Foucault Contra Foucault:

Abstract

This article provides a brief account of some key aspects of Foucault's later work in the area of power, security, population and `governmentality', and a critical analysis of these in light of other of his writings. The argument is as follows. This later work is marred by an implicit idealism that takes two forms. First, there is a vulgar historicist logic, a neo-Hegelian objective idealism involving a unilinear theory of crucial aspects of western history and the use of a single measuring rod for comparing and contrasting successive forms of organization of societies, thereby pre-empting the possibility of examining the varying effects in different social contexts of seemingly similar ways of organizing social relations. Second, much of this work is overly intentionalist in its understanding of particular phenomena. This subjective idealism involves an explanation of social arrangements as the result of political activities which, in turn, are themselves understood through the extant writings of various governors, policy writers and advisors—namely, as the effect of self-consciously produced self-reflexive discourses. Some of his earlier work, notably The Archaeology of Knowledge, provides the conceptual resources to critique and go beyond these writings.