Roger Scruton on Michel Foucault – From ‘Thinkers of New Left’

Nowhere has the outlook of the left entered more firmly into the national culture than in France, the motherland of revolution. Whatever power has reigned in the skies of politics, French intellectual life has tended to adopt the ways and manners of the Jacobins. Even the exceptions – Chateaubriand, de Maistre, de Tocqueville, Maurras – have focused their attention on the standard of revolution, hoping to glimpse some strategy that would fortify their restorationist designs. And every movement away from the left – Ultramontanism, Action Franacise, Nouvelle Droite – has felt called upon to match the theoretical absolutism of its opponents. It has taken up the socialist challenge to present a rival system, a rival intellectual machine, with which to generate answers to all the problems of modern man.

No doubt this desire for system, and for universalist answers, shares some of the character of Roman Catholicism. But far more important in the thinking of the left has been the Enlightenment rationalism, which seeks to penetrate through human subterfuge, and to display the hidden core of unreason that lies within our acts. The modern gauchiste shares the rationalist’s suspicion of human institutions, and his contempt for superstition. But he is distinguished by a boundless cynicism. He no longer believes that the process of ‘discovery’ – whereby the ploys of unreason are exposed – will present the opportunity for some new and ‘rational’ alternative. The Reason of the Jacobins is also an illusion, and the only advice that the gauchiste is disposed, in the end, to offer, is the advice given by Genet and Sartre: be true to nothing, so as to be true to yourself. There are no solutions, only problems, and our duty is to ensure that we are not deceived.

In the ensuing quest for authenticity the gauchiste has a permanent need for an enemy. His system is one of destruction. He knows the illusoriness of values, and finds his identity in a life lived without the easy deceptions which rule the lives of others. Since he has no values, his thought and action can be given only a negative guarantee. He must fortify himself by unmasking the deceptions of others. Moreover, this unmasking cannot be done once and for all.

It must be perpetually renewed, so as to fill the moral vacuum which lies at the centre of existence. Only if there is some readily identifiable and, so to speak, renewable opponent, can this struggle for authenticity – which is in fact the most acute struggle for existence – be sustained. The enemy must be a fount of humbug and deception; he must also possess elaborate and secret power, power sustained through the very system of lies which underscores his values. Such an enemy deserves unmasking, and there is a kind of heroic virtue in his assailant, who frees the world from the stranglehold of secret influence.

It is to the French aristocracy that we owe the contemptuous label by which this enemy is known. The renewable opponent is the ‘bourgeois’: the pillar of the community, whose hypocritical respectability and social incompetence have inspired every variety of renewable contempt. Of course this creature has undergone considerable transformation since Moliere first ridiculed his social pre tensions. During the nineteenth century he acquired a complex dual character. Marx represented him as the principal agent and principal beneficiary of the French Revolution – the new enslaver, whose tentacles reach into every pocket of influence and power – while the cafe intellectuals continued, in more bitter accents, the scathing mockery of the aristocracy. Epater les bourgeois became the signature of the disaffected artist, the guarantee of his social credentials, whereby he demonstrated his aristocratic entitlement, and his conempt for the usurpatory dominion of the rising middle class. Under the dual influence of Marx and Flaubert, the bourgeois emerged from the nineteenth century as a monster transformed out of all recognition from his humble origins. He was the ‘class enemy’ of Leninist dogma, the creature whom we are commanded by history to destroy; he was also the repository of all morality, all convention, all codes of conduct that might hamper the freedom and crush the ebullience of la vie boheme. The Marxian theory of ideology tried to knit the two halves of the portrait together, describing the ‘comfortable’ values as the social disguise of real economic power. But the theory was vague and schematic, lacking the concrete quality which is necessary for a rewarding and renewable contempt. Much of the efforts of the French left in our century have therefore been devoted to completing the portrait. The aim has been to create the perfect enemy: the object against which to define and sharpen one’s authenticity, an authenticity guaranteed by its transformation into wit.

The invention of the ideal bourgeois was finally accomplished in 1952, with the publication of the masterpiece of modern satanism, Sartre’s Saint Genet, in which the ‘bourgeois’ is characterised by an extraordinary complexity of emotions, ranging from rooted heterosexuality to a hostility to crime. The bourgeois finally emerges as the champion of an illusory ‘normality’, concerned to forbid and to oppress all those who, in challenging his normality, challenge also the social and political dominion which it both validates and conceals.

The anti-bourgeois sentiment which lies at the root of French left-wing thinking, explains its rejection of all roles and functions that are not creations of its own. Its main power base has been, not the university, but the cafe: to occupy positions of influence within the ‘structures’ of the bourgeois state is incompatible with the demands of revolutionary rectitude. Whatever influence the gauchiste enjoys must be acquired through his own intellectual labour, in producing words and images which challenge the status quo. The cafe becomes the symbol of his social position. He observes the passing show, but does not join it. Instead, he waits for those who, attracted by his gaze, separate themselves from the crowd and ‘come over’ to his position.

By the same token we must recognise the intimate dependency that exists between the gauchiste and the true middle class. In a certain manner, the gauchiste is the confessor of the middle class. He presents to it an idealised image of its sinful condition. The ‘bourgeois’ of recent iconography is a myth. But he bears a resemblance to the ordinary city-dweller who, seeing himself distorted in this portrait, is troubled by the thought of moral possibilities. He enthusiastically confesses to purely hypothetical crimes. He begins to extol the gauchiste as the absolver of his corrupted conscience. The gauchiste therefore becomes the redeemer of the class whose illusions he has been appointed to unmask. Hence, despite his rudeness – which is, in truth, no more than the necessary virtue of his profession – he enjoys abundant social privilege. He is born aloft on the shoulders of the bourgeoisie whose habits he tramples, and enjoys again the aristocrat’s place in the sun. At the best Parisian parties he will appear in person: but even the meanest reception will take place against bookshelves loaded with his writings. So close, indeed, is this symbiotic relation between the gauchiste and his victim as to resemble that previous, seemingly indissoluble, bond between aristocrat and peasant. The major difference is this: the aristocrat both exalted the peasant in his words (creating the idealized ‘shepherd’, the spectacle of whose virtues would refresh the wearied courtier), and at the same time abused and oppressed him in his actions. The gauchiste judiciously reverses the priorities: he does no more than bark at the hand which feeds him. In this he shows, indeed, a greater wisdom, and a healthy instinct for survival. I have singled out Michel Foucault, the social philosopher and historian of ideas, as representative of the French intellectual left. It must be pointed out at once that Foucault’s position has been constantly shifting, and that he shows a sophisticated contempt for all convenient labels. He is also a critic (although, until his last years, a fairly muted critic) of modern communism. Nevertheless, Foucault is the most powerful and most ambitious of those who aim to ‘unmask’ the bourgeoisie, and the position of the left has been substantially reinforced by his writings. It is impossible to do full justice here to his achievement. His imagination and intellectual fluency have generated abundant theories, concepts and apercues, and the compendious, synthesizing poetry of his style is nothing if not disarming. Foucault is unable to encounter opposition without at once rising, under the impulse of his intellectual energy, to the superior ‘theoretical’ perspective, from which opposition is seen in terms of the interests which are advanced by it. Opposition relativised is also opposition discounted. It is not what you say, but that you say it, which awakens Foucault’s criticism. ‘D’ou parles – tu?’ is his question, and his stance remains outside the reach of every answer.

The unifying thread in Foucault’s work is the search for the secret structures of power. Power is what he wishes to unmask behind every practice, behind every institution, and behind language itself. He originally described his method as an ‘archaeology of knowledge’, and his subject – matter as truth – truth considered as the product of ‘discourse’, taking both form and content from the language in which it is conveyed. A problem of terminology immediately arises, and proves to be something more than a problem of terminology. What is meant by a ‘knowledge’ that can be overthrown by new experience, or by a ‘truth’ that exists only within the discourse which frames it? The language here is Hegelian, and the method implied is that of idealism. Foucault’s ‘truth’ is created and re – created by the experiences through which we ‘know’ it. Like Hegel, therefore, Foucault is able to derive some surprising and even disquieting results, from a historical method which dramatises change as a mute obedience to a changing consciousness.

Thus in Les mots et les choses (1966)[1] we are told that man is a recent invention: truly an original idea! On inspection it turns out that Foucault means no more than this: that it is only since the Renaissance that the fact of being a man (rather than, say, a farmer, a soldier or a nobleman) has acquired the special significance that we now attribute to it. By such arguments we could show that the dinosaur too is a recent invention. Of course, there is a point to Foucault’s remark. He means to emphasise the extent to which the sciences which have taken man as their object are recent inventions, already outmoded as forms of ‘knowledge’. The idea of man is as fragile and transitory as any other idea in the history of human understanding, and must give way under the impulse of a new episteme (structure of ‘knowledge’) to something which we cannot name. Each episteme, for Foucault, is the servant of some rising power, and has had, as its principal function, the creation of a ‘truth’ which serves the interest of power. Thus there are no received truths which are not also convenient truths.

There are many insights in Foucault’s early writings. But the Hegelian method – which identifies reality with a way of apprehending it – must lead us to doubt that they are hard – won. There is a cheat involved in this method, which allows its proponent to jump across to the finishing line of historical enquiry, without running the hard track of empirical analysis. (Consider what would really have to be proved, by someone who believed man to be an artefact, and a recent one at that – more recent even than the medieval and Renaissance humanists who extolled his virtues.) A proper assessment of Foucault’s thought must therefore try to separate its two components: the Hegelian sleight of hand (which would lead us too simply to dismiss him), and the ‘diagnostic’ analysis of the secret ways of power. It is the second which is interesting, and which is expressed in Foucault’s claim that each successive form of ‘knowledge’ is devoted to the creation of a discourse favourable to, and symbolic of, the structures of pre vailing power.

In Histoire de la Jolie a l’age classique (1961)[2] Foucault gives the first glimpse of this thesis. He traces the confinement of madmen to its origins in the seventeenth century, associating this confinement with the ethic of work and the rise of the middle classes. Foucault’s idealism – his impatience with explanations that are merely causal – leads him constantly to thicken his plot. Thus he says, not that the economic reorganisation of urban society brought about confinement, but that ‘it was in a certain experience of labour that the indissolubly economic and moral demand for confinement was formulated’. But this should be seen largely as an embellishment to categories of historical explanation which derive ultimately from Marx.

The madman is ‘other’ in what Foucault calls the ‘classical’ age because he points to the limits of the prevailing ethic, and alienates himself from its demands. There is a kind of virtuous disdain in his refusal of convention. He must therefore be brought to order. Through confinement madness is subject to the rule of reason: the madman now lives under the jurisdiction of those who are sane, confined by their laws, and instructed by their morality. The re course of reason in this close encounter is to reveal to madness its own ‘truth’ – the truth through which reason ‘knows’ it. To lack reason is, for ‘classical’ thought, to be an animal. The madman must therefore be made to act the part of an animal. He is used as a beast of burden, and by this confrontation with his own ‘truth’ is finally made whole. Each successive age finds a similar ‘truth’ through which the experience of madness is transcended into sanity (i.e. into that condition which is condoned and fostered by prevailing power). But Foucault suggests that this stock of ‘truths’ is now exhausted. The book ends with a satanistic encomium of madness, in which Foucault appeals to the gods of the modern French Olympus – Goya, de Sade, Holderlin, Nerval, Van Gogh, Artaud, Nietzsche – to testify to this exhaustion. This encomium gains no substance from the studies that precede it, and consists largely in the ritual rehearsal of what has become, in France, a critical commonplace. Thus, although it is impossible for a sane reader to detect literary merit in de Sade, for example, it is liturgically necessary to sing his praises, as le plus gros des epateurs. A second-rate hack thereby becomes the literary representative of post-Revolutionary France.

It was clear to the eighteenth century, according to Foucault, that, while madness was able to express itself, it had no language in which to do so besides that which reason provides. The only phenomenology of madness lies in sanity. Surely then, the eighteenth century had at least one sound intuition about the nature of unreason? The province of language and the province of reason are coextensive, and if madness contains its own ‘truths’, as Foucault claims, these are essentially inexpressible. How then can we rightly imagine a ‘language’ of unreason in which the truths of madness are expressed, and to which we must now attune our ears? The idea of such a language is the idea of a delirious monologue, which neither the man of reason, nor the madman himself, could understand. The voice of madness is a voice that belongs to no-one, since it violates the grammar of the self. It could bear no resemblance to the remorseless logic of The Twilight of the Idols, or to the precise symbolism of Les chimeres. Foucault’s heroes would have been unable to use this language, even in their final dis solution, and if we can understand them it is without its aid.

For the nineteenth century, according to Foucault, the experience of ‘unreason’ characteristic of the ‘classical’ period becomes dissociated: madness is confined within a moral intuition, and the fantasy of an unceasing monologue of madness, in a language in accessible to reason, is forgotten. This idea is to be resuscitated, however, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the Freudian theory of the unconscious thought – processes that determine the behaviour of the irrational man. In the nineteenth century, madness has become a threat to the whole structure of bourgeois life, and the madman, while superficially innocent, is profoundly guilty in his failure to submit to familiar norms. The greatest offence of madness is against the ‘bourgeois family’, as Foucault calls it, and it is the experience of this family that dictates the paternalistic structure of the asylum. The ethos of judgement and reprobation in the asylum is part of a new attitude to madness – madness is at last observed. It is no longer thought that the madman has anything to say or symbolise; he is an anomaly in the world of action, responsible only for his visible behaviour.

In the asylum the man of reason is presented as an adult, the madman as a child, so that madness may be construed as an incessant attack against the Father. The madman must be brought to recognise his error, and reveal to the Father a consciousness of his guilt. Thus there is a natural transition from the ‘confession in crisis’ characteristic of the asylum, to the Freudian dialogue, in which the analyst listens to and translates the language of unreason, but in which madness is still forced to see itself as a disobedience and a transgression. Finally, Foucault intimates, it is because psychoanalysis has refused to suppress the family structure as the only one through which madness can be seen or known, that its introduction of a dialogue with madness leads to no understanding of its interlocutor.

Beneath all this fascinating analysis – part insight, part rhetoric – it is possible to discern a persistent and discredited historical perspective. Despite his apparent scholarship, Foucault remains wedded to the mythopoeic guide to modern history presented in The Communist Manifesto. The world divides conveniently into the ‘classical’ and the ‘bourgeois’ eras, the first beginning at the late Renaissance and ending with the ‘bourgeois revolution’ of 1789. It is only thereafter that we witness the characteristic features of modern life: the nuclear family, transferable property, the legally constituted state, and the modern structures of influence and power. Engels made an heroic attempt to give credence to the ‘bourgeois family’, and this has proved useful to left-wing demonology. But Engels’s icon is now threadbare and faded, and only marginally more persuasive than the idea that the French Revolution involved a transition from feudal to capitalist modes of production, from an ‘aristocratic’ to a ‘bourgeois’ social structure, from entailed to transferable property. Less persuasive still is the idea that the ‘classical’ outlook of Racine and La Fontaine is the principal index of post Renaissance, pre-Revolutionary culture in France. All this is based on an elaborate and, to tell the truth, culpable simplification of historical data, the prime aim of which is not truth but propaganda. Foucault’s rhetoric is supposed to mesmerise us into a sense of some intrinsic connection between ‘bourgeois’, ‘family’, ‘paternalistic’ and ‘authoritarian’. Historical facts – such as that the peasant family is more authoritarian, the aristocratic family more paternalistic, than the family known as ‘bourgeois’; or that the middle class shows an ability to relax the temper of domestic life which has seldom been matched at the upper or lower ends of the social spectrum – all such facts are kept out of mind. The reader finds no argument over evidence, no search for instance or counter-instance, which could sow the seeds of doubt. For facts have an abrasive quality. They blur the figures and erase the lineaments of the necessary icon. When the image fades, so too does the idea: we can no longer believe that the secret power which created the categories of mental illness, which confined the innocent sufferer, and which moralised him into ‘abnormality’, also generated the family and its egregious norms. Far less can we believe that the nature of this power is summarised in the single word ‘bourgeois’, although doubtless that word has liturgical value, as designating the object of acceptable contempt.

The schematic historiography survives in Foucault’s later works. In particular, he makes abundant use of the concept of a ‘classical’ epoque. But the enemy who stalks through his pages seems somehow to have lost his respectable clothing. He appears as naked power, without style, dignity of status. If the term ‘bourgeois’ is sometimes applied to him it is a flourish, like an insult thrown by the wrestler to his opponent. There is no longer the same liberating confidence in the enemy’s identity. Nevertheless, the method and the results remain, and each of Foucault’s books repeats the hidden agenda of his Histoire de la Jolie.

In Naissance de la clinique: Une archeologie du regard medical (1963)[3], Foucault extends the ideas of ‘observation’, and ‘normality’, so as to explain, not only the confinement of madmen, but also the confinement of the sick. (He will shortly extend the analysis further, to prisons and punishment. If he stops short of schools and universities it is not for want of conviction.) That patients should be gathered together for observation shows a need to divide the world into the normal and the abnormal, and to confront the abnormal with an image of its ‘truth’. The need is also for a classification of illness, a ‘measured language’ which places each disease within the competence of the observer. Now there is truth in those ideas: who would deny that the growing understanding of disease implied isolation, observation and selective treatment? But what a simple truth, and what an innocent occurrence! Clearly it needs unmasking. So here, in characteristic language, is what the hospital – surely one of the more benign of human accomplishments – becomes:

Over all these endeavours on the part of clinical thought to define its methods and scientific norms hovers the great myth of a pure Gaze that would be pure Language: a speaking eye. It would scan the entire hospital field, taking in and gathering together each of the singular events that occurred within it; and as it saw, as it saw ever more clearly, it would turn into speech that states and teaches; the truth, which events, in their repetitions and convergences, would outline under its gaze, would, by this same gaze and in the same order, be reserved, in the form of teaching, to those who do not know and have not yet seen. This speaking eye would be the servant of things and the master of truth.[4]

There is an accomplished rhetoric here, a rhythmic movement which, feeding on the simple fact of scientific observation, becomes a haunting and persecuted awareness of the hidden source of power. Behind this concept of the Gaze (a Sartrean term more familiar, perhaps, to French than to English readers) lurks a great suspicion, the same suspicion of human decencies that inhabits the pages of Being and Nothingness. It tells us not to be deceived, not to believe that anything is undertaken, or anything achieved, except in the interests of power.

The idea takes a further step in Foucault’s most brilliant book Surveiller et punir[5], subtitled ‘the birth of the prison’. (The surveiller of the title is hard to translate: it refers, once again, to the Gaze of the guardians.) It is natural that the near-simultaneous rise of the prison system, the hospital, and the lunatic asylum, will not go unnoticed by the suspicious iconographer of bourgeois man. And there is something persuasive in Foucault’s initial analysis of the transition from the exemplary punishments of our ancestors, to the system of physical confinement. To call the first ‘classical’, the second ‘bourgeois’ is of little interest. But it is surely illuminating to see the earlier system as embodying a kind of corporal language of crime. The aim of torture was to imprint the crime on the patient’s body, in the living language of pain, so as to symbolise the criminal’s intention. Foucault contrasts the prison system, which, he argues, was founded in a juridical conception of individual rights, under which punishment has the character of a forfeit. The contracting individualist can be legitimately made to suffer in no other way. And, as Foucault elegantly remarks, even capital punishment under the new regime of prison has a juridical character:

The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so much to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist. It had to have the abstraction of the law itself.[6]

Foucault proceeds to draw the usual abundance of surprising and not so surprising conclusions. It is surprising to be told that punishment is an element in the genealogy of the human soul, so that the Cartesian ego is precisely what is conjured on the rack: the gazing subject who exists as the observer of this pain. It is surprising to learn that the modern soul is a product, if not of the prison system, at least of the juridical idea of the subject, as a complex of legal rights.

It is less surprising to be told that criminal justice operates in the ‘production of truth’, and that it is part of one of those systems of ‘knowledge’ which, for Foucault, go hand in hand with power. Nor is it surprising to find that punishment undergoes the same tran sition as medicine, from a system of symbolism, to a system of surveillance. In an impressive description of Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ (a machine a corriger, in which all prisoners could be observed from a single post), Foucault relates the discipline of prison to the newly emerging power of the invisible over the visible, which is, if I understand him, the power expressed in law. The law is the invisible possessor of that ‘normalising gaze’ which both singles out the criminal as an abnormal specimen, and also deprives him of his rights until such a time as he should once again be able to take up the burden of normality.

There then occurs one of those forced, marxisant, explanations which mar the poetry of Foucault’s far from unimaginative writing. We are told that the prison disciplines exhibit a ‘tactics of power’, with three fundamental purposes: to exert power at lowest cost, to extend power as far and as deeply as possible, and ‘to link this “economic” growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical), within which it is exercised’.[7] All of which is meant to suggest a connection between prison and the ‘economic take-off of the West’, which ‘began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital’[8]. Such impulsive observations are produced not by scholarship, but by the association of ideas, the principal idea being the historical morphology of the Communist Manifesto. And if we are asked why that discredited (and somewhat adolescent) morphology is still accepted by so sophisticated a modern thinker, the answer is to be found, I believe, in its providing the preliminary sketches for the portrait of the enemy. It inspires such passages as the following:

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue to multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penalty? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?[9]

No, it is not surprising. For if we unmask human institutions far enough, we will always find that hidden core of power by which Foucault is outraged and fascinated. The only question is whether this unmasking reveals the truth about its subject, or whether it is not, on the contrary, a new and sophisticated form of lying. We must ask ourselves whether the idealist who observes ‘at the very centre of the carceral city, the formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, “sciences” that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual’[10] – whether such an observer is not in fact also the inventor of what he observes.

But it is not easy to unmask this observer. That his writings exhibit mythomania, and even paranoia, is, I believe, indisputable. But that they systematically falsify and propagandise what they describe is more difficult to establish. A writer who can glibly declare that ‘the bourgeoisie could not care less about delinquents, about their punishment and rehabilitation, which economically have little importance’;[11] that ‘the bourgeoisie is perfectly well aware that a new constitution or legislature will not suffice to establish its hegemony’[12]; that ‘ . . . “dangerous” people had to be isolated (in prison, in the Hospital General, in the galleys, in the colonies) so that they could not act as a spearhead for popular resistance’[13] – such a writer is clearly more concerned with rhetorical impact than with historical accuracy. However, I believe that it would be a mistake to dismiss Foucault on the evidence of such pronouncements. As I have argued, we must separate Foucault’s analysis of the workings of power from the facile idealism which opens such easy paths to theory. And paranoia is no more than a localised idealism – a specific and focused manifestation of the des ire that reality be subservient to thought, that the other have an identity entirely determined by one’s own response to him. What is important is, not the disposition to find, in human thought and action, the smiling masks of persecution, but rather the idea that, by unmasking them as forms of power, we come closer to an under standing of their nature. It is precisely this which I doubt.

In a pair of lectures delivered in 1976[14], Foucault deliberates over what he means by ‘power’, and distinguishes two approaches: the Reichian (which argues that ‘the mechanisms of power are those of repression’), and the Nietzschean, which holds that the ‘basis of the relationship of power lies in the hostile engagement of forces’[15]. In an obscure and muddled account of this distinction, Foucault aligns himself with the second approach, and he tries to show (in L’His toire de la sexualite, vol. 1, 1976[16]) how this conception of power enables us to see even sexual relations as instances of the ‘hostile engagement of forces’. But it is significant that Foucault offers no real explanation of what he means by ‘power’. The ‘Reichian’ and the ‘Nietzschean’ approaches are entirely compatible, and both are explained in terms – ‘repression’, ‘force’ – which are at least as obscure as the ‘power’ which they are supposed to illuminate.

The problem becomes more and more acute. We are repeatedly told that Foucault is concerned with power in its ‘capillary’ form, the form which ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals’[17]. But we are never told who or what is active in this ‘power’: or rather, we are told, but in terms that carry no conviction. In an interview, Foucault admits that, for him, ‘power is coextensive with the social body’[18].And it is, of course, indisputable that social order, like every order, embodies power. A society, like an organism, can sustain itself only by constant inter action among its parts. And all interaction is an exercise of power: the power of a cause to produce its effect. But that is merely trivial. What is not trivial is the entirely unwarranted and ideologically inspired idea of dominance with which Foucault glosses his conclusions. He at once assumes that if there is power, then it is exercised in the interests of some dominant agent. Hence, by sleight of hand, he is able to present any feature of social order – even the disposition to heal the sick – as a covert exercise of dominion, which aims to further the interests of ‘those in power’. Foucault writes: ‘I believe that anything can be deduced from the general phenomenon of the domination of the bourgeois class’.[19] It would be truer to say that he believes that the general thesis of the domination of the bourgeois class can be deduced from anything. For, having decided, along with the Communist Manifesto, that the bourgeois class has been dominant since the summer of 1789, Foucault deduces that all power subsequently embodied in the social order has been exercised by that class, and in its interests. Any fact of social order will necessarily bear the fingerprints of bourgeois domination. The triviality of the argument needs no comment; what is astounding is the philosophical naivety from which it stems.

As an instance of an old Marxian confusion (the confusion which identifies a class as the product of power, and then power as the pursuit of a class), Foucault’s analysis may be left to one side. But it is necessary to remind ourselves of its important political con sequences. In a remarkable discussion with a group of 1968 Maoists, Foucault draws some of the political morals from his analysis of law, as yet another ‘capillary’ mode of power, yet another way of ‘introducing contradictions among the masses’.[20] The revolution, he assures us, ‘can only take place via the radical elimination of the judicial apparatus, and anything which could reintroduce the penal apparatus, anything which could reintroduce its ideology and enable this ideology surreptitiously to creep back into popular practices, must be banished’.[21] He recommends the banishment of adjudication, and every form of court, and gestures, in the negative manner characteristic of Utopian thinking, towards a new form of ‘proletarian’ justice, which will not require the services of a judge. With characteristic effrontery, he tells us that the French Revolution was a ‘rebellion against the judiciary’: and such, he implies, is the nature of every honest revolution.

But what does this mean in practice? It means that there shall be no third party present at the trial of the accused, no-one with the responsibility to sift the evidence, no – one to mediate between the parties, no – one to look impartially on the facts, or on the con sequences of judgement. It means that the criminality of the act will be as unpredictable as the penalty which it incurs, for no Jaw could exist which would determine the outcome. It means that all ‘justice’ will be reduced to a ‘struggle’ between opposing factions, a trial by ordeal in which, presumably, he who speaks with the voice of the proletariat will take the prize. And in order to prove that he speaks with the voice of the proletariat, the victor need do one thing, and one thing only: overcome his opponent. Having done so he will call himself judge, and sanctify his action with the ideology of ‘proletarian justice’. And we know how this proletarian judge will then comport himself[22]. In short, it is only the greatest naivety, about human nature and human history, that can permit Foucault to believe that his ‘proletarian justice’ is a form of justice, or that, in working towards it, he is freeing society from the blight of power. On the contrary, all social order is composed of Foucault’s ‘power’, and a rule of law, which is the highest form of order, is simply the best and most mitigated form of it.

The example is minatory. What is true of adjudication is true of other institutions. The attempt to remove the ‘mask’ from human institutions simply reduces them to a single commodity: a ‘power’ which, considered in itself, is neither good nor evil. It also removes those dimensions of human thought and action which enable the relative virtues of our institutions to be assessed. Hence it points to a far greater tyranny than the one against which it is wielded. It seems to me that Foucault’s political naiveties are a direct result of a false idea of ‘essence’, according to which the essence of human things lies never on the surface, but always in the ‘ hidden’ depths. The search for this ‘depth’ is, in fact, the greatest shallowness. Foucault’s ‘unmasking’ reveals, not the essence of human thought and action, but merely the underlying substance out of which all human institutions, and life itself, are made. To reduce everything to this ‘hidden’ core is in effect to reduce it to nothing. And we should not be surprised to find that it is precisely this nothing which then becomes the hidden god.