many politicians invest in the housing market. We are becoming a nation of renters.
I have long since refused to identify with the modern Left. To my mind they are traitors of their heritage.
Do you have any ideas on how to change the current Left?