capitalism

180 Foucault, Michel (1926–1984)
to take shape in the early years of the 21st century. The outcome
of that debate will likely determine the nature of
America’s role in the world for many years to come.
TGC and MI
See also Military-Industrial Complex; Peace and Pacifism; War; War
on Terror; War Powers
Further Readings
Bandow, Doug. Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.
Longwood, FL: Xulon Press, 2006.
Carpenter, Ted Galen. Peace and Freedom: Foreign Policy for a
Constitutional Republic. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2002.
Dempsey, Gary T. Fool’s Errands: America’s Recent Encounters
with Nation Building. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2001.
Lynch, Tim, and Gene Healy. Power Surge: The Constitutional
Record of George W. Bush. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2006.
Taft, Robert A. A Foreign Policy for Americans. New York:
Doubleday, 1952.
FOUCAULT, MICHEL (1926–1984)
Michel Foucault was one of the most influential social theorists
of the 20th century. He held a chair at the Collège de
France; his studies on mental health, prison and penal
reform, sexuality, and epistemology have profoundly influenced
their respective fields. Particularly in academic
humanities, Foucault’s work enjoys widespread influence.
Much of Foucault’s work drew on his personal experience.
He was born in Poitiers, France, the son of a surgeon,
and he spent a good part of his adult life critically reexamining
the history of medicine, particularly its practitioners’
troubling use of coercion. His early years in the rigidly
structured elite French educational system seem to have
deeply informed his analysis of institutionalized power
relationships. In addition, his open homosexuality—and his
embrace of its sadomasochistic subculture—led him to
doubt the prevailing views regarding modern sexuality.
In each of these areas, Foucault questioned whether the
accepted professional techniques, which were commonly
coercive, could ever produce genuine, unbiased knowledge
or, indeed, whether such knowledge was even possible.
His influential book Madness and Civilization traced
modern psychiatry’s institutionalization of people whose
behavior deviated from a set of increasingly stringent
norms. He termed this process the great confinement, and
he suggested that modernity had not increased liberty but
reduced it.
A similar paradoxical approach runs throughout
Foucault’s work. The science of sexuality, Foucault argued,
curtailed human freedom by insisting on rigid sexual
identities, only some of which were normal. Likewise,
modern epistemological categories, including the abstract
numbering of populations and the scientific mapping of
territories, increased state power and subjected the individual
to the government in a profoundly dehumanizing manner.
Foucault similarly argued that some of the worst
cruelties of the civilized world could be found in the prison
system, whose original purpose was to rehabilitate criminals
and end the cruel punishments found before the
Enlightenment. All that modernity had accomplished here,
Foucault claimed, was to hide cruelty from public view,
which helped it to continue.
Even outside his academic work, Foucault attacked
modernity’s darker side. He participated in the student
uprisings of the 1960s, edited harrowing firsthand accounts
of prison life, and even traveled to Iran in the ultimately
vain hope of finding a genuine popular revolution against
the modern state, exemplified by the Shah and his government.
He was one of the leading inspirations of the modern
gay rights movement, and he contributed often to the francophone
gay press.
Although Foucault consciously rejected Enlightenment
hopes for human betterment through liberty, he still has
much to offer libertarians, and Foucault seems to have been
aware of this possibility even while he always placed himself
on the political left. In particular, his attacks on the way
government conceptualized itself brought him to doubt the
need for government at all and—surprisingly for some—to
recommend to his students the works of Friedrich Hayek
and Ludwig von Mises. In Foucault’s words, they should be
studied as examples of “the will not to be governed.” His
analysis of compulsory mental health has often been
likened to that of libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz,
who discovered similar ideas independently and who also
argued against forcible confinement.
Like many intellectuals of his era, Foucault joined the
Communist Party, although he quickly abandoned both
communism and Marxism. As recent scholars have agreed,
Nietzsche was his most important intellectual ancestor. His
mature works show a critical, antinomian libertarianism,
rather than a rigid, class-based analysis of social phenomena.
Particularly in his final years, as he grew ill from AIDS
and contemplated his approaching end, his politics
approached classical liberalism, tempered with a deep
interest in Stoic philosophy. From attacking state coercion,
Foucault had come to wonder what might replace it. Much
of Foucault’s work from these final years remains unpublished,
and still more of it was destroyed, rendering much
of Foucault an enigma in death as he was in life.
See also Bioethics; Coercion; Enlightenment; Government;
Nietzsche, Friedrich; Psychiatry; Retribution for Crime;
Sexuality
JTK