Foucault as a kind of realist: genealogical critique and the debunking of the human sciences

ABSTRACT

Foucault’s corpus is animated by an ethical or political impulse: to liberate individuals from a kind of oppression, one which does not involve the familiar tyranny of the totalitarian state but exploits instead values that the victim of oppression herself accepts, and which then leads the oppressed agent to be complicit in her own subjugation. Foucault’s critique also depends on a skeptical thesis about the epistemological authority of the social sciences that is supposed to be supported by his genealogies of those sciences. It is this conjunction of claims – that individuals oppress themselves in virtue of certain normative claims they accept because of their supposed epistemic merits – that marks Foucault’s uniquely disturbing contribution to the literature whose diagnostic aim is, with Weber, to understand the oppressive character of modernity, and whose moral aim is, with the Frankfurt School, human liberation. Foucault is also a kind of ‘realist’ in his approach: he does not offer moral arguments to persuade people that they ought to behave differently than they do, but instead shows people the actual history of the institutions and norms to which they subjugate themselves. This essay explains Foucault's critical and realist project, and concludes with critical reflections on its plausibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Foucault
• genealogy
• political realism
• Marx
• Nietzsche

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I hedge with ‘almost,’ but I can’t think of an exception.

2 Moralists have had the advantage historically too, for reasons Thucydies and Marx well understood: the ruling elites in every society have a vast appetite for justifications of their dominance. There are some important historical figures who are harder to place, depending on how one understands ‘realism.’ Bentham is a case in point. As David Runciman notes it is tempting to see Bentham as ‘representative of a naïve form of moralism [in Runciman’s slightly different sense], because he specified a single, pre-political value (utility) as the basis for assessing politics’ (2017, 5). But Runciman says that this is a ‘caricature’ since, ‘Bentham’s writing exemplifies … the realist suspicion of the loose application of moralised language to politics, and in particular talk about rights, which for Bentham was meaningless in the absence of any underpinning in the terms of enforcement, or power’ (5). More importantly, he thought this moralised nonsense was ‘dangerous because it serves as a smokescreen for those engaged in the practice of politics’ (6). That is right as far as it goes – it shows that Bentham is not a ‘moralist’ in Runciman’s limited sense of someone who thinks politics is just applied moral philosophy. In other ways, Bentham is a moralist, though one, like Mill after him, with a finer talent for rhetoric than most contemporary moralists.

3 See Runciman (2017, 11) for a useful summary of Williams’s view. As two other scholars note, in a survey piece on recent ‘realism’ in political theory, Williams ‘does not give up on some justificatory standards for the exercise of political power,’ with the result that he is ‘too close to the mainstream approach he wants to reject’ (Rossi and Sleat 2014, 692).

4 See, e.g., Geuss’s polemic against Rawls in Philosophy and Real Politics (2008). As Brian O’Connor points out to me, if the point is to get students and scholars to read something else than ridicule might be a sensible strategy – a point another realist, Nietzsche, well-understood.

5 Some international realists think the behavior of states is due entirely to human nature, for example, the instinct for self-preservation or for power (Morgenthau was himself influenced by Nietzsche). The dominant strand of IR realism links the motive for self-preservation to the anarchic character of the international system: the international arena is the Hobbesian state of nature, so only the most powerful will survive. (Thanks to John Mearsheimer for discussing these issues with me.)

6 In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Foucault says he uses ‘bio-power’ to mark ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ which began in the 17th-century (1980a, 140).

7 Foucault 1980b, 121.

8 See esp. The Uses of Pleasure (Foucault 1990) and The Care of the Self (Foucault 1988).

9 Foucault certainly thinks, to be sure, that the techniques for regulating and ‘disciplining’ bodies have grown more sophisticated in the modern era. The classic study is, of course, his Discipline and Punish (1977).

10 The best, and probably best-known, examples are Madness and Civilization (1965) and Discipline and Punish (1977).

11 Foucault 1980b, 109.

12 See, e.g., Grünbaum 1984 and Murphy 2006.

13 See Leiter 2004, 103–105. Alas, Foucault is extremely unclear about the character and ultimate import of his skepticism about the human sciences. Often his position echoes Rudolf Carnap’s on ‘external’ and ‘internal’ questions (in his famous paper on ‘Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’ [1952]), as when Foucault says he is only interested in ‘seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true or false’ (1980b, 118). The ‘external’ question about whether, e.g., psychiatric claims about human beings are true or false is a misguided, indeed, unintelligible question. Foucault’s willingness to exclude ‘non-dubious’ sciences like physics and chemistry from his critical analysis belies what I suspect is a rather deep affinity with the ‘logical positivist’ view of the sciences.

14 Gettier 1963.

15 See, e.g., Kitcher 1992, 59.

16 See Goldman 1986, 42–12.

17 See Sinhababu 2007.

18 Foucault 1980c, 277.

19 Foucault 1980c, 278–279.

20 Foucault 1977, 23.

21 See the discussion in my Leiter 2015, 213–214.

22 See Leiter 2018a, 151–158. And for a more popular treatment, an essay of the same name (but much shorter) for the Times Literary Supplement’s ‘Footnotes to Plato’ series on the great philosophers (Leiter 2018b): https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/friedrich-nietzsche-truth-terrible/.

23 These concerns are suggested, for example, by Foucault’s remarks in one of the last interviews he gave before his death: ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations’ (1991, 386–387).

24 Foucault himself says that ‘the prison was linked from its beginning to a project for the transformation of individuals,’ but in this respect it is no different from any of the other institutions to which he has turned his attention: ‘The prison was meant to be an instrument, comparable with – and no less perfect than – the school, the barracks, or the hospital, acting with precision upon its individual subjects’ (1980d, 39–40).

25 In assessing the success of Foucault’s critique, we will later examine The History of Sexuality (1980a).

26 Foucault 1965, 6.

27 Foucault 1965, 7.

28 Foucault 1965, 57.

29 Foucault 1965, 38 and 45.

30 Foucault 1965, 47.

31 Foucault 1965, 58.

32 Foucault 1965, 58–60.

33 Foucault 1965, 197.

34 Foucault 1965, 259.

35 Foucault 1965, 275–276.

36 Walzer 1986, 55.

37 Foucault 1980e, 145.

38 Foucault 1980b, 109.

39 A classic articulation of this idea is Kitcher 1993, esp. Ch. 5.

40 Foucault 1980a, 31.

41 See, i.e. the critiques of economics offered by Rosenberg 1992 and Hausman 1997, and the critique of psychology offered by Murphy 2006.

42 This essay expands greatly on some rough ideas I first broached more than a decade ago in Leiter 2008. I am grateful to an audience at a conference on ‘How Do We Keep Knowing?’ at the Glassock Humanities Research Center at Texas A&M University for helpful discussion of an earlier draft. Finally, I am indebted to Joshua Fox for research assistance and to an anonymous referee for helpful corrections and feedback.