Using Foucault

Foucault once said the following:

'I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area... I would like [my work] to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers.'[1]

My supervisor also warned me not to get 'hypnotised' by him and I like the quote above because he himself seems to sanction that view. He exhorts us here to take what we will and use it well.

This is exactly how I intend to approach him. It is not for me, nor is it especially useful to me, to ‘go all the way’ with Foucault. I don’t want to get entangled in the broad anti-humanist and post-structuralist controversies of which some of his work was a part. Therefore I need to be very clear about what I am going to take from Foucault and how I am going to use it.

On perhaps a simplistic level Foucault is fleshing out the anatomy of power, the detail that Weber misses because of his focus on structures and institutions.

He develops a (kind of) phenomenology of everyday life – although, crucially, he is not especially interested in how it is directly experienced by the individual, but in how it bears upon the subject that is subjected.

On the other hand, Foucault appears to miss the continuing importance of institutions in the evolution of power.


[1] Michel Foucault, (1974) 'Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir' in Dits et Ecrits, t. II. (Paris: Gallimard), 1994, pp. 523-4. Sourced here.