Abstract - Aaron Gavin

Michel Foucault has often been considered a thinker of the Left. Surprisingly, many Leftist theorists have accused Foucault of being conservative. This paper seeks to elucidate the Foucault-as-a-conservative claim by establishing a connection between Foucault and conservatism as represented by its founding fathers—Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. Foucault and these conservative thinkers share a similar world-view in their interpretation of political society. The paper makes this point through the use of three socio-political terms—power, right, and truth—and through a two-fold argument: first, Foucault, Burke, and Maistre each attack the French Revolution as the embodiment of a destructive and dominative interpretation of political society which regards power as repressive and juridical, right as a universal concept derived from natural origins, and truth as a concept discovered through philosophical inquiry. Foucault, Burke, and Maistre each reject this view. Second, each theorist redefines these concepts in similar ways. In their perspective, power is productive and unacquirable, rights are local and dependent on continuity, and truth is tied to the historical realization of war’s centrality for socio-political life. Having established this relationship, the paper reflects on the implications of Foucault’s conservative discourse for the concept of political action in our current epoch.

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