Roger Scruton on Michel Foucault

“There are certainly many insights in Foucault's early writings. But the relativist method – which identifies reality with a way of apprehending it – must lead us to doubt that they are hard-won. For this method allows him to jump across to the finishing line of historical enquiry, without running the hard track of empirical enquiry. 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 man's virtues. A proper assessment of Foucault's thought must therefore try to separate its two components: the relativist 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 that 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 prevailing forms of domination.”

“The impression created by these later works is of a Foucault who has been ‘normalized’. His command of the French language, his fascination with ancient texts and the by-ways of history, his flamboyant imagination and beautiful style – all have been put, at last, to a proper use, in order to describe the human condition respectfully, and to cease to look for the secret ‘structures’ beneath its smile. It helps that his subject-matter is the ancient world, and the works of authors who cannot be dismissed or debunked as merely ‘bourgeois’. But it helps too that Foucault had, by this time, been ‘mugged by reality’, and was being cared for in the institution which he had once scoffed at for its habit of confronting its inmates with the ‘truth’ of their condition. It was when confronted with the truth of his condition that Foucault at last grew up. He had gone down with Sartre into the hell where the Other resides. But he had recognized his own otherness too, and returned to the real world in a posture of acceptance. And, reading these later works, I was constantly drawn to the thought that Foucault's belligerent leftism was not a criticism of reality, but a defence against it, a refusal to recognize that, for all its defects, normality is all that we have.”