"Foucault's response to attempts such as those of Habermas, Dewey, and Berlin - attempts to build a philosophy around the needs of a democratic society - is to point out the drawbacks of this society, the ways in which it does not allow room for self-creation, for private projects. Like Habermas and Sellars, he accepts Mead's view that the self is a creation of society. Unlike them, he is not prepared to admit that the selves shaped by modern liberal societies are better than the selves earlier societies created. A large part of Foucault's work - the most valuable part, in my view - consists in showing how the patterns of acculturation characteristic of liberal societies have imposed on their members kinds of constraints of which older, premodern societies had not dreamed. He is not, however, willing to see these constraints as compensated for by a decrease in pain, any more than Nietzsche was willing to see the resentfulness of "slave-morality" as compensated for by such a decrease."
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Atheists from FranceAcademics from FrancePhilosophers from FranceHistorians from FranceSociologists from France
Original Language: English
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Sources
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Chap. 3 : The contingency of a liberal community
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
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Michel Foucault
1926 – 1984
französischer Philosoph
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