June 25, 2024 - 10:55am

Michel Foucault, who died 40 years ago today, is undoubtedly one of the most influential intellectuals of the late 20th century. The standard narrative which has circulated about him for decades, especially on the political Right, is that he is the godfather of the postmodernism that became hegemonic throughout Anglophone universities in the Eighties and Nineties. This ideology opposed the notion of objective truth, preached the virtues of relativism, described the supposed reality of an invisible yet pervasive oppressive power, and was generally anti-Western.

According to this view of Foucault’s work, a generation of academics, philosophers, teachers, writers and journalists have been inculcated on his ideas, thus producing a cultural elite that promotes the iniquities of “wokeness” and identity politics. Bound up in this outlook is the rejection of free speech, belief that Western societies form the cultural superstructure of white supremacy which must be “decolonised”, and contention that gender and sexuality are entirely socially constructed and therefore malleable.

Moreover, Right-wing critics frequently label Foucault’s thought as another species of Marxism. Douglas Murray wrote in The War on The West that “Foucault’s obsessive analysis of everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of power relations diminished almost everything in society into a transactional, punitive and meaningless dystopia.” Jordan Peterson has also been fond of calling Foucault a “postmodern neo-Marxist”.

It’s a popular and long-held narrative, but there are several problems with it. For one, it is incoherent to describe Foucault as a “neo-Marxist” or a “cultural Marxist”. He, like other postmodern thinkers, was broadly opposed to Marxism. While Foucault joined the French Communist Party as a young student on the encouragement of Louis Althusser, he left soon afterwards due to the homophobia he experienced in the party and the antisemitism employed by Stalinists in the wake of the Doctors’ Plot.

Foucault subsequently became very critical of Marxism, which he saw as a scion of the Enlightenment that upheld scientific objectivity and believed history had a progressive, teleological direction instead of being a series of non-linear discontinuities and contingencies that possess no inner logic.

Like many other postmodernist philosophers, Foucault shaped his thought from a fundamental disillusionment with Stalinism and the horrors it wrought. Communism’s hoped-for telos of history instead led to further oppression and empowered a new elite in the name of the proletariat. With two world wars and the Holocaust barely behind them, it seemed to them that history didn’t progress towards freedom, but in the direction of catastrophe. Postmodernism, then, is more a reflection of this profound disillusionment with history than an insidious plot.

The intellectual godfather behind Foucault isn’t Karl Marx but Friedrich Nietzsche. His genealogical approach to history and the idea that knowledge is implicated with power and always situated from a particular perspective are taken straight from the author of Beyond Good and Evil.

Secondly, a reading of Foucault’s oeuvre demonstrates that he would be very much opposed to contemporary identity politics. He argued that the identities we assume and uphold are the result of “subjectification”: that is, determined from outside of us. Those who base their subjectivity on their race or sexuality are really imposing on themselves categories devised by others. As he said in a 1982 interview on the politics of homosexuality: “If people think they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity’ and that their own identity has to become the law […] if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility.”

Foucault’s rejection of identitarianism as essentialist shouldn’t be surprising — it is the logical outcome of his general opposition to the idea of fixed, stable categories. So many of the identity categories we take for granted are contingent, and thus are subject to change and evolution. To take refuge under identity and make it a goal in itself restricts us by subordinating our unique selves to categories that are ultimately imposed on us. As Foucault said: “I think we have a right to be free.”


Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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