Cover: Title: Author: Publisher: Isbn10 - Asin: Print Isbn13: Ebook Isbn13: Language: Subject

cover next page >
Cover
title: Foucault Contra Habermas : Recasting the Dialogue

between Genealogy and Critical Theory
author: Ashenden, Samantha.; Owen, David
publisher: Sage Publications, Inc.
isbn10 | asin:
print isbn13: 9780803977709
ebook isbn13: 9780585388236
language: English
subject Foucault, Michel,--1926-1984--Contributions in political
science, Habermas, Jèurgen--Contributions in political
science, Social sciences--Philosophy, Social sciences--
Philosophy.
publication date: 1999
lcc: JA76.F68 1999eb
ddc: 320/.01/1
subject: Foucault, Michel,--1926-1984--Contributions in political
science, Habermas, Jèurgen--Contributions in political
science, Social sciences--Philosophy, Social sciences--
Philosophy.
cover next page >

< previous page page_i next page >
Page i
Foucault contra Habermas
< previous page page_i next page >

< previous page page_ii next page >
Page ii
This page intentionally left blank
< previous page page_ii next page >

< previous page page_iii next page >
Page iii
Foucault contra Habermas
Recasting the Dialogue between
Genealogy and Critical Theory
edited by
Samantha Ashenden and David Owen
< previous page page_iii next page >

< previous page page_iv next page >
Page iv
© Editorial selection and Introduction Samantha Ashenden
and David Owen 1999
Chapter 1 © David Owen 1999
Chapter 2 © Thomas Osborne 1999
Chapter 3 © Daniel W. Conway 1999
Chapter 4 © James Tully 1999
Chapter 5 © Samantha Ashenden 1999
Chapter 6 © Mitchell Dean 1999
Chapter 7 © Simon Thompson 1999
First published 1999
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers.
SAGE Publications Ltd

6 Bonhill Street
London EC2A 4PU
SAGE Publications Inc
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320
SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd
32, M-Block Market
Greater Kailash – I
New Delhi 110 048
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN 0 7619 5501 1
ISBN 0 7619 5502 X (pbk)
Library of Congress catalog record available
Typeset by Photoprint, Torquay, Devon
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press,
Gateshead
< previous page page_iv next page >

< previous page page_v next page >
Page v
To Wivenhoe
< previous page page_v next page >

< previous page page_vi next page >
Page vi
This page intentionally left blank
< previous page page_vi next page >

< previous page page_vii next page >
Page vii
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: Foucault, Habermas and the Politics of Critique 1
1 Orientation and Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and 21
Genealogy
David Owen
2 Critical Spirituality: On Ethics and Politics in the Later Foucault 45
Thomas Osborne
3 Pas de deux: Habermas and Foucault in Genealogical 60
Communication
Daniel W. Conway
4 To Think and Act Differently: Foucault's Four Reciprocal 90
Objections to Habermas' Theory
James Tully
5 Questions of Criticism: Habermas and Foucault on 143
Civil Society and Resistance
Samantha Ashenden
6 Normalising Democracy: Foucault and Habermas on 166
Democracy, Liberalism and Law
Mitchell Dean
7 The Agony and the Ecstasy: Foucault, Habermas and the 195
Problem of Recognition
Simon Thompson
Index 212
< previous page page_vii next page >

< previous page page_viii next page >
Page viii
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea for this collection emerged from a dialogue between the editors that began at the Oxford
Political Theory conference in 1991 and which has continued ever since, widening to include the
contributors to this collection amongst others. We are grateful to Ziyad Marar and Robert Rojek at Sage
for supporting this project and for their patience and encouragement in the face of the difficulties which
attended its production. We would also like to thank Sage Publications for permission to use sections of
David Owen's ‘Foucault, Habermas and the claims of reason’, History of the Human Sciences, 9 (2):
119–38 in the introduction to this collection.
< previous page page_viii next page >

< previous page page_1 next page >
Page 1
INTRODUCTION
Foucault, Habermas and the Politics of Critique
The encounter between the practices of critical reflection elaborated by Michel Foucault and by Jürgen
Habermas is a source of continuing debate in social and political philosophy. The concern of both of
these thinkers with the topics of enlightenment, modernity and critique indicates the possibility of a
productive philosophical dialogue oriented to contemporary issues in moral philosophy and ethics on the
one hand, and social and political theory on the other. Yet, with some honourable exceptions (Hoy and
MacCarthy, 1994), the history of this encounter is characterised by the marked absence of open
dialogue. No doubt, as Michel Kelly has noted, this is in part due to the unfortunate fact that
the amount of discussion by each philosopher about the other was unintentionally lopsided in Habermas'
favour. He devoted two chapters of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity to Foucault, but the book
was published after Foucault's death and thus received no reply … the effect of this lopsidedness is that
the debate is too often construed in Habermasian terms. (Kelly, 1994a: 4)
There are, of course, further reasons for the Habermasian bias of the debate thus far. Not the least of
these is the fact that, whereas Foucault is concerned with elaborating a form of critical reflection,
Habermas seeks to establish the form of critical reflection (Tully, 1989). On the appropriately strict
criteria which Habermas imposes on the theory of communicative rationality which expresses his critical
project, the transcendental-pragmatic claims which the theory enunciates are supported if, and only if,
the theory can generate more powerful conceptual, moral and empirical insights than its competitors.
Consequently, it should not be surprising that the Foucault/Habermas debate has been largely driven by
the attempt to demonstrate the incoherence of Foucault's practice of critical reflection while also
incorporating its admitted insights

Page 2
within Habermas' theory (see, for example, Fraser, 1989; Honneth, 1991; MacCarthy, 1990). The most
common expression of this project is provided by Nancy Fraser's contentious (but often repeated) claim
that Foucault's practice can be described as a mixture of ‘empirical insights and normative confusions’
(Fraser, 1989) – a claim which reproduces the double gesture of appropriation and exclusion
characteristic of Habermas' reconstructive approach.
Confronted with this stance of assault and assimilation, advocates of Foucault's practice of critical
reflection have generally chosen either to dismiss the Habermasian assault as presupposing what it
seeks to show, namely, the superiority of Habermas' practice (typically, this stand is expressed by
ignoring the debate per se) or to defend Foucault's practice with arguments designed to illustrate the
misrecognition of this practice which, it is claimed, structures the critical charges directed at it (Dean,
1994; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1986; Owen, 1995; Patton, 1994; Schmidt and Wartenberg, 1994).
It is in the context of this history that this collection of essays seeks to perform three modest but
necessary tasks in order to recast the dialogue. First, it elucidates the character – and stakes – of the
encounter between these practices of critical reflection. Secondly, it evaluates some of the major
criticisms of genealogy made in the course of this debate. Thirdly, it offers a critical response to
Habermas' position from the perspective of Foucault's practice with respect to contemporary
philosophical and political issues. It is not the purpose of this collection to settle this debate; its aim is
to reanimate the engagement by providing a Foucauldian rejoinder to the practitioners of critique,
thereby issuing an invitation to the advocates of critique to engage in further dialogue. This introduction
will set the scene for the task by outlining the practices at stake in this encounter and by offering an
account of the skewed nature of the debate thus far, before indicating the ways in which the essays
collected here attempt to take up these tasks.
Both Habermas and Foucault delineate their mature reflections on their own practices of critical
reflection by reference to the Enlightenment and to the themes of maturity and modernity; however, the
relationships which each establishes with respect to these topics are radically divergent. This contrast
emerges markedly in their respective relations to Kant's philosophical project (Dreyfus and Rabinow,
1986; Hutchings, 1996). For both Foucault and Habermas, Kant's specification that the task of critical
reflection, of enlightenment, as the achievement of maturity (i.e. the autonomous deployment of one's
capacity for critical reflection) marks the emergence of our modernity. However, this is the limit of
Habermas' and Foucault's agreement. On the one hand, Habermas locates the central feature of Kant's
project in its recognition of the limits of reason and its simultaneous preservation of the critical-
transcendental power of reason to ground claims to truth and to normative rightness.

Page 3
On the other hand, Foucault focuses on Kant's reflections on enlightenment as exemplifying a certain
form of reflection on the present, namely, reflection on ‘today’ as difference in history. Consequently,
whereas Habermas seeks to rearticulate Kant's project in terms of a weak transcendental argument
grounded in a reconstruction of our communicative competences, Foucault offers a reworking of what it
is to think ‘today’ as difference in history.
Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment
Since the ‘linguistic turn’ which marked Habermas' move away from the attempt to demonstrate the
possibility of such a project through recourse to the idea of quasi-transcendental knowledge-constitutive
interests elaborated in Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), the main thrust of his work has been
concerned with redeeming the possibility of an emancipatory form of knowledge through the project of
universal pragmatics by rendering plausible his theory of communicative action and rationality.
Habermas' confrontation with this theoretical problematic operates across four primary contexts of
contemporary debate: the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, the characterisation of
modernity, moral and political philosophy, and the political theory of the liberal-democratic state (White,
1995b: 7). To clarify what is involved in this project, we can note the character of the transcendental-
pragmatic claims which Habermas proposes as the central tenets of his practice of critical reflection.
The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct the universal conditions of possible
understanding. To address this task, Habermas proposes to examine ‘how language has the ability to
coordinate action in a consensual or cooperative way as opposed to a forced or manipulated one’ and to
show how even the ‘capacity to force compliance can be shown to rest on the possibility of acting
communicatively’ (Warnke, 1995: 120–1). This starting point presupposes the sustainability of a
distinction between consensual agreement and straightforward compliance which Habermas grounds ‘in
a reconstruction of the pretheoretical knowledge of competent speakers and actors’ (Warnke, 1995:
120). Consequently, we can gloss Habermas' project as the attempt to establish the primacy of the
communicative use of language to generate agreement on the strategic use of language to force
compliance and, thereby, to show the relationship of language in its ‘original’ mode to the idea of
reason (which, contra Apel, operates through a strategy of ‘weak transcendental argument’ based on
the rational reconstruction of competencies).
To develop this argument, Habermas draws on Austin's account of speech acts which distinguishes three
aspects of speech acts (locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary) and reformulates it:

Page 4
Habermas distinguishes between two sorts of illocutionary effect – first, the understanding and, second,
the acceptance of a speech act offer – and three sorts of perlocutionary effect. A perlocutionary effect
(1) refers to that effect that the speech act produces on the hearer merely because of what follows from
its meaning; … By a perlocutionary effect (2), Habermas refers to an effect on the hearer which is not
grammatically legislated by the speech act itself but that could be revealed to the participants without
affecting their understanding and acceptance of the speech act offer. Finally, perlocutionary effects (3)
refer to those effects that are not grammatically legislated by the speech act and that could not be
revealed to the participants in the communication without affecting their understanding and acceptance
of the speech act offer. (Warnke, 1995: 121)
The novelty of Habermas' reformulation of speech act theory is to illustrate that the possibility of
perlocutionary effects (3), in which language is deployed strategically, depends on the primacy of the
communicative use of language in which the speaker ‘owes the binding … force of his illocutionary act
not to the validity of what it said but to the coordinating effect of the warranty that he offers: namely to
redeem, if necessary, the validity claim raised with the speech act’ (Habermas, 1984: 302 cited in
Warnke, 1995: 122) since it is only by adopting the guise of redeemability that strategic uses of
language can have binding force. Thus, the use of language to manipulate others into compliance is
parasitic on the orientation of speech acts to mutual understanding in which the redeemability of the
claims offered in the speech act is presupposed. Moreover, in so far as Habermas' account of how
mutual understanding and consensual agreement are possible connects the communicative use of
language to the redeemability of speech act offers and, thus, to the provision of reasons, it establishes
the relationship of language in its original mode to a communicative concept of rationality.
Habermas clarifies the concept of communicative rationality which emerges from this analysis by
distinguishing between three types of validity claim: claims to truth, claims to normative rightness, and
claims to truthfulness. He offers the following comment:
In contexts of communicative action, we call someone rational not only if he is able to put forward an
assertion and, when criticized, to provide grounds for it by pointing to the appropriate evidence, but
also if he is following an established norm and is able, when criticized, to justify his action by explicating
the situation in the light of legitimate expectations. We even call someone rational if he makes known a
desire or an intention … etc., and is then able to reassure critics in regard to the revealed experience by
drawing practical consequences from it and behaving consistently thereafter. (Habermas, 1984: 15)
Claims to truth and normative rightness are distinguished from claims to truthfulness in that the former
are redeemed discursively, whereas the latter are redeemed through a pattern of ongoing interaction.
But what is the character of the discursive redemption of the first two types of validity

Page 5
claim? In answering this question, Habermas provides a specification of the transcendental structure of
rational argumentation by suggesting that the discursive redemption of validity claims to truth and
normative rightness entails that participants must presuppose: (1) that all beings capable of speech and
action are entitled to participate in the process of argumentation, the principle of universal moral respect
(Benhabib, 1990: 337); (2) that participants have an equal right to introduce and question claims, to
put forward reasons, etc., the principle of egalitarian reciprocity (Benhabib, 1990: 337); and (3) that no
participants be prevented from exercising these rights to, and of, participation, the principle of non-
coercion. These principles are universal and necessary presuppositions of rational argumentation
precisely because they entail that understanding and agreement are generated solely by the force of the
better argument under universal conditions of equal and reciprocal access to participation, and act as
guarantors of the context-transcending power of reason. As such, the ‘ideal speech situation’ (or
unlimited communication community) constructed by these conditions of rational argumentation
operates critically as a regulative ideal immanent in all speech act offers and, thus, rearticulates the
Kantian preservation of the power of reason. In other words, while Habermas recognises the context-
dependence of our recognition of the idealising presuppositions of communicative action (and the
fallibility of our rational reconstruction of these presuppositions), his central – and most controversial –
claim is that the validity of these presuppositions is not context-bound: ‘The transcendental moment of
universal validity bursts every provinciality asunder’ (Habermas, 1987: 322).
The power of this conception of rationality can be illustrated by attending briefly to its reformulation of
Kant's universalistic conception of morality. Let us begin by noting that Habermas distinguishes between
three forms of practical reason: pragmatic, ethical, and moral, which relate respectively to reflection on
the purposive (means), the good (evaluations), and the just (norms). It is only the validity of claims to
normative rightness – that is, the moral form of practical reason which Habermas locates as entailing a
transcendence of the egological perspective of the actor and, thus, as requiring ‘a break with all of the
unquestioned truths of an established, concrete ethical life’ – which is ‘characterized by an intermeshing
of the perspective of each with the perspectives of all … under the communicative presuppositions of a
universal discourse’ (Habermas, 1993: 12).
We have already noted the three principles which Habermas specifies as the idealising presuppositions
immanent within speech act offers. However, as Moon notes, to suggest that challenges to the validity
of a norm must be met through a process of moral argumentation requires ‘a principle of argumentation
for normative questions analogous to the principle of induction for empirical questions’ (1995: 149).1
Habermas argues that the principle of universalisability (U) fulfils this role in so far as it is derivable from
the presuppositions of argumentation. In other

Page 6
words, if we express the presuppositions of discourse as rules, it follows that ‘a contested norm cannot
meet with the consent of the participants in a practice discourse unless (U) holds’, that is,
Unless all affected can freely accept the consequences and the side effects that the general observance
of a controversial norm can be expected to have for the satisfaction of the interests of each individual.
(Habermas, 1990: 93)
Once this point is made clear, we can state the principle of discourse ethics (D), its basic tenet as a
moral theory, as follows:
Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in
their capacity as participants in a practical discourse. (Habermas, 1990: 93)
Having elaborated the structure of discourse ethics, we need to note that Habermas is not following, for
example, Rawls in constructing an ideal discourse; on the contrary, Habermas is concerned with actual
discourses between affected parties and is simply trying to delineate the conditions of argumentation
which participants must assume to be approximately realised if they are concerned to validate a norm,
whether or not these assumptions are counterfactual in a given case (Habermas, 1990: 91–2).
However, as Habermas recognises, ‘Valid norms owe their abstract universality to the fact that they
withstand the universalization test only in a decontextualized form’ (1993: 13). Consequently, Habermas'
reconstructed Kantianism might appear vulnerable to the criticisms which Hegel aimed at Kant's moral
philosophy (Habermas, 1990: 195–215). To overcome this vulnerability, Habermas argues that the
application of norms also calls for argumentative clarification:
In this case, the impartiality of judgement cannot again be secured through a principle of
universalization, rather, in addressing questions of context-sensitive application, practical reason must be
informed by a principle of appropriateness. What must be determined here is which of the norms
already accepted as valid is appropriate in a given case in the light of all the relevant features of the
situation conceived as exhaustively as possible. (Habermas, 1993: 13–14)
This demarcation of justification and application is a necessary feature of Habermas' theory in so far it
claims that the discourse of application is context-bound, while the discourse of justification transcends
the provinciality of context.
The pertinence of this brief sketch of Habermas' critical project to our understanding of the character of
the Foucault/Habermas debate emerges when we note two features. First, it presents the task of
providing rational criteria for justifying universal moral norms as an immanent feature of the critique of
practical reason. It is this aspect of critical reflection which ties it to a commitment to human freedom.
Secondly, it

Page 7
is a condition of sustaining the strong claims of Habermas' critical project that it can show that
alternative projects are either capable of being subsumed under the theory of communicative action or
involve a performative contradiction. Typically both these relations are established to Foucault's work,
although the latter has probably had more prominence in that it is a central claim of Foucault's critics
that, despite his rhetorical appeals to autonomy, his work is incapable of answering the question ‘why
fight?’ (Habermas, 1987: 284).
Foucault and the Ethos of Enlightenment
By contrast with Habermas, Foucault does not not provide us with a transcendental argument, however
weak, but with a series of historical studies which he characterises as ‘philosophical exercises’ (Foucault,
1985: 9). Borrowing a distinction from James Tully (1988), we can say that rather than proposing and
theoretically elaborating a universal pragmatics, Foucault offers us various performances of a historical
pragmatics which act as exemplars of his practice of critical reflection. However, he does offer us some
reflections on his critical practice and focusing on these will provide the basis for reflecting on Foucault's
practice.
In his essay ‘What is enlightenment?’ – the third of his engagements with Kant's essay of the same
title2 – Foucault delineates a form of reflection that does not take up a relationship to the present which
represents it as a threshold, an age, or an achievement (Rabinow, 1994) but, rather, thinks its relation
to the present in terms of ‘reflection on ‘‘today” as difference in history’ (Foucault, 1984: 38). Foucault
elaborates this mode of reflection as ‘the attitude of modernity’ in which our relationship to the present
manifests an ethos of ‘ironic heroization’: ‘an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is
confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it’
(Foucault, 1984: 39–41).
The claim that Foucault attaches to the philosophical ethos exhibited in his practice of critical reflection
is that it expresses this ‘limit-attitude’, that is, his practice of critical reflection is the practice of such a
liberty at the level of discursive activity, and that it opens up the possibility of such exercises of liberty
at the level of non-discursive activity. Thus Foucault comments:
if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge had to renounce transgressing, it
seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given
to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and
the product of arbitary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form
of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression…. I shall
thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of

Page 8
ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by
ourselves upon ourselves as free beings. (Foucault, 1984: 45–7)
No doubt, as Foucault recognises, this form of critique surrenders the possibility of a final delimitation of
what may constitute our historical limits and is, thus, always in the position of beginning again. It is,
perhaps, not least for this reason that Foucault suggests that his position ‘leads not to apathy but to a
hyper- and pessimistic activism’ predicated on identifying the main dangers of modern society (1984:
343) by reflecting on ‘the “contemporary limits of the necessary”, that is, … what is not or is no longer
indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects’ (Foucault, 1984: 43).3 What,
though, is the structure of this practice of critical reflection?
Foucault's response to this question draws out the implication of his recasting of the Kantian project of
critique in a way which both establishes a relationship between his archaeological and genealogical
studies, and demarcates the difference between his understanding of the form of critical reflection and
that proposed by Habermas:
criticism is no longer going to be practised in the search for formal structures with universal value, but
rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to
recognise ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying…. Archaeological – and not
transcendental – in that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or all
possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say
and do as so many historical events. And the critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not
deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate
out from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or
thinking what we are, do, or think. (1984: 45–6)
But how are we to analyse how we have become what we are and to separate out the possibility of
being otherwise than we are? To address this question we need to turn to the conceptual apparatus
which Foucault develops to articulate his critical project.
Foucault's analysis is articulated along three axes: knowledge (reflection on oneself and others), power
(action on the action of others), and ethics (action on the actions of oneself). An initial implication of
this starting point is that Foucault's genealogies do presuppose ‘a “thin” conception of the subject of
thought and action: whatever else it may be, the human subject is a being endowed with certain
capacities’ (Patton, 1994: 61). Of course, Foucault's claim is that how human subjects have come to be
endowed with certain capacities for reflection and action at a given juncture is a matter of historical
investigation, but if we are to grasp his concepts of power, knowledge and ethics, it is important to note
that Foucault is committed to a minimal account of the human

Page 9
subject. We can locate Foucault's recourse to these concepts and his elaboration of them by attending
to two problematics through which his critical reflection is articulated:
The theoretical problematic of occidental reason: How do human beings govern themselves and others
by the production of truth?
The practical problematic of modern society: How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from
the intensification of power relations?
We will begin by focusing on the first problematic before turning to the second.
Contra Habermas, Foucault is not concerned with providing an analytic of truth but of investigating the
politics of truth, that is,
the types of discourse which [a society] accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and
instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is
sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those
who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1984: 73)
By attending to the politics of truth, Foucault is concerned with the ways in which our ‘will to truth’
produces effects of power.4 We can clarify this point by distinguishing two aspects of the politics of truth
before showing how these aspects relate to power and ethics.
The first aspect is a concern with the ways in which a given epistemic field, namely, what can be up for
grabs as true or false, structures consciousness (our capacity to recognise and reflect on ourselves and
others) in terms of criteria governing what counts as an object of knowledge, how we reflect on the
objects of knowledge, and what is the telos of knowledge. This aspect is exhibited by The Order of
Things (1970) in Foucault's analyses of, for example, the classical and modern epistemes in which he
seeks to disclose a tranformation of the epistemic grammar of knowledge with respect to its object,
mode of reflection and purpose. The second aspect is an interest in the ways in which the production
and reproduction of an epistemic field involve criteria governing the authorisation, status and role of
those who are charged with speaking the truth. This aspect is manifested by Discipline and Punish
(1977) and The History of Sexuality (1979) in which Foucault notes how the development of the human
sciences involved the emergence of disciplinary/professional criteria of authorisation, the status of an
expert, and the role of judging normality.
How do these aspects of Foucault's analysis of knowledge relate to the analysis of power and ethics?
Foucault presents his concept of power as ‘a mode of action on the actions of others’ which seeks to
govern the conduct of others, that is, ‘to structure the field of possible actions of

Page 10
others’ (Foucault, 1982: 221). We should note with respect to power relations that Foucault introduces
the concept of ‘domination’ to refer to the establishment of ‘stable and asymmetrical systems of power
relations’ in which ‘the possibility of effective resistance has been removed’ (Patton, 1994: 64), that is,
where those who are subject to constraints cannot transform the system of constraints to which they
are subject. The relationship between power, ethics and Foucault's analysis of the politics of truth
becomes apparent when we ask what is involved in the exercise of power over others (relations of
power) or oneself (relations of ethics). The crucial point is that in so far as relations of ethics are simply
relations of power exercised by the self over itself, Foucault's ‘analytic’ for disclosing the structure of
ethical relations applies equally to power relations. This analytic involves four elements: (1) a
determination of the object of power or ethical relations, (2) the mode of recognition of a practical rule
and of reflection on one's relationship to it (ethics) or on the other's relationship to it (power), (3) the
performance of or attempt to impose a set of ascetic practices, and (4) the telos of power relations or
relations of ethics (Foucault, 1985: 26–8). With respect to the first aspect of Foucault's analysis of
relations of knowledge in terms of their epistemic grammar (i.e. object, mode of reflection and telos),
this analytic illustrates that power relations and ethical self-relations involve an immanent relationship
with an epistemic field with respect to (1), (2) and (4), that is, the object, mode of reflection and telos
of power relations or ethical self-relations. In other words, ‘there is no power [or ethical] relation without
the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and
constitute at the same time power [and ethical] relations’ (Foucault, 1977: 27). With regard to the
second aspect of Foucault's analysis of relations of knowledge in terms of the production of an epistemic
field, this analytic illustrates that power relations and ethical self-relations involve an immanent relation
to (3), that is, the ascetic practices which express (2) in working on (1) in order to accomplish (4), since
the authority of the claim of particular ascetic practices to perform their task is predicated on the
practical judgement of those who are authorised to speak the truth – the ‘ascetic priests’, in Nietzsche's
sense.
At this juncture, we should note that our discussion of Foucault's first problematic reveals how his form
of critical reflection can act to articulate the possibility of being otherwise than we are, but that we still
need to connect this to his second problematic: the question of how to disconnect the growth of our
capacities from the intensification of power relations in modern society. The dilemma which Foucault
identifies can be described as the ‘double bind’ of biopower. We can clarify what is involved in this
double bind by noting that Foucault's claim is predicated on the co-implication of the epistemic grammar
of the human sciences and the biopolitical grammar of power relations exercised over ourselves and

Page 11
others. Dreyfus and Rabinow offer a useful summation of the matrix of human sciences/biopower under
the latter aspect:
Biopower spread under the banner of making people healthy and protecting them. When there was
resistance, or failure to achieve its stated aims, this was construed as further proof of the need to
reinforce and extend the power of experts. A technical matrix was established. By definition, there ought
to be a way of solving any technical problem. Once this matrix was established, the spread of biopower
was assured, for there could be nothing else to appeal to: any other standards could be shown to be
abnormal or to present merely technical problems. We are promised normalisation and happiness
through science and law. When they fail, this only justifies the need for more of the same. (1982: 196)
The double bind established by biopower emerges clearly when we reflect that resistance to power
relations within this matrix is articulated through forms of ethics ‘founded on so-called scientific
knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on’ (Foucault, 1984: 343)
which, consequently, act to reinforce this matrix and the power of experts articulated within, and
through, it.
How, then, does Foucault seek to articulate the disconnection of the growth of our capacities from the
intensification of power relations? The response to this question refers us to Foucault's genealogical
investigations which both illustrate the contingency and specificity of the matrix of biopower (the
opening of the possibility of thinking otherwise), and redescribe this matrix in terms of its effects on our
capacity to govern ourselves (the incitement to take up the possibility of being otherwise). Moreover,
Foucault's exercises in the critical ontology of ourselves are both exemplifications of thinking otherwise
and exemplary instances of acting otherwise which exhibit the ethos of ironic heroisation. This latter
point becomes clear when we treat Foucault's texts both in terms of ethics qua Foucault's relation to
himself as a philosopher in which his texts are ascetic practices through which he seeks to take up the
ongoing critical task of producing himself as a philosopher and in terms of power qua Foucault's relation
to his readers in which his texts are ascetic practices through which he attempts to act on the actions of
others by recommending (and not legislating) a form of relation of the self to itself structured in terms
of an ethos of enlightenment.
This discussion makes it clear that Foucault's practice of critical reflection is radically distinct from that
of Habermas. Foucault is, as it were, concerned to loosen the grip of a picture which currently holds us
captive and, simultaneously, to open up the possibility of being otherwise than we are by loosening this
picture and to exhibit a mode of being otherwise than we are through its practice. At this juncture,
then, we are perhaps prepared to explore the construction of a critical debate between Habermas' and
Foucault's practices of critical reflection.

Page 12
Foucault contra Habermas, Habermas contra Foucault
Since the force of many of the criticisms of Foucault offered by practitioners of critical theory is
dependent on Habermas' claim to articulate a form of critique in which reason is expressed as a context-
transcending power, it may be appropriate to begin by identifying those criticisms of Foucault's work
which specifically depend on this strong claim and to take up a Foucauldian response to Habermas'
weak transcendentalism in order to adjudicate this aspect of the debate. Following this discussion, we
can turn to other aspects of the debate, most notably the question of the lack of normative criteria in
Foucault's work.
The critical claims which Habermas puts forward are that the coherence and cogency of Foucault's work
is put into question
(1) by the involuntary presentism of a historiography that remains hermeneutically stuck in its starting
situation; (2) by the unavoidable relativism of an analysis related to the present that can understand
itself only as a context-dependent practical enterprise; (3) by the arbitary partisanship of a criticism that
cannot account for its own normative foundations. (Habermas, 1987: 276)
We will take up each of these criticisms briefly.
The critique of Foucault as caught up in an ‘involuntary presentism’ is based on the claim that Foucault's
approach entails a rejection of the attempt ‘to make comprehensible what actors are doing and thinking
out of a context of tradition interwoven with the self-understanding of actors’ in favour of the
explanation of ‘the horizon within which such utterances can appear meaningful at all in terms of
underlying practices’ (Habermas, 1987: 267). This line of criticism can lead to the identification of
Foucault as practising a form of systems theory (Honneth, 1991) and ties Foucault to presentism in so
far as the rejection of hermeneutics leads to ‘a historiography that is narcissistically oriented to the
stand-point of the historian and instrumentalises the contemplation of the past for the needs of the
present’ (Habermas, 1987: 278). The first aspect of this criticism is based on an elementary confusion in
that, although Foucault's analyses typically operate by focusing on the practices through which relations
of knowledge, power and ethics are articulated and focusing on the effects of these practices, that is,
the ways in which they structure forms of subjectivity, this does not entail the rejection of hermeneutics
per se, since it is through the self-understandings and actions of human agents that these practices
have been produced and are maintained or transformed (as Foucault's essay ‘The subject and power’
(1982) as well as the preceding section of this introduction makes clear). Rather Foucault's analysis
operates at this level in order to make intelligible the regimes of truth and states of domination which
emerge from the plurality of power/knowledge relations elaborated and exercised by human agents,
often in unintentional ways and certainly

Page 13
without a subject which acts to direct the formation of these second-order effects (Dreyfus and
Rabinow, 1982: 104–25). The second aspect of this criticism is the more significant, to the extent that
Foucault's practice of critical reflection does entail an investigation of the past which expresses a
practical judgement concerning the ‘main danger’ (i.e. biopower) which confronts human autonomy in
our present. While this judgement is offered up in the form of genealogical arguments for public debate,
the interest which guides Foucault's reflection on the past concerns how we have become what we are
in the present and how what we are acts to constrain what we may become in the future – and this
may seem to instrumentalise the past in terms of the needs of the present. However, the force of this
criticism depends on the possibility of a form of universal historical reflection which is not guided by
context-bound interests but by context-transcending interests; in the absence of such interests, this
criticism simply amounts to the assertive use of ‘instrumentalises’ as term of abuse (one which,
moreover, does not distinguish between different modes of instrumentalising the past with respect to
the interests of the present but simply rejects all such efforts).
The second criticism, that of relativism, needs to be clarified slightly on the basis of Habermas' more
recent distinction between being context-dependent and context-bound. While both Foucault's and
Habermas' forms of critique are context-dependent in that they only become possible under modern
conditions, Habermas' objection to Foucault's account is that it identifies being context-dependent with
being context-bound, whereas he sees his own activity as deploying criteria of rationality which are
context-transcending. So this criticism also depends for its force on Habermas' securing of his weak
transcendental argument.
The final criticism is that Foucault's work cannot account for its own normative foundations, that is,
cannot answer the question ‘why fight?’. However, this claim is also articulated in terms of Habermas'
commitment to the idea that it is necessary to provide a general response to this question by specifying
the transcendental structure of rational argumentation and, thus, grounding universal norms that
provide a general response to the question ‘why fight?’. In this respect, Foucault cannot answer
Habermas' criticism in the terms in which it is set, yet these terms again depend on the cogency and
universality of Habermas' practice of critical reflection.
Having specified these criticisms and shown how they depend upon presupposing the universality of
Habermas' project, we can turn to outlining a Foucauldian response which is, simultaneously, a criticism
of Habermas' own understanding of critique. The crux of the Foucauldian criticism is scepticism towards
the context-transcending power of critical reflection, its ‘moment of unconditionality’, combined with the
concern that insistence on this moment of unconditionality ‘tends to freeze certain juridical ways of
thought and action at the expense of an ethic of

Page 14
critical enquiry into the limitations of and alternatives to these arrangements’ (Tully, 1989: 188). As
Kelly expresses it, Foucault's critical response to Habermas is that
the transcendence Habermas speaks of is not something about which we could ever have any
epistemological assurance so long as our reason is historical, for the historicity of subjectivity and reason
places ontological limits on our ability to have such knowledge. (1994b: 388)
Habermas' refutation of this Foucauldian scepticism is predicated on the idea that ‘philosophy raises
universals as hypotheses to be confirmed or not by (the logic of) historical development’ (Kelly, 1994b:
389) but this countermove relies on Habermas' own ontological claims about reason, namely, that it is
necessarily incarnated in contexts of communicative action. (Kelly, 1994b: 390). Consequently, in so far
as Habermas is simply proposing an alternative ontology, this ontology must be justified before it can
act as a ground for criticising the coherence of Foucault's project. We might conclude, as Kelly does
(1994b: 390), by suggesting that the antagonism of these ontologies towards the fundamental issue of
the status of universals cannot be decided. Perhaps this is the case,5 but it seems reasonable to note
two further points at this juncture.
First, the strategies which Habermas has deployed to justify his claims do not seem particularly
convincing; for example, Habermas has acknowledged earlier criticisms of the distinction between
justification and application which is crucial to his project by arguing that the abstract universality of
valid norms entails that they ‘can be applied without qualification only to standard situations whose
salient features have been integrated from the outset into the conditional components of the rule as
conditions of application’ (Habermas, 1993: 13). Yet there is something troubling in the appeal to
‘standard situations’ which Habermas makes here since, to extend a line of criticism developed by
Warnke (1995), it seems plausible to suggest that what counts as a ‘standard situation’ will be informed
by our cultural values or, at least, by our form of life. If this is the case, it suggests that not only is the
distinction between justification and application unsustainable but also that the justification of norms
cannot escape the contextual horizon of our form of life. Secondly, in so far as the distinction between
knowledge and power, and between critique and power, which Habermas ‘defends analytically can so
far not be found empirically’, this entails that ‘Foucault can practice critique now, while Habermas must
wait (or else operate with counterfactuals)’ (Kelly, 1994b: 399).
This discussion does not, of course, exhaust the debate. We also need to take up the question of
Foucault's lack of normative criteria. This criticism is often admitted in part by Foucault's sympathetic
readers; thus Patton, who offers the most sophisticated reading of Foucault's subject of power to date,
notes that Foucault's minimalist conception of

Page 15
the human subject ‘will not provide any basis for a single universal answer to the question, ‘‘Why ought
domination to be resisted?” ’ (Patton, 1994: 61). However, Patton also immediately notes that ‘given
certain minimal assumptions about the nature of human being, and about the capacities which human
beings have acquired, Foucault's conception of the subject does provide a basis on which to understand
the inevitability of resistance to domination’ (Patton, 1994: 61). These minimal assumptions are drawn
out by elaborating some of the background Nietzschean assumptions of Foucault's later work:
In order to account for the experience of … systems of power as forms of domination, Foucault must
presuppose the existence of particular forms of self-interpretation and the existence of something like
the feeling of powerlessness. In other words, he must suppose a fuller conception of human subjectivity
which takes into account both the interpretive and self-reflective dimensions of human agency. (Patton,
1994: 71)
That Foucault's late work does involve such presuppositions is, Patton argues, implied in his account of
modernity:
Modernity understood as an ethos of permanent self-criticism presupposes the existence of possible
subjects of such activity. Such subjects will necessarily be free in the sense that their possibilities for
action will include the capacity to undertake this self-critical activity which Foucault called ‘work carried
out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’. So long as human capacities do in fact include the
power of individuals to act upon their own actions, we can see that Foucault's conception of human
being in terms of power enables us to distinguish between those exercises of power which inhibit and
those which allow the self-directed use and development of human capacities. To the extent that
individuals and groups acquire the meta-capacity for the autonomous exercise of certain of their own …
capacities, they will inevitably be led to oppose forms of domination which prevent such activity.
(Patton, 1994: 68)
This argument is both cogent and valuable, not least since its illustration of Foucault's commitment to a
Nietzschean account of human agency clarifies his rejection of the legislative project of providing
‘universal moral norms or criteria of evaluation’ and his recommendation of an ‘ethics of existence’
(Patton, 1994: 71; cf. also Bernauer and Mahon, 1994; Davidson, 1994; Rabinow, 1994). But, it is
limited to the extent that it does not further recognise the way in which Foucault's practice of critical
reflection grounds its recommendation of an ethics of existence, that is, its exercise as a form of power
which cultivates ‘the self-directed use and development of human capacities’, in its exemplification of
such an ethics (Owen, 1995). Taken together, these points provide both a rejoinder to the criticism
offered by critical theorists and a problematisation of the form in which that criticism is posed.
The features of the Habermas/Foucault debate presented are not the only aspects of the critical
exchange which have developed between

Page 16
practitioners of these two modes of critical reflection. Our purpose in this section has simply been to
indicate that this debate is still an open issue and to provide a context in which the contributions to this
collection can be situated as rejoinders to the bias of the dialogue.
Chapters 1 to 3 of this collection focus on the philosophical stakes of the encounter between genealogy
and critical theory, providing a response to Habermas' attempt to set the terms of this engagement.
They attend to three central issues: the understanding of enlightenment, the grounds of resistance and
the question of modernity. Chapter 4 raises the philosophical stakes of the debate by presenting four
reciprocal objections to Habermas' project from the perspective of Foucault's genealogical practice.
Chapters 5 to 7 develop this debate in relation to some of the central concerns of contemporary political
philosophy, namely the concept of civil society, the idea of democracy and the recognition of difference.
Reframing the Debate
In Chapter 1 David Owen addresses critique and genealogy as practices of critical reflection in terms of
the issue of orientation in thinking. This approach, he argues, allows us to clarify the character of these
practices and the stakes of their encounter without presupposing the terms of the debate. The chapter
presents a case for distinguishing critique and genealogy in respect of both their modes of relation to
the orientation of thinking and the orientations which they articulate. The former is elucidated as a
contrast between legislative and exemplarity modes of relation, while the latter is drawn out as a
contrast between the project of striving to reconcile the real and the ideal through the lawful use of
reason, on the one hand, and the process of becoming otherwise than we are through the agonic use of
reason, on the other. On the basis of this discussion, Owen argues that we can understand the stakes of
this debate through the distinct implications of critique and genealogy for conceptualising enlightenment
and the ethics of dialogue. He shows that while both practices conceptualise enlightenment as self-
government and dialogue as mutual respect, they offer distinct understandings of self-government and
of mutual respect.
In Chapter 2, ‘Critical Spirituality’, Tom Osborne attends to Foucault's late writings on ethics and politics
in the context of Habermas' charge that Foucault's work is incapable of answering the question ‘why
fight?’. Focusing on the idea of an aesthetics of existence and linking this to Foucault's political writings,
Osborne argues that Foucault can provide a rejoinder to Habermas but that this response will
necessarily not be the type of response that Habermas demands. Osborne's careful elucidation of
Foucault's advocacy and performance of a critical ethos shows that Foucault's work exhibits a
commitment to freedom and justice which

Page 17
is grounded in our experience of concrete practices of government and which aims to cultivate our
capacities of critical reflection on government.
In contrast to the chapters by Owen and Osborne, Dan Conway approaches the Habermas/Foucault
debate by focusing on the rhetorical and dramatic structures that characterise Habermas' reading of
Foucault in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Arguing against the standard view of this reading
as an uncharitable polemic (the view taken, for example, by Owen), Conway argues that it in fact
constitutes prima facie evidence not only of successful communication between Habermas and Foucault
but also of philosophical twinship. He suggests that we read Habermas' chapters as a response to an
invitation issued by Foucault in which Habermas successfully demonstrates that Foucault's work
continues to think within the historical shadow of humanism. However, Conway contends, Habermas is
able to make this case only by conducting a genealogical investigation of Foucault's project, thereby
confirming the value of genealogy as a form of historical enquiry, even as he discredits its best-known
practitioner. It is at this level of genealogical communication that Conway finds Habermas and Foucault
to be engaged in a project of common cause and common commitment and he concludes by arguing
that this communication fulfils several of Habermas' criteria for ideal, distortion-free, communication.
Genealogy contra Critique
Whereas Chapters 1 to 3 focus on clarifying the character and stakes of the Foucault/Habermas debate
and on defending genealogy against its critics, Chapter 4, by James Tully, seeks to transform and
extend the dialogue. Tully argues that Foucault's late work accommodates the criticisms directed at it by
Habermas, amongst others, and makes four reciprocal criticisms of Habermas' critical practice: that (1)
Habermas' approach is less critical; (2) Foucault's historical approach is not unreasonable, whereas
Habermas' universalisation of the ‘modern’ decentred understanding of the world may well be; (3)
Habermas' decentred subject is a historically contingent juridical form of the subject which, when taken
as a regulative ideal, hinders the analysis of other ways in which we are constituted and constitute
ourselves as subjects; and (4) Habermas' normative analysis is utopian whereas Foucault's is not. Tully
sets the scene for a consideration of these criticisms by clarifying the similarities and differences
between Habermas' and Foucault's practices of critical reflection before turning to an elaboration and
examination of each of the criticisms in turn. He concludes that the criticisms are sound and that
Foucault's genealogical practice is not only defensible but provides a critical and effective test of limits in
the present, including the limits that Habermas claims are universal.

Page 18
Political Theory and the Politics of Criticism
Chapters 5 to 7 consider the Foucault/Habermas debate in the context of the concerns of contemporary
political theory. In ‘Questions of Criticism’ Samantha Ashenden takes up contemporary accounts of civil
society and the dilemmas of the modern welfare state as her point of engagement between Habermas
and Foucault. She examines their alternative accounts of these relations, assessing what is at stake in
their respective analyses of contemporary relations of government. She suggests that while Habermas'
critical theory relies upon an account of civil society as a privileged locus of criticism outside of
governance, Foucault's work provides a point of critical reflection on the manner in which the modern
idea of civil society itself comes into being with the emergence of a governable domain of the social.
Turning to the question of critique and of resistance to contemporary relations of government, Ashenden
suggests that while Habermas refines and reiterates the terms of contemporary political reason,
Foucault challenges us to think again about our conceptual and practical limits.
Mitchell Dean, in Chapter 6, shifts the focus to Foucault's and Habermas' analyses of the relation
between democracy, liberalism and the rule of law. He shows how, for Foucault, liberalism is a
technology of government deploying discourses and practices of sovereignty and normalisation.
Foucault's account of the architecture of governmental relations characteristic of our present is then
brought to bear upon Habermas' project of reconstructing the foundations for a procedural account of
law and democracy. Dean argues that Foucault's genealogies of the modern subject and of modern
rationalities of rule disclose the unacknowledged preconditions of Habermas' proceduralist democracy in
the emergence of biopower. On the basis of this analysis, he suggests that Habermas' account is aimed
at ‘normalising democracy’, attempting to further entrench procedures of normalisation within the
juridical system of law and sovereignty.
Finally, and in contrast with the chapters by Ashenden and Dean, Simon Thompson's chapter focuses on
the question of recognition. Drawing on what he regards as the complementary contributions of
Habermas and Foucault, Thompson analyses the inadequacies of Habermas' work in relation to an
account of alterity and the inadequacies of Foucault's in relation to an account of intersubjectivity.
Thompson argues that we should take from Habermas an account of symmetry and reciprocity and from
Foucault an account of the concrete otherness of the other and an awareness of the strategies of power
through which subjects assimilate the other. He combines Habermas' focus on equality and reciprocity
with Foucault's agonism, recognition of difference and of otherness. In this way, he suggests that
Habermas and Foucault can together provide an account of intersubjective relations in which subjects
recognise one another as both equal and different.

Page 19
This book aims to futher the engagment between genealogy and critical theory by providing a
Foucauldian riposte to Habermas' criticisms of genealogy. It is our hope that this collection will itself
provoke futher responses and continue the dialogue between these two ways of reflecting critically on
our historical being in the present.
Notes
1 In the course of his argument, Moon suggests that the principle of universalisation may be too strong
and that Habermas' discourse ethics may need to accommodate an idea of agonistic respect. This
strikes us as a valuable argument which might provide some basis for mediating between Habermas'
current position and the Foucauldian stance elaborated by Connolly (1991).
2 Schmidt and Wartenberg (1994) provide an excellent account of Foucault's three essays relating to
Kant's ‘What is enlightenment?’ which demonstrates the limitations of the typical forms of ire directed at
his work by critical theorists.
3 The question of Foucault's use of the notion of danger and its relation to the idea of parrhesia is
beautifully elucidated in Rabinow (1994).
4 Perhaps the best discussion of Foucault and the politics of truth in relation to the analytic tradition of
philosophy currently available is provided by Allen (1993).
5 Following Tully's (1989) Wittgensteinian critique, a stronger case could be presented in terms of the
incoherence of Habermas' practice of critical reflection.
References
Allen, B. (1993) Truth in Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benhabib, S. (1990) ‘Afterword: communicative ethics and contemporary controversies in practical
philosophy’, in S. Benhabib and F. Dallmayr (eds), The Communicative Ethics Controversy. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Bernauer, J. and Mahon, M. (1994) ‘The ethics of Michel Foucault’, in Gutting (1994). pp. 141–58.
Connolly, W. (1991) Identity/Difference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Davidson, A. (1994) ‘Ethics as ascetics: Foucault, the history of ethics, and ancient thought’, in Gutting
(1994). pp. 115–40.
Dean, M. (1994) Critical and Effective Histories. London: Routledge.
Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1986) ‘What is maturity? Habermas and Foucault on “What is
Enlightenment?” ’, in D. Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 109–22.
Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things. London: Tavistock.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Page 20
Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The subject and power’, in Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982). pp. 214–32.
Foucault, M. (1984) The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1985) The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Random House.
Fraser, N. (1989) ‘Foucault on modern power: empirical insights and normative confusions’, in Unruly
Practices. Cambridge: Polity pp. 17–34.
Gutting, G. (ed.) (1994) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Habermas, J. (1971) Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, trans. T. MacCarthy. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence. Oxford: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and S. Weber
Nicholson. Oxford: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1993) Justification and Application, trans. C. Cronin. Oxford: Polity
Honneth, A. (1991) The Critique of Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hoy, D. and MacCarthy, T. (1994) Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hutchings, K. (1996) Kant, Critique, and Politics. London: Routledge.
Kelly, M. (1994a) ‘Introduction’, in M. Kelly (ed.), Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas
Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 1–16.
Kelly, M. (1994b) ‘Foucault, Habermas, and the self-referentiality of critique’, in M. Kelly, (ed.), Critique
and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 365–400.
MacCarthy, T. (1990) ‘The critique of impure reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School’, Political
Theory, 18: 437–69.
Moon, J. (1995) ‘Practical discourse and communicative ethics’, in White (1995a). pp. 143–64.
Owen, D. (1995) ‘Genealogy as exemplary critique’, Economy and Society, 24 (4): 489–506.
Patton, P. (1994) ‘Foucault's subject of power’, Political Theory Newsletter, 6 (1): 60–71.
Rabinow, P. (1994) ‘Modern and countermodern: ethos and epoch in Heidegger and Foucault’, in
Gutting (1994). pp, 197–214.
Schmidt, J. and Wartenberg, T. (1994) ‘Foucault's enlightenment: critique, revolution, and the fashioning
of the self’, in Kelly (1994a). pp. 283–314.
Tully, J. (1988) ‘The pen is a mighty sword’, in J. Tully (ed.) Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and
his Critics. Cambridge: Polity.
Tully, J. (1989) ‘Wittgenstein and political philosophy’, Political Theory, 17: 172–204.
Warnke, G. (1995) ‘Communicative rationality and cultural values’, in White (1995a). pp. 120–42.
White, S. (ed.) (1995a) The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
White, S. (1995b) ‘Reason, modernity, and democracy’, in White (1995a). pp. 3–16.

Page 21
1
ORIENTATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT

An Essay on Critique and Genealogy
David Owen
‘But being guided is surely a particular experience!’ The answer to this is: you are now thinking of a
particular experience of being guided.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
This chapter addresses the dialogue between critique and genealogy by drawing attention to these
practices of critical reflection as ways of orienting thinking. In taking this approach, the chapter has two
purposes. The first is simply to try and clarify the terms of the debate by elucidating critique and
genealogy as distinct practices of critical reflection. The second is to illustrate the stakes of the debate
by showing that this encounter poses important questions concerning the ethics of dialogue.
The argument will be presented in four sections. The first and second sections focus on the grammars
of critique and genealogy respectively by drawing out the distinct modes of orienting thinking exhibited
by these practices of critical reflection. In the opening section, it is shown that critique legislates an
orientation in thinking in which thinking is oriented to a transcendent ideal and that it articulates this
orientation in terms of the project of striving to reconcile the real and the ideal through the lawful use of
reason. The second section demonstrates that genealogy exemplifies an orientation in thinking in which
thinking is oriented to an immanent ideal and that it articulates this orientation in terms of the process
of becoming otherwise than we are through the agonic use of reason. The third section explores this
encounter by focusing on an asymmetry which characterises Habermas' and Foucault's relations to each
other's practices. Here it is shown that whereas Foucault acknowledges but dissents from the claims of
critique, Habermas fails to acknowledge the claims of genealogy and that this avoidance of genealogy is
a necessary feature of Habermas' own practice. The final section clarifies the stakes of this

Page 22
encounter by focusing on these practices in terms of the ethics of dialogue.
I
The central claim of this section is that the grammar of critique can be presented schematically as
follows: critique legislates an orientation in thinking in which thinking is oriented to a transcendent ideal;
it articulates this orientation in terms of the project of striving to reconcile the real and the ideal through
the lawful use of reason. I will illustrate this claim by reference to Kant's reflections on critique and
enlightenment before showing that Habermas' post-metaphysical reconstruction of Kantian critique
demonstrates his commitment to the same mode of orientation in thinking. In both cases we will see
that this way of orienting thinking produces a specific conception of enlightenment and, relatedly, a
two-sided attitude of moral impatience and moral anxiety towards practices of critical reflection
characterised by the ‘lawless’ use of reason.
From its inception, Kant's philosophy links criticism to the unconstrained public use of reason. In the
preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1983) [1781] Kant proclaims:
Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion
through its sanctity and law-giving through its majesty may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they
then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that
which has been able to sustain the test of free and open discussion. (Kant, 1983: A, xii)
The relationship between reason and unconstrained public discussion invoked here under the title of
criticism is elaborated in the revised second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1983) [1787]:
Reason depends on this freedom [of discussion] for its very existence. For reason has no dictatorial
authority; its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be
permitted to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto. (Kant, 1983: B 766f.)
This conceptualisation of reason's critical judging of ‘everything’ in terms of ‘the test of free and open
discussion’ means that reason's critical judging of itself, that the law which reason imposes on itself, is
specified by the transcendental presuppositions of ‘the test of free and open discussion’. Kant proposes
the following maxims as transcendental hypotheses: ‘(1) to think for oneself [the maxim of unprejudiced
thought/understanding]; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else [the maxim of enlarged
thought/judgement]; (3) always to think consistently [the maxim of consistent thought/reason]’ (Kant,
1952: I.2

Page 23
s40; AA v, 294). From these maxims we can deduce the transcendental formula of moral law: ‘Act
always according to that maxim which you can at the same time consistently will as universal law’ – and,
concomitantly, the transcendental ideal to which Kant's critical philosophy orients thinking, namely, the
kingdom of ends. For Kant, it is by acting in conformity with the moral law that we direct and transform
our present (the real) towards the kingdom of ends (the ideal).
The implications of this analysis for the concept of enlightenment are drawn out in the essays ‘An
answer to the question: “what is enlightenment?” ’ (1784) and ‘What is orientation in thinking?’ (1786).
In these essays, Kant argues that the free public use of reason is a necessary condition for the
development of public enlightenment. Thus, in ‘An answer to the question: ‘‘what is enlightenment?” ’,
Kant defines enlightenment as ‘man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’ (1991a: 54). He
argues that this immaturity has been held in place by the ‘dogmas and formulas’ propagated by ‘the
guardians of humanity’ but holds that public enlightenment is ‘almost inevitable’ if the public is granted
‘freedom to make public use of their reason in all matters’ (1991a: 54–5). Relatedly, in ‘What is
orientation in thinking?’ Kant argues that two of the major threats to enlightenment are civic (i.e. legal)
and moral (i.e. religious or ideological) constraints on freedom of communication (1991b: 247).
However, while freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters is a necessary condition of the
movement towards an enlightened public, it is not a sufficient condition. In ‘What is enlightenment?’,
Kant points out that a further requirement is the existence of some enlightened individuals who ‘will
disseminate the spirit of rational respect’ (1991a: 55); while in ‘What is orientation in thinking?’ Kant
points to a third threat to enlightenment: the lawless use of reason (1991b: 247). These points are
related but, for the purposes of this chapter, let us focus on the threat posed by the lawless use of
reason.
Kant elaborates this threat in the following terms:
the inevitable result of self-confessed lawlessness in thinking (i.e., of emancipation from the restrictions
of reason) is this: freedom of thought is thereby ultimately forfeited and, since the fault lies not with
misfortune, for example, but with genuine presumption, this freedom is in the true sense of the word
thrown away. (1991b: 248)
This result is inevitable because such lawlessness manifests itself as ‘rational unbelief’:
an undesirable state of mind which first deprives the moral laws of all their power to motivate the heart,
and eventually even deprives them of all authority, so giving rise to the attitude known as libertinism
(i.e., the principle of no longer acknowledging any duty). (1991b: 249)

Page 24
Given widespread libertinism, Kant argues, the authorities will ‘intervene to ensure that civil affairs are
not themselves plunged into complete disorder’ and impose arbitary legal and moral constraints on
freedom of thought: ‘they may even abolish freedom of thought altogether’ (1991b: 249).
There are two initial points to note about this threat. First, the lawless use of reason is all too
compatible with – indeed, seems to require – the freedom to make public use of one's reason. Secondly,
whether or not the lawless use of reason causes the authorities to reimpose constraints on freedom of
communication, Kant identifies it as a threat to enlightenment simply by virtue of the fact that it
undermines the authority of the moral law. Consequently, it should not surprise us that Kant exhibits a
two-sided attitude towards philosophers who advocate the lawless use of reason: on the one hand,
moral impatience with their failure to orient thinking appropriately (they abuse the freedom they have
been granted) and, on the other hand, moral anxiety concerning the effects of their advocacy (they
undermine enlightenment). What conclusions can we draw from Kant's reflections on enlightenment and
the lawless use of reason? The pertinent conclusion for my argument here is simply this: Kant's remarks
are only intelligible given an understanding of enlightenment as the project of striving to reconcile the
real and the ideal through the lawful use of reason. In other words, it is only if we grasp Kant's
understanding of enlightenment in this way that we can see why he regards the lawless use of reason
as posing such a significant threat. Consequently, we can summarise Kant's specific way of orienting
thinking thus: critique orients thinking to the kingdom of ends (the transcendental ideal); it articulates
this orientation in thinking in terms of enlightenment (the project of striving to reconcile the real and the
ideal) in which the free public use of reason subjects itself to the regulative constraints of performative
consistency, that is, the maxims of reason (the lawful use of reason).
Let us turn to Habermas' post-metaphysical reconstruction of Kantian critique in terms of universal
pragmatics in which he ‘attempts to identify and reconstruct social-practical analogues of Kant's ideas of
reason’ (MacCarthy, 1994: 38). We should note initially that Habermas shares Kant's emphasis on the
relationship between criticism and communicative freedom, and, relatedly, Kant's understanding of
critique as the articulation of the transcendental presuppositions of the test of free and open discussion.
But, in an attempt to avoid the aporias of Kant's philosophy, Habermas shifts this understanding of
critique from a metaphysical philosophy of the subject focused on the rational internal structure of
individual consciousness to a fallibilistically conceived philosophy of intersubjectivity focused on the
reconstruction of the rational internal structure of communication oriented to understanding/agreement
(Verständigung). Consequently, Habermas reconstructs critique as engaged in a formal-pragmatic
analysis which ‘aims at hypothetical

Page 25
reconstructions of that pre-theoretical knowledge that competent speakers bring to bear when they
employ sentences in actions oriented to reaching understanding [Verständigung]’ (Habermas, 1984:
138, cf. Hutchings, 1996). To elucidate Habermas' particular account of critique as a way of orienting
thinking, let us attend briefly to this formal-pragmatic analysis.
Drawing on speech act theory, Habermas argues that ‘in communicative action one actor seeks
rationally to motivate another by relying on the illocutionary binding/bonding effect [Bindungseffekt] of
the offer contained in his speech act’ (Habermas, 1990: 58):
The fact that a speaker can rationally motivate a hearer to accept such an offer is not due to the validity
of what he says but to the speaker's guarantee that he will, if necessary, make efforts to redeem the
claim that the hearer has accepted. (Habermas, 1990: 58)
He claims further that we, moderns, can distinguish analytically between three different types of validity
claim raised in any communicative speech act. These are ‘the validity claims of propositional truth,
normative rightness, and sincerity or authenticity’ which correspond to three world-relations (objective,
social and subjective), three attitudes (objectivating, norm-governed and expressive) and three types of
value-sphere (science, morality and law, aesthetics and ethics) (Habermas, 1984: 137). Habermas
specifies rationality in relation to these three types of validity claim:
In contexts of communicative action, we call someone rational not only if he is able to put forward an
assertion and, when criticized, to provide grounds for it by pointing to the appropriate evidence, but
also if he is following an established norm and is able, when criticized, to justify his action by explicating
the situation in the light of legitimate expectations. We even call someone rational if he makes known a
desire or an intention … etc., and is then able to reassure critics in regard to the revealed experience by
drawing practical consequences from it and behaving consistently thereafter. (Habermas, 1984: 15)
Thus Habermas argues that ‘[in] the case of claims to truth or rightness, the speaker can redeem his
guarantee discursively, that is, by adducing reasons; in the case of claims to truthfulness he does so
through consistent behaviour’ (Habermas, 1990: 58–9).
Now, given that communicative action is oriented to ‘rationally motivated agreement’ based on ‘the
intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims’ (Habermas, 1984: 137), Habermas claims that
participants in argumentation concerning a validity claim to truth or rightness cannot avoid certain
‘idealizing presuppositions’ immanent in such action – presuppositions which can be reconstructed as
universal rules of rational argumentation. These transcendental presuppositions ‘are identified by
convincing a person who contests the hypothetical reconstructions offered that he is caught up in a
performative contradictioni’ (Habermas, 1990: 89), i.e. that he is committed to a constative speech act

Page 26
k(p) which rests on non-contingent presuppositions whose propositional content contradicts the asserted
proposition p (Habermas, 1990: 80). We can elucidate this claim by reference to Habermas' hypothetical
reconstruction of the ‘idealizing presuppositions’ involved in redeeming validity claims concerning
normative rightness. In this case, Habermas distinguishes three levels of presupposition: ‘those at the
logical level of products, those at the dialectical level of procedures, and those at the rhetorical level of
processes’ (Habermas, 1990: 87) – which correspond to three types of rule: logical-semantic rules of
consistency, procedural rules of mutual recognition, and processual rules of reciprocity. Habermas
tentatively specifies these rules as follows:
Logical-semantic rules (1990: 87)
(1.1) No speaker may contradict himself.
(1.2) Every speaker who applies predicate F to object A must be prepared to apply F to all other
objects resembling A in all relevant respects.
(1.3) Different speakers may not use the same expression with different meanings.
Procedural rules (1990: 88)
(2.1) Every speaker must assert only what he really believes.
(2.2) A person who disputes a proposition or norm not under discussion must provide a reason for
wanting to do so.
Processual rules (1990: 89)
(3.1) Every speaker with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in the discourse.
(3.2) a. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
b. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.
c. Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires and needs.
(3.3) No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid
down in (3.1) and (3.2).
From these rules of rational argumentation, Habermas deduces the universalisation principle (U): a
moral norm cannot be valid unless ‘all affected can freely accept the consequences and the side effects
that the general observance of a controversial norm can be expected to have for the interests of each
individual’ (1990: 93). This rule of argumentation acts as a bridging principle which ‘makes agreement in
practical discourses possible whenever matters of concern to all are open to regulation in the equal
interest of everyone’ (1990: 66). On the basis of U, Habermas deduces the transcendental formula of
discourse ethics (D): ‘Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the
approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse’

Page 27
(1990: 66) – and, concomitantly, the transcendent ideal to which post-metaphysical critique orients
communication, namely, the ideal (or unlimited) communication community.
The implications of this analysis for the concept of enlightenment are drawn out in Habermas'
philosophical reflections on, and social theory of, modernity. Unsurprisingly, in his work on this topic,
Habermas specifies communicative freedom as a necessary condition of public enlightenment. We can
begin by noting that just as Kant argues that his age has the potential to become enlightened but that
the development of enlightenment is blocked by the guardians of humanity, so Habermas argues that
modern societies have this potential but that its development is obstructed by the one-sided
rationalisation of modernity. Habermas conceptualises this obstruction in terms of the system's
colonisation of the lifeworld and the impoverishment of culture.
On the one hand, the thesis of colonisation argues that the lifeworld (the realm of communicative
action) has become subject to systemic imperatives via the media of money and power (Habermas,
1987a: 185–208). This colonisation is organised in the private sphere via the roles of employee and
consumer through which individuals are subjected to the functional imperatives of the economic
subsystem and in the public sphere via the roles of client and citizen in which individuals are subjected
to the functional imperatives of the state-administrative subsystem. More specifically, Habermas argues
that compensation for the control exercised over individuals as employees and as citizens ‘comes in the
form of system-conforming rewards which are channeled into the roles of private consumer and public
client of the welfare state’ (White, 1988: 112). The costs of this colonisation can be expressed as that of
the commodification and the juridification of the lifeworld. Both of these aspects of the reification of
social life entail the progressive detachment of individuals from the coordination of action orientations
through communicatively achieved consensus and, consequently, the ‘communicative deskilling’ of
modern subjects. On the other hand, the thesis of cultural impoverishment argues that the lifeworld is
characterised by ‘the elitist splitting off of expert cultures from the contexts of everyday practice’. The
problem is ‘that increasingly specialized forms of argumentation become the guarded preserve of experts
and thereby lose contact with the understanding processes of the majority of individuals’ (White, 1988:
116). The effect of this is to fragment everyday consciousness. Cultural impoverishment undermines the
synthesising (and thus critical) power of everyday consciousness, while empowering expert cultures to
redefine contexts of everyday life and thus facilitate the colonisation of the lifeworld. Given these threats
to enlightenment, Habermas argues that the right to ‘the public use of communicative freedom’ (1996a:
127) is a necessary condition for the development of enlightenment. However, like Kant, Habermas does
not regard this right as a sufficient condition for public enlightenment. In Between Facts and Norms
(1996a) he argues

Page 28
that a further requirement is the existence of some enlightened social movements that will exemplify the
exercise of the right to the public use of communicative freedom as an activity in which citizens ‘take the
perspective of participants who are engaged in the process of reaching understanding about the rules
for their life in common’ (1996b: 147). In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987b), Habermas
identifies a third threat to enlightenment, which is best described in Kant's terms as the lawless use of
reason. As with Kant, these points are related but again, for the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on
the lawless use of reason.
For Habermas, the lawless use of reason can be generally specified as a use of reason which is caught
in a performative contradiction. On Habermas' account, this lawlessness takes the form of a ‘radical
critique of reason’ articulated ‘in terms of the indirectly affirmed “other of reason” ’ (1987b: 336–7). For
example, Habermas argues that Foucault presents a critique of reason through a totalising theory of
power (the other of reason) but that the cost of this radical critique is demonstrated in the fact that
Genealogy is overtaken by a fate similar to that which Foucault had seen in the human sciences: To the
extent that it retreats into the reflectionless objectivity of a non-participatory, ascetic description of
kaleidoscopically changing practices of power, genealogical historiography emerges from its cocoon as
precisely the presentistic, relativistic, cryptonormative illusory science that it does not want to be.
(1987b: 276)
These features of genealogy derive, Habermas argues, from ‘the aporias of the theory of power’; they
are ‘the consequences of [Foucault's] attempt to preserve the transcendental moment proper to
generative performances in the concept of power while driving from it every trace of subjectivity’
(1987b: 294–5). The defining feature of this lawlessness is that Foucault's genealogical practice cannot
account for the normative foundations of its own rhetoric: it ‘raises validity-claims only to renounce
them’ (1987b: 336). Here Habermas' claim is that what is meant to make genealogy pointful is that its
‘denunciations [of modernity] are constantly inspired by a special sensitivity for complex injuries and
subtle violations’ which demonstrates its commitment to ‘a picture of undamaged intersubjectivity’ but
that genealogy cannot account for this commitment in its own terms precisely because the very
radicalness of its critique of reason (i.e. its identification of reason and power) undermines any rational
grounds on which it might do so. In other words, genealogy is ‘guided by normative intuitions that go
beyond what [it] can accommodate in terms of the indirectly affirmed “other of reason” ’ (1987b: 337).
In just this respect, then, Foucault's genealogy collapses back into what Habermas describes as a
Nietzschean aestheticism (i.e. libertinism) which undermines the motivational power and, ultimately, the
authority of reason.

Page 29
It is not difficult to see that Habermas' reflections repeat the structure of Kant's remarks on the lawless
use of reason. Again the lawless use of reason exploits the freedom to make public use of one's reason
and undermines the authority of the moral law. Habermas manifests the same double-sided attitude to
practices of critical reflections that exhibit the lawless use of reason. As Hindess (1997) has acutely
noted, there is a moral impatience predicated on the identification of genealogy as caught in a
performative contradiction and thus as failing to orient thinking appropriately. This fact is disclosed, on
Habermas' account, by the inability of genealogy as a practice of critical reflection to answer the
question ‘why fight?’. Genealogy, it seems, presupposes a transcendent ideal (an ethical totality of
undamaged intersubjectivity) but cannot orient our thinking to this ideal because it lacks an account of
the lawful use of reason. There is also a ‘moral anxiety’ that expresses Habermas' concern with the
corrupting effects of genealogy; effects which he identifes with an incitement to ‘the intellectual youth of
today’ to ‘seek their salvation in the portentous voices of a cultically revived and authentic Young
Conservatism’ (1989: 38). Habermas' concern here is that genealogy as a practice, that is, as an
exercise of the right to communicative freedom, acts to seduce and corrupt youth through its promotion
of an aesthetic language of transgression which replaces rational argument with subjective judgements
of taste.
We may conclude by noting that, as with Kant, Habermas' reflections are only intelligible given an
understanding of enlightenment as the project of striving to reconcile the real and the ideal through the
lawful use of reason. Indeed, Habermas discloses this fact in an essay on enlightenment as the
unfinished project of modernity in which he identifies himself with this project ‘as it was formulated by
the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century’ which ‘consists in the relentless
development of the objectivating sciences, of the universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of
autonomous art, all in accord with their own immanent logic. But at the same time it also results in
releasing the cognitive potentials accumulated in the process from their esoteric high forms and
attempting to apply them in the sphere of praxis, that is, to encourage the rational organization of social
relations’ (1996c: 45). We can summarise Habermas' specific way of orienting thinking thus: critique
orients communication to the ideal communication community (the transcendental ideal); it articulates
this orientation in communication in terms of enlightenment (the project of striving to reconcile the real
and the ideal) in which the public use of communicative freedom subjects itself to the regulative
constraints of performative consistency, that is, to the universal rules of rational argumentation (the
lawful use of reason).
This section has been concerned to elucidate the character of critique as a particular practice of critical
reflection. It has shown that critique is characterised by a specific way of orienting thinking and has
noted that this mode of orientation in thinking constructs a conception of

Page 30
enlightenment as the project of striving to reconcile the real and the ideal through the lawful use of
reason which acts as the standard for the normative evaluation of other practices of critical reflection. I
want to emphasise the fact that the conception of enlightenment advocated by Habermas is generated
by the orientation in thinking which critique legislates because, as we will see, genealogy contests this
conception of enlightenment.
II
The general claim to be advanced now is this: genealogy exemplifies an orientation in thinking in which
thinking is oriented to an immanent ideal and this orientation in thinking is articulated in terms of the
process of becoming otherwise than we are through the agonic use of reason. This section will reverse
the ordering of the previous section in order to draw out clearly both the difference between the
conceptions of enlightenment which characterise critique and genealogy, and the form of, and
relationship to, orientation in thinking exhibited by genealogy.
It is appropriate to begin by simply illustrating the claim that genealogy resists the hegemony of
critique's conception of enlightenment and that it does so by articulating a distinct conception of
enlightenment. Writing in response to Habermas' description of his work as anti-Enlightenment, Foucault
makes the following remarks:
I think that the Enlightenment as a set of political, economic, social, institutional, and cultural events on
which we still depend in large part, constitutes a privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as an
enterprise for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation, it
formulated a philosophical question that remains for us to consider. I think, finally, as I have tried to
show with reference to Kant's text [‘An answer to the question: ‘‘what is enlightenment?” ’], that it
defined a certain manner of philosophizing.
But that does not mean that one has to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment. It even means that one
has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian
alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is
considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you
criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality (which may be seen
once again as good or bad). And we do not break free of this blackmail by introducing ‘dialectical’
nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have been in the
Enlightenment. (1984a: 42–3)
This refusal of the blackmail of enlightenment is a refusal to accept enlightenment as the project of
striving to reconcile the real and the ideal through the lawful use of reason (i.e. it is a refusal to accept
the con-

Page 31
ception of enlightenment which generates the authoritarian logic according to which one must be either
‘for’ it or ‘against’ it). Rather than submit to this logic, Foucault argues:
We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a
certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as
precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the ‘essential kernel
of rationality’ that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved in any event;
they will be oriented to the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no
longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects. (1984a: 43)
This mode of reflection expresses enlightenment as the critical ethos of modernity: ‘the permanent
reactivation of an attitude – that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent
critique of our historical era’ (1984a: 42) in which ‘the critique of what we are is at one and the same
time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of
going beyond them’ (1984a: 50). These remarks sketch out Foucault's conception of enlightenment as a
critical ethos and indicate the character of this ethos in terms of the process of becoming otherwise than
we are through what we may call the agonic use of reason, that is, the use of reason ‘to call into
question what is given as a bound of reason’ (Tully, 1989: 188).
To illustrate the relationship of this conception of enlightenment as critical ethos to the Enlightenment,
Foucault provides a genealogical sketch of its emergence and development. In relation to ‘veritable
explosion of the art of governing men’ from the period of the Renaissance, the critical ethos emerges as
a counterpoint, as ‘the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility’ which calls forms of
government into question:
in the great anxiety surrounding the way to govern and in the inquiries into modes of governing, one
detects a perpetual question, whch would be: ‘How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of
these principles, in view of such objectives and by the means of such methods, not like that, not for
that, not by them?’ (1996: 384)
He argues that it is this attitude – which develops by reference to spiritual government (what is the
truth of scripture?), political government (what are the limits of the right to govern?) and epistemic
government (who is authorised to tell the truth?) – that characterises ‘the historical consciousness that
the Enlightenment has of itself’ (1984a: 44). This attitude, on Foucault's account, is given exemplary
expression by Kant in the essay ‘An answer to the question: “what is enlightenment?” ’ in which we are
exhorted to have the courage to use our own understanding; that is, to take up a critical attitude to the
limits which characterise our present

Page 32
(1984a: 32–8; 1996: 386–7). Moreover, Foucault argues that Kant introduces a specific form of
reflection on the present which ‘one might call the attitude of modernity’, namely, ‘reflection on “today”
as difference in history’ (1984a: 38). In other words, Kant's essay links the critical attitude towards the
limits to which we are subject in the present to a reflection on the present as singular. It is this critical
ethos of modernity which Foucault identifies as guiding his own practice. However, Foucault also argues
that Kant's critical philosophy introduces a slippage which tipped enlightenment as a critical attitude in
which we have the courage to question the limits to which we are subject into the question of critique as
reason's transcendental judging of its own limits in which we submit to its law (1996: 386–7). This
slippage has typically resulted in the subordination of the expression of the critical attitude to the
practice of critique (as, for example, in the work of Habermas) and, concomitantly, to the conception of
enlightenment as the project of reconciling the real and the ideal through the lawful use of reason.
Against the background of these reflections, Foucault situates his own project as that of reversing this,
of trying ‘to take the inverse path to this movement of tipping over, to this slippage, to this way of
displacing the question of Aufklärung onto critique’ (1996: 398). Foucault reflects on genealogy as
exemplifying that form of critical reflection on ‘today’ as difference in history which expresses
enlightenment.
We have seen that Foucault proposes a conception of enlightenment as a critical ethos – an art of
reflective indocility – which is expressed in contesting the limits to which we are subject through the
agonic use of reason. Let us turn now to showing how genealogy exemplifies this conception of
enlightenment and to clarifying the immanent ideal to which this practice orients our thinking.
Foucault sketches his understanding of the task of criticism in the following passage:
Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting on limits. But if the Kantian question was that of
knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question
today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary,
obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitary
constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation
into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression. (1984a: 45)
He describes this form of critical reflection as ‘genealogical in its design and archaeological in its
method’:
Archaeological – and not transcendental – in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal
structures of all knowledge or all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse
that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be
genealogical

Page 33
in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and
to know; but it will separate out from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of
no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. (1984a: 46)
This mode of analysing and reflecting on limits is presented by Foucault as ‘work carried out by
ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’ (1984a: 47) which seeks to ‘give new impetus, as far and wide
as possible, to the undefined work of freedom’ (1984a: 46) by attending to general problematics of
government (1984a: 49). To clarify the purpose and character of this practice of critical reflection, let us
focus more closely on what it involves.
We can begin by noting that Foucault, like Habermas, dispenses with ‘the constituent subject’ in order
‘to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical
framework’ (1984b: 59). This task is carried out by way of historical analyses of the emergence and
development of the ‘practical systems’ in and through which we are constituted by others (practices of
government) and constitute ourselves (practices of freedom) as beings characterised by particular ‘forms
of subjectivity’, that is, particular ways of reflecting and acting on ourselves and others. Practical
systems are analysed in terms of three axes: knowledge (the ways in which subjects recognise and
reflect on themselves and others), power (the ways in which subjects act on others) and ethics (the
ways in which subjects act on themselves). These axes are interwoven in that it makes no sense to
think of relations of ethics or of power without reference to some or other system of description and
some or other form of reasoning directed to some or other ideal, because these are necessary
conditions of agency; while it also makes no sense to think of relations of knowledge without reference
to human purposes. Thus, as Foucault puts it, ‘there is no power relation [or ethical relation] without the
correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and
constitute at the same time power relations [and ethical relations]’ (Foucault, 1977: 27).
What are the implications of this conceptual apparatus for reflecting on limits? Note that this apparatus
conceptualises limits in terms of forms of subjectivity, that is, the ways in which we experience our
being in the world. To experience a limit as ‘universal, necessary, obligatory’ is therefore to experience a
form of subjectivity (or a particular aspect of a form of subjectivity) as ‘universal, necessary, obligatory’.
Thus, the role of Foucault's conceptual apparatus is both to show how we come to experience a form
(or aspect of a form) of subjectivity as necessary by tracing its historical emergence and development
and, in so doing, to show the respects in which it is ‘singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary
constraints’. However, to ground this practice of historical reflection as a practice of critical reflection,
genealogy needs not only to show how we can reflect on – and thus open a space for transgressing –

Page 34
our historically constituted limits but also to show that we have reasons for engaging in this activity.
Foucault needs to show how we can experience a form of subjectivity or limit as problematic in such a
way that the recognition of the non-necessary character of this limit is experienced as a form of
liberation and motivates the experimental transgression of this limit. In elucidating this feature of
Foucault's work, we can draw out the way in which genealogy exemplifies enlightenment and discloses
the immanent ideal to which this practice orients our thinking.
Paul Patton has pointed out that Foucault's genealogical investigations, like any other practice of critical
reflection, necessarily rely on a minimal account of human subjectivity:
whatever else it may be, the human subject is a being endowed with various capacities. It is a subject
of power, but this power is only realized in and through the diversity of human bodily capacities and
forms of subjectivity. (Patton, 1994: 61)
In its most basic sense, this account conceives of human subjectivity in terms of beings who are
conscious and self-conscious agents, that is, beings who can reflect and act on themselves and others,
and on their ways of reflecting and acting on themselves and others. This feature is illustrated by
Foucault's reflections on power relations in the essay ‘The subject and power’ (1982). Here Foucault
presents his concept of powerover as ‘a mode of action on the actions of others’ which seeks to govern
the conduct of others, that is, ‘to structure the field of possible actions of others’ (Foucault, 1982: 221).
In this sense, power can be exercised ‘only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free’
(Foucault, 1982: 221); that is, exercises of power can only act to govern the actions of human subjects
in so far as they have the capacity to act in various ways, including that of resisting the government of
their actions (Patton, 1994: 62–3). Or, as Tully puts it:
Our mode of existence in any field of power and knowledge is clearly as practitioners of self-awareness
and self-formation, in which we think and act and have our ethical mode of being, and conduct
ourselves in relation to power. Hence, power is not a relation which molds passive receptacles into
obedient subjects, but one which presupposes free subjects. Power is any relation that governs ethical
subjects by guiding them, with diverse means, to engage in specific practices of the self by which they
constitute and conduct themselves as governable subjects, or refuse to do so. (1992: 384)
Thus, while this conceptualisation of power means that ‘there cannot be a society without power
relations,’ this is not to say ‘either that whose which are established are necessary, or, in any case, that
power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined’ (Foucault,
1982: 221). On the contrary, it is to suggest that at

Page 35
the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and
the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speak of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of
an ‘agonism’ – of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a
face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. (1982: 221–2)
It is in the context of these remarks that Foucault introduces the concept of domination to refer to the
establishment of ‘stable and asymmetrical systems of power relations’ in which ‘the possibility of
effective resistance has been removed’ (Patton, 1994: 64), that is, where those who are subject to
constraints cannot transform the system of constraints to which they are subject:
The analysis of power relations is an extremely complex area; one sometimes encounters what may be
called situations or states of domination in which the power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing
the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them, remains blocked, frozen. When an individual
or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any
reversibility of movement by economic, political or military means, one is faced with what may be called
a state of domination. (Foucault, 1997: 283)
To illustrate this, Foucault asks us to consider ‘what is undoubtedly a very simplified example’:
one cannot say that it was only men who wielded power in the conventional marital structure of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; women had quite a few options: they could deceive their
husbands, pilfer money from them, refuse them sex. Yet they were still in a state of domination insofar
as these options were only ever stratagems that never succeeded in reversing the situation. (1997: 292)
Such asymmetrical systems are experienced as problematic in so far as they diminish or obstruct our
experience of ourselves as agents, that is, our experience of ourselves as self-conscious beings capable
of reflecting and acting on our ways of reflecting and acting on ourselves (Patton, 1994: 68–70). As
practitioners of self-awareness and self-formation, we experience ourselves as free subjects, as subjects
of power, to the extent that we experience ourselves as agents, that is, as beings who can conduct our
own conduct, while we experience ourselves as dominated subjects, as powerless, to the extent that we
experience the exercise of our capacities for reflection and action as not being self-directed: that is, as
being directed by others. It is in respect of this feature of human subjectivity that Foucault remarks that
in ‘such cases of domination’ the problem is not that of knowing whether resistance will develop but
‘where resistance will develop’ (1997: 292). Thus, as Patton has argued, Foucault's point is that, as
conscious and self-conscious beings, humans

Page 36
are characterised by ‘ “the self-reflective goal of experiencing the self as agent’’ ’ (1994: 70). In this
respect, then, Foucault's argument is that we have a general second-order interest in being able to
exercise (and, in so doing, develop) our powers of self-government and so we have a general second-
order reason to engage in genealogical enquiries in so far as a genealogical contestation of a ‘necessary’
limit destabilises the experience of this limit as necessary, and so destabilises a particular state of
domination. By showing that a given limit is not ‘universal, necessary, obligatory’ and thus that we can
think and act differently, that we can become otherwise than we are, genealogy opens a space in which
what are experienced as immobile, irreversible and stable limits to reflection are re-experienced as
mobile, reversible and unstable bounds. In other words, what is taken as constitutive is shown to be
merely regulative.
Thus genealogy exemplifies the conception of enlightenment as a critical ethos – precisely because
genealogy is nothing other than the performance of an agonic engagement with a given limit or form of
subjectivity which is experienced as problematic. It is in this respect that Foucault describes genealogy
as ‘work carried out by ourselves on ourselves as free beings’ (1984a: 47); to which one can add that
this work is also carried out for ourselves as free beings. This latter point becomes clear when we note
that genealogy as a self-directed exercise of our capacities for reflecting and acting on our ways of
reflecting and acting on ourselves is itself a way of conducting our conduct directed to the development
of our capacity for the self-directed exercise of our capacities for reflecting and acting on ourselves.
Genealogy is a practice of freedom, an ethical labour of the self on itself, directed to enhancing our
capacity to engage in practices of freedom – or, to put it negatively, directed to allowing us ‘to play
these games of power with as little domination as possible’ (1997: 298). Thus, considered as an ethical
practice, genealogy orients our thinking to an immanent ideal which is nothing other than the (endless)
process of developing and exercising our capacity for self-government.
This claim is reinforced if we consider the practice of genealogy not simply as an ethical labour that we
perform on ourselves but also as an attempt to conduct the conduct of others. We can draw this out
both by reflecting on the claims of genealogy as a particular practice and also by considering the claims
of any particular genealogical investigation. With respect to the former, we need merely note that in so
far as genealogy exemplifies a certain orientation in thinking, it recommends but does not seek to
legislate this. The judgement of practitioners of genealogy that this practice of critical reflection, that
this orientation in thinking, is worthwhile is subject to the test of free and open discussion by human
beings as practitioners of criticism. This judgement has authority only to the extent that it gains public
assent. With respect to the latter, the judgement that a given limit is experienced as problematic is
rebuttable, that is, it is subject to free and open public discussion on the basis of

Page 37
which the recognition of the contingency of the limit in question need not lead to the experimental
transgression of this limit on the part of a community of action. In other words, the authority of the
reflective judgement exercised by the practitioner of genealogy in undertaking a particular investigation
is not given in advance but is indicated by the capacity of their investigation to generate a community of
action (Foucault, 1984c: 385). So while both genealogy qua human beings as practitioners of criticism
and any given genealogy qua human beings as citizens call for the assent of others and, in this respect,
make a claim on them, both exhibit a commitment to others as self-governing precisely because both
only claim and do not command their assent. So it seems that even considered as an exercise of power,
the practice of genealogy affirms its commitment to the activity of self-government.
In this section we have seen that genealogy articulates both a different relationship to orienting our
thinking than critique – exemplification rather than legislation – and a distinct conception of
enlightenment – the process of becoming otherwise than we are through the agonic use of reason
rather than the project of reconciling the real and the ideal through the lawful use of reason. We can
summarise Foucault's position as follows: genealogy exemplifies an orientation in thinking in which
thinking is oriented to the activity of self-government (the immanent ideal) and it articulates this
orientation in terms of enlightenment (the process of becoming otherwise than we are) in which the
public use of reason is directed at questioning the contemporary limits of the necessary (the agonic use
of reason).
III
In this section I will try to redeem the promissory note offered in my introduction by showing that there
is an asymmetry between Habermas' and Foucault's relations to each other's practices – that whereas
Foucault acknowledges but dissents from the claims of critique, Habermas fails to acknowledge the
claims of genealogy and that this avoidance of genealogy is a necessary feature of Habermas' own
practice.
In the first section we noted Habermas' criticisms of Foucault as an advocate of the lawless use of
reason. Let us now reflect on the character of this criticism. We can begin by noting that Habermas'
criticism fails to acknowledge the claims of genealogy precisely because it reflects on genealogy as a
certain kind of thing (the lawless use of reason) rather than as a certain thing (a singular practice of
critical reflection). Rather than considering genealogy as this practice of critical reflection characterised
by this mode of orientation in thinking, Habermas' reflections presuppose that genealogy can be justly
addressed in terms of its capacity to satisfy the criteria of a post-metaphysical practice of critique.
Habermas

Page 38
then reaches the unsurprising conclusion that genealogy does not provide the resources for specifying,
fallibilistically or not, the transcendental bounds of reason and, therefore, that it cannot ground its own
normative commitments and, therefore, that it is caught in a performative contradiction. Perhaps the
most notable indicator of the violence exhibited by this failure of acknowledgement is Habermas'
presumption that Foucault is attempting to provide a general theory of power which reduces reason to
expressions of power, whereas – as should be apparent from the preceding section – Foucault does not
seek to provide a theory of power at all but rather an analytic and certainly does not identify power and
knowledge but rather points out that power relations presuppose relations of knowledge, and vice versa.
Given these observations, we might be tempted to conclude that Habermas' failure of acknowledgement
is a failure to do justice to the claims of genealogy and is, in this sense, a moral failure on Habermas'
part. But this conclusion would be too quick: for while this failure of acknowledgement may or may not
be a moral failure, it is not strictly a failure on Habermas' part; it is a failure to which Habermas is
bound by the practice of critique to which he is committed. This point can be elucidated by simply
noticing that it is a founding presumption of the practice of critique that it is the only practice of critical
reflection which can legitimately orient thinking. This presumption is inbuilt into the Idea of Critique as
reason's transcendental judging of its own limits; it is illustrated both in the mode of relation to
orientation exhibited by critique, namely, the legislation of an orientation in thinking, and as the mode of
orientation in thinking which is legislated, namely, the project of striving to reconcile the real and the
ideal through the lawful use of reason. The irony of critique is thus that it advocates an understanding of
reason in which reason is conceptualised as the test of free and open discussion, while it also attempts
to determine the rules which constitute free and open discussion without being able to subject those
rules to the same test. The presupposition that the test of free and open discussion can be adequately
captured in terms not merely of these rules, but of any rules, must remain ungrounded – and the
ungrounded character of this presupposition is not and cannot be acknowledged within the practice of
critique. On the contrary, for practitioners of critique, this is where the spade turns. Consequently, for
practitioners of critique, being guided is and must be a particular experience, namely, the experience of
being subject to reason's self-imposed laws; the possibility that there are ways of being guided which do
not take this juridical form is ruled out in advance.
Let us now turn to the claim that Foucault acknowledges but dissents from the claims of critique. This
claim can be established by noting two features of Foucault's reflections on Habermas. First, Foucault
acknowledges Habermas' post-metaphysical practice of critique in dissenting

Page 39
from, and responding to, its particular claims concerning enlightenment (1984a: 42–5), rationality
(1988a: 25–34) and consensus (1984d: 377–80) amongst others. Secondly, Foucault acknowledges the
value of Habermas' work in remarks such as the following:
I am quite interested in [Habermas'] work, although I know he completely disagrees with my views.
While I, for my part, tend to be a little more in agreement with what he says, I have always had a
problem insofar as he gives communicative relations this place which is so important and, above all, a
function that I would call ‘utopian’. (1997: 298)
How can Foucault ‘tend to be a little more in agreement‘ with what Habermas says? We can account for
this claim and link these two types of acknowledgement by noting that the fact that genealogy
exemplifies a particular orientation in thinking entails that it is not committed to the claim that there is
only one way of orienting thinking, only one coherent practice of critical reflection. Indeed, it would be
inconsistent with his own conceptual apparatus if Foucault were to be committed to this claim. This
point becomes clear when we recall Foucault's conceptualisation of power and ethics as ‘the conducting
of conduct’. It is, after all, one of the central points of this conceptualisation that it does not presuppose
any given model or theory of the conducting of conduct but allows us to acknowledge the manifold
diversity of ways of conducting conduct in their particularity – and this point applies to the conducting of
our ways of reflecting and acting on our ways of reflecting and acting in just the same way that it
applies to the conducting of our ways of reflecting and acting. Thus Foucault, like Wittgenstein,
acknowledges that there is a plurality of ways in which we can be guided. This explains both why
Foucault dissents from the claims of critique – he thinks that it mistakenly conceptualises being guided
as a particular experience – and why he can acknowledge its critical claims as valuable: critique is a
particular experience of being guided. In this respect it is entirely consistent for Foucault to reject what
Habermas claims for his claims concerning the present while having some sympathy for the content of
these claims. Thus, for Foucault, the value of Habermas' practice of critical reflection and, in particular,
his way of conceptualising the test of free and open discussion in terms of rules is subject to the test of
free and open public discussion in the same way as, and in relation to, other practices of critical
reflection characterised by other ways of conceptualising the test of free and open public discussion
(including, for example, genealogy and its conceptualisation of that test in terms of an agonic dialogue
characterised by mutual acknowledgement). Similarly, the value of Habermas' critical reflections on the
present is subject to the test of free and open discussion in the same way as, and in relation to, other
critical reflections on the present.

Page 40
At this stage, let us turn from the exploration and delineation of this asymmetry of Habermas' and
Foucault's relations to each other's practices to a more explicit focus on the significance of this
asymmetry for understanding the stakes of the encounter between critique and genealogy.
IV
This final section addresses the implications of considering critique and genealogy in terms of orientation
in thinking for the topic of the ethics of dialogue. It is not my concern here to come down on one side
or the other, but rather to use this topic as a site on which the stakes of the dialogue between
Habermas and Foucault can be clarified.
Let's begin with a long passage from Foucault on the ethics of dialogue in which he insists that ‘a whole
morality is at stake, the morality that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other’ (1984c:
381):
In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each
person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The
person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given to him: to remain
unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates,
to point out faulty reasoning, etc. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right
that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse he is tied to what he has
said earlier, and by the acceptance of the dialogue he is tied to the questioning of the other. Questions
and answers depend on a game – a game that is at once pleasant and difficult – in which each of the
two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of the
dialogue.
The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will
never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that
struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for truth, but an
adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For
him, then, the game does not consist in recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak,
but of abolishing him, as an interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be, not
to come as close as possible to a difficult truth, but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has
been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is
by definition denied. (1984c: 381–2)
Whether or not these remarks are directed at Habermas' failure to acknowledge the claims of genealogy,
they do indicate both Foucault's affirmation of dialogue as a mode of relation in which the participants

Page 41
acknowledge each other as partners in a process and his ethical concern with polemics, of which
Habermas' The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a good example. Foucault considers three models
of polemics – religious, juridical and political – and unsurprisingly it is the juridical model which most
accurately characterises Habermas' practice:
it examines a case [the case against the radical critique of reason]; it isn't dealing with an interlocutor,
it is processing a suspect [genealogy]; it collects the proofs of his guilt [relativism, presentism,
cryptonormativism], designates the infraction he has committed [the lawless use of reason], and
pronounces the verdict [guilty] and sentences him [to be disciplined by reason]. (1984c: 382)
Now, given Habermas' strong commitment to free and open public dialogue, it is tempting to conclude
that his polemical defence of this commitment entails (ironically enough) that he is caught in a
performative contradiction.
Yet this conclusion is too quick. Habermas can offer a response. He can, for example, claim that a
juridical polemic is compatible with dialogue if the participants alternately occupy the roles of the
examiner-judge and the examinee-suspect – and here Habermas can reasonably point out that his
commitment to communicative freedom entails recognising and defending Foucault's right of reply. This
reply commits Habermas to two further claims concerning dialogue as a form of communicative action
characterised by mutual recognition and respect. First, that engaging in dialogue does not entail that a
participant acknowledge the claims of the other in the terms in which they are presented; on the
contrary, mutual recognition and respect are satisfied even if one redescribes these claims as a certain
type of claim in terms of one's own system of description. Secondly, that it is a legitimate dialogic move
to illustrate that the claims of the other as a certain type of claim are not compatible with one's own
commitments and to challenge the other to provide general reasons as to why one should surrender
these commitments. Another way of putting these three claims is simply to say that Habermas can resist
the charge of performative contradiction by arguing that the constitutive features of dialogue can be
reconstructed in terms of purely formal rules which guarantee reciprocal relations between participants,
i.e. that mutual recognition and mutual respect can be expressed as, and secured through, formal rules
(this is, of course, exactly what Habermas does argue). This move allows Habermas to resist the charge
of performative contradiction because it entails that the attitude which one participant exhibits to
another is irrelevant unless, and until, the mode of conduct which expresses this attitude breaches the
formal rules of dialogic engagement. Moreover, in just this respect, Habermas can also argue that his
failure to acknowledge the claims of genealogy as just these claims is compatible with exhibiting mutual
recognition and respect

Page 42
towards genealogy and, thus, is not appropriately conceptualised as a moral failure.
What conclusions can we draw from these reflections on Foucault's and Habermas' accounts of the
ethics of dialogue? We can note that these reflections are consistent with the asymmetry which
characterises their reflections on each other's work. Indeed, these reflections simply elucidate the
implications of this asymmetry for thinking about mutual respect in so far as both Foucault and
Habermas conceptualise dialogue as a practice of mutual respect. Consequently, viewed under the
aspect of dialogue, we can specify the stakes of the encounter between Habermas' practice of critique
and Foucault's practice of genealogy as concerning how we reflect on mutual respect. On the one hand,
for Foucault, mutual respect is understood as an attitude in which we acknowledge each other in
thought and action as the self-governing beings that we are. This understanding accounts for, and is
exhibited by, Foucault's concern with the topic of the care of the self and, in particular, the relationship
between care of the self and the government of others addressed in his work on ancient and modern
forms of government (Foucault, 1986, 1988b, 1988c, 1988d). On the other hand, for Habermas, mutual
respect is reconstructed as a set of procedures through which we recognise each other in thought and
action as members of the class of self-governing beings. This understanding of mutual respect accounts
for, and is exhibited by, Habermas' concern with law and the form of the constitutional-democratic state
(Habermas, 1996a). In this regard, what is at stake in the encounter is the character of our ethical
understanding of ourselves and of our relations to each other as self-governing beings, which is simply
to say that what is at stake is the very concept of enlightenment.
Conclusion
The purpose of this chapter has not been to evaluate or adjudicate between critique and genealogy as
practices of critical reflection. Rather it has been concerned to illustrate the value of reflecting on these
practices as ways of orienting thinking for elucidating significant differences between them and to clarify
the stakes of this encounter. But no doubt it is apparent that the chapter also has two further purposes.
The first is simply to reinforce the claim that it is still worthwhile to explore the encounter between
these practices, to claim both that the contest between critique and genealogy has yet to be decided,
and that investigating this contest yields insights into what is at stake in our ways of reflecting on our
historical being in the present. The second is to draw attention to a contrast between two modes of
moral education: teaching by and through rules and teaching by and through examples. This is my
underlying theme and it is a topic that requires and deserves further reflection.

Page 43
Note
An earlier version of this chapter was presented to a conference on Nietzsche and Foucault at the
University of Manchester. I am grateful to the conference organiser, Maurizio Passerin D'Entreves, for
inviting me and to those present for their comments. I would like to thank Samantha Ashenden, Aaron
Ridley and James Tully for their comments on the penultimate draft.
References
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The subject and power’, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. pp. 214–32.
Foucault, M. (1984a) ‘What is enlightenment?’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader.
Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 32–50.
Foucault, M. (1984b) ‘Truth and power’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth:
Penguin. pp. 51–75.
Foucault, M. (1984c) ‘Polemics, politics and problematizations’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault
Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 381–90.
Foucault, M. (1984d) ‘Politics and ethics’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth:
Penguin. pp. 373–80.
Foucault, M. (1986) The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Pantheon.
Foucault, M. (1988a) ‘Critical theory/intellectual history’, in L. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics,
Philosophy, Culture. London: Routledge. pp. 17–46.
Foucault, M. (1988b) ‘Politics and reason’, in L. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy,
Culture. London: Routledge. pp. 57–85.
Foucault, M. (1988c) ‘The return of morality’, in L. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy,
Foucault, M. (1988d) ‘The concern for truth’, in L. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy,
Foucault, M. (1996) ‘What is critique?’, in J. Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century
Answers and Twentieth Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 382–98.
Foucault, M. (1997) ‘The ethics of the concern for the self as a practice of freedom’, in P. Rabinow (ed.),
Michel Foucault: Ethics, Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 281–302.
Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action (vol. 1). Boston: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1987a) The Theory of Communicative Action (vol. 2). Boston: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1987b) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence. Oxford: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1989) The New Conservatism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Habermas, J. (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and S. Weber
Nicholson. Oxford: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1993) Justification and Application, trans. C. Cronin. Oxford: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1996a) Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: Polity.

Page 44
Habermas, J. (1996b) ‘Afterword’, in M. Deflem (ed.), Habermas, Modernity and Law. London: Sage. pp.
135–50.
Habermas, J. (1996c) ‘Modernity: an unfinished project’, in S. Benhabib and M. D'Entreves (eds),
Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. pp. 38–55.
Hindness, B. (1997) ‘The object of political theory’, in A. Vincent (ed.), Political Theory: Tradition and
Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 254–71.
Hutchings, K. (1996) Kant, Critique, and Politics. London: Routledge.
Kant, I. (1952) Critique of Judgement, trans. J.C. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kant, I. (1983) [1781, 1787] Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp-Smith. London: Macmillan.
Kant, I. (1991a) ‘An answer to the question: “what is enlightenment?”’ in H. Reiss (ed.), Kant's Political
Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 54–60.
Kant, I. (1991b) ‘What is orientation in thinking?’ in H. Reiss (ed.), Kant's Political Writings. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. pp. 237–49.
MacCarthy, T. (1994) ‘Philosophy and critical theory: a reprise’, in D. Hoy and T. MacCarthy, Critical
Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 5–100.
Tully, J. (1989) ‘Wittgenstein and political philosophy’, Political Theory, 17: 172–204.
Tully, J. (1992) ‘Michel Foucault’, in L.C. Becker (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ethics. Chicago: St James Press.
pp. 383–5.
White, S. (1988) The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Page 45
2
CRITICAL SPIRITUALITY
On Ethics and Politics in the Later Foucault
Thomas Osborne
‘There is, moreover, in this disease of the French Revolution something very strange that I can sense,
though I cannot describe it properly or analyse its causes. It is a virus of a new and unknown kind.
There have been violent Revolutions in the world before; but the immoderate, violent, radical,
desperate, bold, almost crazed and yet powerful and effective character of these Revolutionaries has no
precedents, it seems to me, in the great social agitations of past centuries. Where did this new race
come from? What produced it? What made it so effective? What perpetuates it? For the same men are
still with us, even though the circumstances are different now; and they have a progeny everywhere in
the civilised world. I am exhausting my mind trying to conceive a clear notion of this object and seeking
a way to depict it properly. Independently of all that can be explained about the French Revolution,
there is something unexplained in its spirit and in its acts. I can sense the presence of this unknown
object, but despite all my efforts I cannot lift the veil that covers it. I can palpate it as if through a
foreign body that prevents me from grasping it or even seeing it.’
(Alexis de Tocqueville to Louis de Kergolay, quoted in Furet, 1981: 163)
L'existence est la matière première la plus fragile de l'art humain, mais c'est aussi sa donnée la plus
immédiate.
(Foucault, 1984a: 630)
There is a very common view which has it that Foucault has no coherent politics as a consequence of
his purportedly self-defeating theory of power. Given his theoretical position, say the critics, any kind of
political view on Foucault's part must have been self-negating. For thinkers like Habermas as well as a
host of lesser aspirants, Foucault's work is self-defeating because, for him, power is everywhere; and
yet clearly Foucault wants to supersede power, to go beyond it, to speak in the name of

Page 46
the oppressed (Habermas, 1987; Kelly, 1994). But Foucault cannot speak in the name of the oppressed
because he believes in the ubiquity of power; therefore he should either keep quiet or should change his
theory of power. Foucault must tell us what his norms are, and Foucault must speak in the name of
something. He must specify what he wants, and he must tell us what he wants before he goes about
trying to get it.
Let us, for a moment, play along with this critical game and concentrate on one theme in Foucault's
oeuvre that might be taken as something like a specific reply to Habermas. This is the idea of what
Foucault calls aesthetics of existence; assuredly one of the few things that Foucault is avowedly in
favour of (cf. Bernauer and Mahon, 1994: esp. 151–6; Miller, 1993: 339; Wolin, 1986).
Aesthetic Morality
The idea of an aesthetics of existence might seem to relate to politics initially only in a rather distant
sense. It appears, first of all, in Foucault's discussion of personal sexual ethics in one of his last books,
The Use of Pleasure (Foucault, 1985). Here, it signifies the creation of a style of life without recourse to
the fixity of moral codes, on the one hand, or epistemological guarantees on the other. Foucault
presumably regards this as being a question of aesthetics in so far as what is at stake is an
autonomisation of life according to a certain creative style. Thus, ‘classical antiquity's moral reflection
was not directed towards a codification of acts, nor towards a hermeneutics of the subject, but towards
a stylisation of attitudes and an aesthetics of existence’ (1985: 93).
Putting things more crudely than we should, we might say that by talking about aesthetics Foucault is
talking about three things. One very general thing – a principle of invention, singularity and creativity;
and two more specific, if negative, things – the possibility of fabricating a sense of political, cultural or
self-identity with as little recourse as possible to either moral codes or forms of knowledge. Indeed, the
idea of aesthetics of existence could be glossed simply as a stylisation of existence without recourse to
moral codes or epistemological norms.
So, in antiquity, in contrast to the world of early Christianity, it was not a question of the fabrication of
identity through moral codes but rather an ethical fabrication of existence.
This elaboration of one's own life as a personal work of art, even if it obeyed collective canons, was at
the centre, it seems to me, of moral experience, of the moral will, in Antiquity; whereas in Christianity,
with the religion of the text, the idea of God's will and the principle of obedience, morality took much
more the form of a code of rules. Only certain ascetic practices were more closely linked to the exercise
of a personal liberty. (Foucault, 1989: 311)

Page 47
Of course, a moral code is not the same thing as a morality. Foucault is unhappy with the idea of a
moral code but his aesthetics is clearly a question of a morality – a kind of doctrineless, self-imposed
doctrine of how to live.
Such an aesthetic model of existence is not meant to be based on a scientific knowledge of the self. Its
aesthetic character is given by its opposition to the concept; or, in fact, it is a domain where concepts
are – in the Kantian sense – indeterminate. So unlike the modern era where, in Foucault's view, the
truth of the self is most usually given through a discourse of desire centred upon a psychological or a
psychoanalytic style of knowledge, the aesthetics of existence repudiates the grounding of one's life in
epistemological form. ‘The relation to truth was a structural, instrumental, and ontological condition for
establishing the individual as a moderate subject leading a life of moderation; it was not an
epistemological condition enabling the individual to recognise himself in his singularity as a desiring
subject and to purify himself of the desire that was thus brought to light’ (Foucault, 1985: 89). The
aesthetics of existence is, in other words, a notion that takes us away from all those modern injunctions
that we should seek the truth of ourselves once and for all and then act or base our sense of identity on
the basis of that truth. Aesthetic morality should be its own yardstick, regardless of the so-called
sciences of the self.
In short, there is a Kantian idea and a Nietzschean idea contained in the notion of an aesthetic of
existence. The Kantian idea is that a work of art is something that exists in and of itself which has value
precisely in so far as it has no other externally determined value. The Nietzschean idea is given by
Foucault's emphasis on aesthetics of existence not just as an end in itself but as a process of self-
transformation: the model of art is meant to suggest a rather rigorous ascetic work or stylisation of
oneself in order to bring about a kind of self-creation or autonomisation. Foucault says of his own work
on this point: ‘For me intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning
transforming yourself…. This transformation of oneself by one's own knowledge is, I think, rather close
to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?’
(Foucault, 1988c: 14).
Perhaps this idea of an aesthetics of existence would not be particularly interesting if it only related to
the ancient Greeks. Foucault feels it has some contemporary pertinence in that we have again reached
a stage in history – without overriding moral norms or decisive systems of knowledge – in which the
elaboration of an aesthetics of existence might once again be apposite. ‘And if I have taken an interest
in Antiquity, it is because for a whole series of reasons, the idea of a morality as obedience to a code of
rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. To this absence of a morality, one responds, or
must respond, with a research which is that of an aesthetics of existence’ (Foucault, 1989: 311).

Page 48
The fact that Foucault never gives us a substantive theory of his aesthetic morality should not give us
too much cause for concern. Foucault used to get on people's nerves by refusing to state what kinds of
aesthetics of existence he is talking about. We never find out what he actually wants. But in fact,
Foucault's indeterminacy on this point is quite in keeping with the notion of an aesthetics of existence
itself. For one cannot specify the nature of aesthetics of existence in advance, any more than actual
aesthetic norms and practices are determined by theories of the beautiful or the sublime. They are
rather the product of an ongoing experiment or process of trial and error. It is the model of the artist
who, on the basis of a hard ascetic labour, enters into the unknown.
What is sure is that the idea of an aesthetic morality is most certainly not an injunction to become
aestheticist in a narrow sense. It is not an injunction to live what would be commonly seen as an artistic
life; the life, for instance, of the bohemian, the dandy, Noel Coward or today's new laddish avant-garde
artists. Art is not to be compensation for life. What is at stake is an aestheticisation of life. ‘The idea of a
bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is something which fascinates me’ (Foucault, 1984d:
348). Foucault is thinking here of the techne ton biou of classical antiquity, a techne not exactly of the
self as such, but of life (only later, with the Stoics and the Epicureans, did the arts of existence begin to
centre upon the self). Once again there is a Nietzschean echo. It is a question not of devoting one's life
to art – be that painting, writing or just posing about as an aesthete – but of creating, one might say, a
singular art for one's life. Perhaps there is something of a historical tale to be told here. No doubt, the
development in modernity of a form of power centred precisely on the forces of life – namely biopower –
served to undermine or discredit the idea that life might be the object of an art. In the French version
of his ‘Genealogy of ethics’ interview, Foucault elaborates on this theme, implying that the aesthetics of
existence in the modern world – as it reappears in the Renaissance – appears as a kind of implicit
affront to the pastoral power that had been developing in the Christian Middle Ages (1984a: 629–30; cf.
Foucault, 1984d: 370). Later, from the end of the eighteenth century, the notion of the ‘life of the artist’
took on a certain importance as against the ideologies of ‘interest’ and egoism that were characteristic of
bourgeois techniques of the self; ‘the ‘‘artistic life”, “dandyism”, were constituted from the techniques of
self that were characteristic of bourgeois culture’ (Foucault, 1984a: 629).
Nor, then, is the notion of an aestheticisation of one's life necessarily a retreatist or privatised one. It is
not – or not necessarily – a question of withdrawing into the self and of retreating from the world but a
question of the stylisation of all of the elements of one's life. These elements can presumably be quite
open-ended, and would certainly include for Foucault the elements of what broadly speaking could be
called one's political life, that is, in so far as any aesthetic of existence which took as its concern how
one governed oneself would necessarily have to make

Page 49
contact with the question of one's relation to how one was governed by others, or likewise, how one
governed others. For instance, an aesthetic of existence does not necessarily imply what one might
describe as a self-indulgent form of existence, although it might be so: ‘A Greek citizen of the 4th or 5th
Century would have felt that his techne for life was to take care of the city, of his companions. But for
Seneca, for instance, the problem is to take care of himself’ (Foucault, 1984d: 348). In short, there is no
reason why questions of aesthetic morality should not map on to questions of political morality, and the
conduct of the intellectual in public life.
Foucault's Politics
There is an obvious and not so interesting way and a slightly less obvious, or, at least, more problematic
and rather more interesting way to look at the question of politics and aesthetics of existence.
One option would be what could be labelled the subcultural sociology of aesthetics of existence; that is,
in relation to the stylisation of what we sociologists used to call ‘out-groups’, all those who transgress
the norms of a culture in a more or less stylised way; like the Cynics, or Baudelaire's dandies, or – an
obvious concern of Foucault's – the modern gay movement. What interested Foucault about such
movements was the way that they stylised a mode of existence for themselves outside of existing
norms. For instance, in a rave review of Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality, Foucault writes that
in the last pages of his book, Dover introduces a very important theme which retrospectively illuminates
his entire analysis. Amongst the Greeks … the regulation of sexual comportment did not take the form of
a code. Neither a civil law, nor a religious law, nor a ‘natural’ law was used to prescribe what one must
or must not do. And if sexual ethics were indeed rigorous, complex and multiple this was in the form,
perhaps, of a techne or art – an art of living understood as a care of the self and of its existence.
(Foucault, 1982b: 317)
Such might be to explore aesthetics of existence in terms of the arts of transgression.
Another – less ‘transgressive’, perhaps more ‘normative’ – option is to focus on some of Foucault's own
political pronouncements, especially in his later, more overtly journalistic, writings. That is roughly what
we pursue in what follows; not in great detail, but to see if something like a style of thinking about
politics can be gleaned from – in particular – Foucault's brief writings, interviews and comments on
things as diverse as prisoners' rights, dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Vietnamese
boat people, anti-terrorism measures, the Iranian revolution, the campaign against the death penalty,
the role of the unions in France, international human rights, and the Polish Solidarity movement.1

Page 50
Such were the concerns which animated Foucault in the last few years of his life, in writings and
pronouncements which concern themselves with an ethic of political conduct from the perspective of the
left, albeit a left not of the Communists nor even of the Socialists in France, but of something like an
independent left.
Although Foucault does not espouse anything so terrifying as the sort of aesthetic politics that so
worried Walter Benjamin, there are, no doubt, points of contact and interchange between his idea of an
aesthetic morality and his notion of a political style that is linked to the ethos of a philosophical
journalism. In his pieces on the meaning of enlightenment, Foucault invokes the idea of a progressive
politics that would be less a question of a doctrine than of a certain ethos, that is, a certain ongoing
critical attitude to the present. The spirit of enlightenment is not provided, for Foucault, by the figure of
humanism or the doctrinal certainties of progress but through a kind of ever-renewed will to
transformation. In that sense, enlightenment is just as much a question of a journalistic as of a
philosophical spirit, focusing on a determination of the present in the form of a ‘mobile thought’ rather
than a static, ‘theoretical’ one (Foucault, 1979c: 783; cf. Foucault, 1986: 91 and 1983: 502). One might
gloss this, in a Deleuzean vocabulary, as a will to expand possibilities of movement, that is to invent a
permanently mobile political thought; in a statement of Deleuze: ‘if oppression is so awful, it is because
of how it limits movement, rather than because it violates eternal values’ (Deleuze, 1990: 166).
Foucault draws attention to the etymological link between the German term Aufklärung and the idea of
a kind of ‘exit’ or ‘way out’ (Foucault, 1984c; Gordon, 1986). Enlightenment, he argues, is not about
imposing some kind of anthropological destiny upon mankind but about preserving and creating new
kinds of political movement and possibilities for escape. It would be mistaken to think of this as being
akin to a postmodern celebration of permanent difference and change. Foucault's meaning is almost
certainly more serious: that we need to be open to both political events and games of government in
terms of their singularity rather than their inevitability – in the one case, in order to understand them
properly and, in the other, as a constant reminder that government itself is an art that is never given
once and for all but is subject to the forces of creative invention, accident, change and transformation.
An enlightened politics on this count would, then, be less a matter of fidelity to doctrine than of
something like an ethical reimagination of ourselves: ‘The heroism of political identity has had its day.
What one is has now become a question one poses, moment by moment, to the problems one
encounters. Experiments with … rather than engagement in …’ (quoted in Gordon, 1986: 73; see also
Foucault, 1979c: 785).
One of Foucault's targets here is that of doctrinal fidelity to the ideal of the revolution. In a discussion of
a section devoted to the French Revolution in Kant's Contest of the Faculties, Foucault argues that what

Page 51
interests Kant is not the act of revolution but that which the revolution signifies for those who are not
necessarily active participants in it – enthusiasm for progress (Foucault, 1986: 91–3; Gordon, 1986). In
short, the revolution itself, as event, is not so significant as the enthusiasm that it generated, for such
enthusiasm signifies a general moral disposition of humanity towards progress in the form of a desire for
a political constitution decided by the free choice of all, and a political constitution which avoids war
(Foucault, 1986: 93–4). The point about Foucault's discussion of Kant here is not least that we should
take a similar attitude to the Enlightenment ideal itself. It is to say that we should treat the
Enlightenment not as an event to the substance of which we need to be faithful but as evidence of a
spirit that we might want to rekindle; that is, as an ethos, not a doctrine (Foucault, 1986: 94; Osborne,
1998). So ‘the question is not that of determining what part of a Revolution should be retained and set
up as a model’ (Foucault, 1986: 45), but rather – how are we to shape the enthusiasm for revolution,
that is, for progress?
A few years before he had written these words about enlightenment and revolution, Foucault, as if he
were himself one of those Kantian bystanders at the spectacle of progress, had attempted to capture
something of the spirit of revolution in Iran. Foucault's – unjustifiably maligned – journalistic writings on
Iran, for the Corriere della Sera in 1978 and 1979, are of interest not just as contemporary testimony
but because the very idea of such a series of articles embodied, for him, his interest in a renewal of the
ethos of a philosophic journalism. This interest was motivated by Foucault's conviction that political
activity is as much the feature of situated political events and conducts as it is of ideologies and
intellectual theorisations. Ideas, for Foucault, were associated more with a logic of events than with
ideologies and programmes: ‘It is necessary to be witness to the birth of ideas and at the explosion of
their force; and it is not in books that they are anounced, but in the events in which they demonstrate
their force, in the struggles into which one is led for the sake of ideas, whether for or against’ (Foucault,
1978d: 707). That, so far as Foucault was concerned, was what it meant to be an intellectual; not to be
a strategist but, on the contrary, to embody what he called an ‘anti-strategic’ model of thought: ‘to
respect the insurgence of singularity, to be intransigent when power infringes upon the universal’
(Foucault, 1979d: 794).
The revolt was, for him, just such a moment of singularity. It is emblematic, precisely because the idea
of revolution is so often held up as the culmination of a logic of theoretically comprehensible events and
causes. In some senses, the revolt, for Foucault, is ‘outside’ of history; it is a deviation, an event of pure
singularity – yet, as such, perhaps it is the very condition of history itself (Foucault, 1979d: 790–1).
Foucault constantly refers to the anti-Shah demonstrations as moments of pure collective subjectivity
and refusal; not expressive of a certain political irrationality but on the contrary of the ubiquity of the
refusal of power;

Page 52
that power – even the most malign, even the most well-armed, brutal power – can always be resisted by
the force of a collective will. (Foucault, 1979d: 791). Obviously, these are always extreme situations,
when one chooses to risk one's very life for the sake of a refusal of power. But such refusal, even if the
highest price is paid, is never exactly pointless. It is never wholly ‘useless’ to revolt because the work of
revolt discloses a work of ethical self-transformation on the part of those who say ‘no' to power; it is the
entry of subjectivity, whether of the great or of the masses, into history (Foucault, 1979d: 793).
Of course revolts can go wrong. Or they can even be meaningless, to the extent that they can embody
a negative attitude (‘no’ to the Shah), without putting forward coherent programmes or policies
(Foucault, 1978c: 701–2; 1978f: 716). But in an interview on Iran, Foucault appears to defend the idea
of the apparently pointless demonstration for its own sake. The demonstration, he argues, should not be
related to the objective contradictions of a society, but only to itself, that is, just to its very existence,
the manifestation of a unique, collective will. ‘The very word demonstration must be taken literally: a
people was tirelessly demonstrating its will’ (Foucault, 1979a: 747; cf. Foucault 1988b: 216). But, in the
context of Iran, he was insistent that this will was a spontaneous effect, mediated but not determined
by the moral dogma of Muslim ideology; that came later, and – received opinion to the contrary –
Foucault never voiced approval of rule by the mullahs (cf. Foucault, 1978e). In some senses, the fact
that the Iranian revolution went so disastrously wrong supports Foucault's own view of the revolt: that it
is a risk to the death, that there can be no general answer to the question ‘Is it useless to revolt?' but
only a close attention to events as they happen. What interested him about Iran, it seems, was never
anything so simplistic as a straightforward endorsement of the events in Tehran and elsewhere. Rather,
he was fascinated by the very fact of their singularity: that a political spirituality had been born that
owed nothing to Western models of revolutionary ideology or sociopolitical progress (Foucault, 1978b:
692; 1978f: 716); even if examples of such a spirituality were themselves definitive of the early
experience of modernity in the West:
When the mosques were too full for the crowds, loud-speakers were placed in the streets; and every
village and every quarter resounded with voices as terrible as those of the Florence of Savonarola, the
Anabaptists at Munster or those of the Presbyterians at the time of Cromwell. (Foucault, 1978a: 686)
Of course, this will seem to some like an example of an irrationalist conception of political resistance.
But the contention was precisely that one does not necessarily have a ‘reasonable’ reason to revolt;
revolt is just a fact consequent upon the exercise of power. The irrationality of the revolt might be said
to be, for Foucault, conducive to freedom – it is like a display of an ascetically modelled, if in this case
fervent, freedom. It

Page 53
indicates that freedom is not an end-state of politics; rather, the will to freedom is an existential given
consequent upon the universality – which is not to say the ubiquity – of power.
Now, clearly, Foucault's writings on Iran do not exhibit anything so shocking as an aesthetic politics as
such. But, although written some years before the theme of an aesthetic of existence makes its
appearance in his work, do they not disclose a kind of parallel logic of concerns? What fascinates
Foucault about the revolt is the fact that it is irreducible to theoretical constructions; that it cannot be
subjected to the models familiar from the intellectual politics of the West. Nor, on the other hand, is the
revolt, for him, archaic or ideological. Perhaps, Foucault suggests, it is the first truly modern revolution
in that it is ‘the first great insurrection against the global system’ [les systèmes planétaires] (Foucault,
1978f: 716). Nor is Muslim religion reducible to an ideological force. It is more than that: an
‘experience’, an attempt to change not just a political regime but a collective mode of existence. Muslim
religion is not a moral code, not just obedience to the law, but the renewal of a spiritual experience; not
just the opium of the people but – as Marx had it in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right – the spirit of spiritless conditions (Foucault, 1979a: 749).
Again, this is not an irrationalist stance consequent upon some self-defeating view of political theory and
practice. On the contrary, it can even be argued that there is something very loosely approximating to a
theory of ‘right’ in Foucault's later thinking. This may seem a strange idea for such an infamously anti-
humanist thinker to embrace. But Foucault's conception of right is based not on our status as human
beings but on our status as governed beings. Given that we are all subject to government, and that it is
the duty of governments to work for the well-being of their citizens, then we have the right to contest
the evils that are done supposedly in the name of government. In other words, given that there are
those who speak in the name of government, it is logical that those who are governed also have the
right to speak in a common name. ‘There exists an international citizenship with rights and duties and
which can engage with any abuse of power, whatever its author, whatever the victims. After all, we are
all governed, and by the light of this, in solidarity’ (Foucault, 1984b: 707; cf. 1979b: 782; Macey, 1995:
13). But what sort of a solidarity is this?
For Foucault, it is not our rights that confer duties on those who govern but the fact that there is
government that makes it imperative that those who are governed should seek to elaborate their
relations with government in the form of a particular stylisation of rights. This is not really moral
solidarity but an ethical or perhaps, stretching our topic a little, an aesthetic solidarity – one that has to
be produced, stylised, singularised. Hence Foucault's particular interest in the emergence of new means
for expressing such solidarity. Part of his suspicion here was directed at the institution of politics and the
sense in which those who

Page 54
govern or who aspire to govern claim a monopoly on what can and cannot be said about government
(Foucault, 1983: 505). His model here was, no doubt, the contention in 1981 by the French government
that the Polish coup was an affair internal to Poland and not the responsibility of others. However, for
Foucault, European solidarity dictated that the situation in Poland was important and the business of
everybody (Foucault, 1982c). But the institutional sphere of politics, says Foucault, is not the only place
where government happens. In this context, he pointed to the emergence of new non-governmental
and international institutions (NGOs), singling out Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International, Médecins
du Monde, the movements in support of the Vietnamese boat people and so forth as exemplary of a
new internationalism of the rights of the governed (Foucault, 1984b). What was important for him, it
seems, was that such organisations should be understood as creating networks of solidarity amongst
disparate individuals, cultures and groups rather than as organic expressions of an already-given moral
solidarity of the oppressed.
Here we have, then, not exactly a theory of natural right but what might be described as a sort of
constructivist or ‘network’ conception of rights. Humans are not meaningfully born with rights, but the
fact that they are subject to government gives them the right to resist government when it becomes
intolerable, and gives others the right to speak in the name of the oppressed. It is certainly of note that
the philosopher who is famous for supposedly arguing that intellectuals have no right to speak for the
oppressed or for particular social groups is here espousing a view concerning the ubiquity of the right to
speak. Anyone can speak up for anyone else in so far as they share the fact that they are governed. But
it is not just a question of protest, that is, of saying to those who govern, ‘Look, we are here.’ It is a
question of changing the relation between those who govern and the governed. The purpose of political
protest is not one of empty affirmation, but of a practical exercise of changing oneself – whether as an
individual or as part of a collectivity – in relation to that by which we are governed and those who
govern us. It is not a question of anything so naïve as to escape from government altogether; but a
stylisation of oneself – as an individual or as a collectivity – in relation to government.
Some Implications
Transformation, experience, stylisation: our terminology here has an aesthetic echo without, for all that,
condemning Foucault to anything quite as specific as an aesthetic politics.
Perhaps the most that can be said – and truly serious scholars would have to bear in mind the relevant
timing of the various utterances on these questions – is that Foucault aimed for a political style that was
not

Page 55
inconsistent with his views on an aesthetic morality. His is a political morality that emphasises creativity
and singularity, and attempts to be ‘beyond’ the reductions of either theoretical epistemology or moral
codes; entailing a valorisation of political activity not as the application of ideas but as something like
practices of (self-) transformation, a scepticism about the limits of political theories as a ‘ground’ for
politics, and a hostility to the moral ‘blackmail’ of some forms of political and intellectual orthodoxy.
Reading Foucault's contributions to philosophical journalism, one gets the impression, precisely, of
somebody trying to think through the circumstances of the present moment by moment and with the aid
of whatever resources – philosophical, sociological, historical, economic – lay to hand. Foucault's political
ethos was certainly not anti-intellectual; it was predicated upon a specific ethos of intellectualism, one
which emphasised a midwifery of singularity rather than of the universal (Foucault, 1979d: 794; cf,
1988a).
The fact that only limited things about Foucault's politics can be said is itself interesting. Reading the
huge literature of commentary that has been devoted to Foucault, one would think that his political
views were clear: that everything is political, that ours is a disciplinary society, that ‘local struggles'
around sexuality, psychiatry and prisons should take the place of the political project, that we need a
politics of identity rather than of class, and so forth. Such characterisations are patently absurd.
Foucault's own scholarly works may themselves be considered to be exercises in a certain kind of
historical politics of truth; but they are not programmatic, nor do they lead to anything as ambitious or
undesirable as an overall Foucauldian ‘programme’. Which is not, in turn, to say that there is anything in
Foucault's work that would encourage us to refute the idea of a progressive politics or of the idea of a
political programme itself. To be sure, Foucault would certainly counsel caution in such matters, but that
is not the same as a sectarian endorsement of a particular kind of politics, be that ‘micro-politics’ or
some other such construction. Rather what is constantly emphasised is the difficulty of governing, the
obligations of government, and the precariousness of the ethics of criticism (cf. Foucault, 1979b: 782;
1984b).
It is as well, perhaps, to point to a certain modesty in Foucault's conception of political activism. It is
rather as if Foucault suspects that little can come by way of politics from asserting universal principles
such as ideal speech situations, the universality of enlightenment or the inevitability of the revolution.
While we wait for such principles, politics, government and activism all carry on as before; it is not that
knowledge is useless but that such knowledge should be used strategically and should not be regarded
as having a foundational relation to political action. This is nothing so grandiose as a critique of theory-
building enterprises, but at most an attitude of scepticism with regard to their aspirations. Such an
attitude represents, so to speak, a sort of middle-distance rejection of a need much trumpeted today –
namely, for a new

Page 56
‘big idea’ to help us into the next millennium. Perhaps we should trust to our practices rather than our
ideas; we should look to the political inventions that have occurred rather than seek out a new
charismatic authority of thought – whether that of Fukuyama, Etzioni, Habermas or (what could be
worse?) Foucault himself. But this is a middle-distance not a long-distance rejection. It is not a
celebration of the end of ideology, nor a postmodern form of retreatism into the politics of identity and
diaspora, or a celebration of the advent of posthistory. Things are far from complacently in order in
Foucault's world; and his work in this area of politics and journalism was marked by the opposite of
anything approximating to quiescence, fatalism, or – still less – neo-liberal triumphalism (Foucault,
1979e: 796; 1979f: 800).
So what of Habermas? In this chapter, he has been like the dog that did not bark in the Sherlock
Holmes story. He did not bark because there was no dog. Likewise, no Habermas. Perhaps part of the
problem has always been that commentators have tended to make assumptions about the style of
criticism that animated Foucault's oeuvre; as if it were straight-forwardly a form of ‘critique’ in the sense
of radical sociology or critical theory (see the decisive article by Tully, 1989; and, of course, Foucault,
1996). Perhaps Foucault's own critical problematic is, to borrow a distinction from Pierre Hadot, more
‘existential’ than ‘discursive’. Foucault, in his work, is always seeking an effect that would also be an
affect, and in this he really is something of an educationalist; not in a formal sense but perhaps in the
sense described by Hadot when he speaks of ancient philosophy as pertaining to a kind of ethical
experiment or ‘spiritual exercise’ (Hadot, 1995). As for the question of an aesthetic politics of criticism in
this connection, might it not be said that Foucault's work stands somewhere towards the end of that
tradition known in the philosophy of pedagogy as aesthetic education? Foucault aims not at a formal
‘science of society’ but at an ethical or even anthropological effect: the transformation of human
capacities or, at least, the renewal of a will to such transformation. To be sure, such a transformation is
not conducted in the name of the ideals of interiority or inwardness of the whole, rounded person.
Foucault could not care less for the ‘inner self'. But there is a kind of humanism at stake here in that
Foucault clearly regards it as an aspect of human capabilities to be affected and to undergo
transformation and reorientation in the manner envisaged by an aesthetic education; after all, the
human being is an animal for whom the idea of an aesthetic morality is at least a possibility.
None of this, of course, fits any of Habermas' concerns. And why should it? One can hold to the idea of
a plurality of critical discourses without succumbing to the postmodern shibboleths of a plurality of
realities or truths. In any case, Habermas speaks in the language of propositions and science, not in the
language of ethics and aesthetics of existence. Habermas is not wrong to do so, but then his critical
concerns are simply not the same as those of Foucault. Whereas Habermas

Page 57
started out as a journalist and ended as a philosopher, Foucault, as a consequence of his philosophy,
ended up – amongst other things – as something like a journalist. In some ways they are interestingly
dissimilar; in important respects, for example, they are both fundamentally oriented towards Kant, if in
radically different ways. Take, for example, the place of the moral ‘moment’ in their work. Habermas
wants to know what are the conditions of moral subjectivity; and he quite justifiably looks to a theorist
such as Piaget for the answers (Habermas, 1979). Habermas – not entirely unlike Foucault – is also
interested in grounding a form of morality that would still owe something to Kant, rather than Hegel
(Habermas, 1993). But, overall, the similarities and dissimilarities are just not all that interesting.
Foucault's thought is, as he once put it, ‘saggital’; it is concerned with disrupting our certainties, with
acting with untimely deliberation upon the present, with finding ways to move beyond our current moral
certainties; its utopian telos, its regulatory idea, being the possibility that we might make of ourselves
not creatures that conform to our knowledge of ourselves, but something like works of art (see the
marvellous interview with Werner Schroeter – Foucault, 1982a: 258).
But all this is a difference in critical style, not in convictions. It is not as if one could ever say that
Foucault would have disagreed with this or that political conviction of Habermas. It is only that whereas
Foucault wanted – in the particular manner that he had distilled from Kant's essays – to act on the
present, one might say that Habermas wants to (re-)construct the future. Assessment of the relative
merits of these thinkers – which is already to put the matter wrongly – must really stand or fall on an
assessment of their projects at this level of a critical ethos. But even then it would not, perhaps, be all
that interesting. At most it might lead to a certain scepticism about some of the aspirations of both
thinkers – especially Habermas, not because he somehow deserves more criticism but just because he,
in many ways, has the greater formal aspirations for his work, which may be a compliment, not a
criticism. But, above all, it is at the level of rationality and justification that such a verdict might be
reached. Habermas would like to prove that justice is truth. Is it taking liberties to suggest that Foucault
would find such a notion unnecessary at best, and vulgar at worst? For why is it really necessary to
ground justice? Would we have to give up on justice were it to be proven ‘false’? Why is justice so
worthless, or why are we so unsure of the worthiness of justice that we have to attempt to prove its
validity through theoretical discourse as opposed to attempting to be witness to it, and striving to
achieve it through criticism, example and practice?
One gets a sense from the tone of some of Foucault's writings that any form of justice that could be
‘proven’ – whether through ideal speech situations, discourse ethics or whatever – is not really worth the
candle. We strive for justice because we find things intolerable: justice is its own end. The task of
criticism is to make way for justice.

Page 58
Note
1 These texts are now gathered in the four-volume edition, Dits et écrits, published by Gallimard and
edited under the direction of Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Foucault, 1994). These volumes, and
especially the latter two, should do much to deepen our understanding of Foucault's political interests.
All quotations from this work in this chapter are my translations.
I am indebted to Colin Gordon and David Owen for their comments on a previous version of the current
chapter.
References
Bernauer, J. and Mahon, M. (1994) ‘The ethics of Michel Foucault’, in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 141–58.
Deleuze, G. (1990) Pourparlers. Paris: Minuit.
Foucault, M. (1978a) ‘Téheran: la foi contre le chah’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 683–8.
Foucault, M. (1978b) ‘À quoi rêvent les Iraniens’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 688–94.
Foucault, M. (1978c) ‘Une Révolte à mains nues’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 701–4.
Foucault, M. (1978d) ‘Les ‘‘Reportages” d'idées’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 706–7.
Foucault, M.(1978e) ‘Réponse de Michel Foucault à une lectrice iranienne’, in Foucault (1994), III. p.
708.
Foucault, M. (1978f) ‘Le Chef mythique de la révolte de l'Iran’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 709–13.
Foucault, M. (1979a) ‘L'Esprit d'un monde sans esprit’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 743–55.
Foucault, M. (1979b) ‘Lettre ouverte à Mehdi Bazargan’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 780–2.
Foucault, M. (1979c) ‘Pour une Morale de l'inconfort’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 783–7.
Foucault, M. (1979d) ‘Inutile de soulever?’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 790–4.
Foucault, M. (1979e) ‘La Stratégie du pourtour’, in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 794–7.
Foucault, M. (1979f) ‘Le Problème de réfugiés est un présage de la grande migration du XIXième siècle’,
in Foucault (1994), III. pp. 798–800.
Foucault, M. (1982a) ‘Conversation avec Werner Schroeter’, in Foucault (1994), IV. pp. 251–60.
Foucault, M. (1982b) ‘Des Caresses d'hommes considérées comme un art,’ in Foucault (1994), IV. p.
317.
Foucault, M. (1982c) ‘En abandonnant les Polonais, nous renoncons à une part de nous-mêmes’, in
Foucault (1994), IV. pp. 340–3.
Foucault, M. (1983) ‘La Pologne et àpres’, in Foucault (1994), IV. pp. 496–522.
Foucault, M. (1984a) ‘Àà propos de la Généalogie de l'éthique: un aperçu du travail en cours’, in
Foucault (1994), IV. pp. 609–46.

Page 59
Foucault, M. (1984b) ‘Face aux Gouvernements, les droits de l‘homme’, in Foucault (1994), IV. pp. 707–
8.
Foucault, M. (1984c) ‘What is enlightenment?’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader.
Foucault, M. (1984d) ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader.
Foucault, M. (1985) The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley. Harmondsworth: Viking.
Foucault, M. (1986) ‘Kant on enlightenment and revolution’, trans. C. Gordon, Economy and Society, 15
(1): 88–96.
Foucault, M. (1988a) ‘Power, moral values and the intellectual’ (interview with M. Bess), History of the
Present, 4 (1–2): 11–13.
Foucault, M. (1988b) ‘Iran: the spirit of a world without spirit’, in L. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault:
Politics, Philosophy, Culture. London: Routledge. pp. 211–26.
Foucault, M. (1988c) ‘The minimalist self’, in L. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy,
Foucault, M. (1989) ‘An aesthetics of existence’, in Foucault Live. New York: Semiotext(e). pp. 309–16.
Foucault, M. (1994) Dits et écrits, vols I—IV. Paris: Gallimard.
Foucault, M. (1996) ‘What is critique?’ trans. K.P. Geiman, in J. Schmidt (ed.), What Is Enlightenment?
Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press.
pp. 382–98.
Furet, F. (1981) Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gordon, C. (1986) ‘Question, ethos, event: Foucault on enlightenment and revolution’, Economy and
Society, 15 (1): 71–87.
Habermas, J. (1979) ‘Moral development and ego identity’, in Communication and the Evolution of
Society, trans. T. McCarthy. London: Heinemann. pp. 69–94.
Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Oxford: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1993) Justification and Application, trans. C. Cronin. Oxford: Polity.
Hadot, P. (1995) Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. M. Chase. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kelly, M. (ed.) (1994) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Macey, D. (1995) ‘Michel Foucault: J‘Accuse’, New Formations, 25: 5–13.
Miller, J. (1993) The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Osborne, T. (1998) Aspects of Enlightenment: Social theory and the ethics of truth. London: UCL Press.
Tully, J. (1989) ‘Wittgenstein and political philosophy: understanding practices of critical reflection’,
Political Theory, 17 (2): 172–204.
Wolin, S. (1986) ‘Foucault's aesthetic decisionism’, Telos, 67: 71–86.

Page 60
3
PAS DE DEUX
Habermas and Foucault in
Genealogical Communication
Daniel W. Conway
I met Foucault only in 1983, and perhaps I did not understand him well. I can only relate what
impressed me: the tension, one that eludes familiar categories, between the almost serene scientific
reserve of the scholar striving for objectivity on the one hand, and the political vitality of the vulnerable,
subjectively excitable, morally sensitive intellectual on the other.
(Jürgen Habermas, ‘Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present’)
I am interested in what Habermas is doing. I know that he does not agree with what I say – I am a little
more in agreement with him – but there is always something which causes me a problem. It is when he
assigns a very important place to relations of communication and also a function that I would call
‘utopian’. The thought that there could be a state of communication which would be such that the
games of truth could circulate freely, without obstacles, without constraint and without coercive effects,
seems to me to be Utopia.
(Michel Foucault, 1984 Interview)
Habermas' treatment of Foucault in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987, hereafter, PDM) is
often adduced by Foucault's champions as conclusive evidence of Habermas' unwillingness to engage in
serious philosophical discussion with Foucault. Routinely and roundly dismissed for its supposedly
uncharitable interpretation of Foucault's books, its undisguised contempt for Foucauldian genealogy, and
its sneering, vituperative Francophobe tone, Habermas' treatment of Foucault in fact constitutes prima
facie evidence, or so I contend, not only of their successful communication, but of their philosophical
twinship.

Page 61
They are inseparable partners in a dance that defines the agenda of contemporary political philosophy.
This chapter represents an attempt to break decisively from the partisan bickering to which the
‘Habermas/Foucault controversy’ is so readily and so often reduced. In order to do so, I focus on the
rhetorical and dramatic movements that inform Habermas' treatment of Foucault in PDM. Toward this
end, I interpret Habermas' angry chapters on Foucault as constituting a response to an invitation issued
by Foucault himself. That is, if the ‘Habermas/Foucault controversy’ occupies the afterlife of a quarrel
between these two thinkers, then perhaps this quarrel was initiated, and entirely to his credit, by
Foucault. Provoked by Foucault's avowed opposition to the traditions of humanism,1 Habermas
endeavours to document the residual complicity of Foucauldian genealogy in the vocabulary, categories
and normative aims of philosophical humanism.
In his execution of this task, Habermas is more or less successful, for he reveals the extent to which
Foucault continues to think within the historical shadow of humanism. Habermas is able to make his
case, however, only by conducting a genealogical investigation of Foucault's project, thereby confirming
the value of genealogy as a method of historical inquiry – even as he discredits its most formidable
practitioner. Indeed, it is at the level of genealogical communication – far removed from the sterile
theatre of universal pragmatics – that we witness the collaboration of Habermas and Foucault on a
project of common cause and common commitment.
At the level of genealogical communication, in fact, their confrontation appears to be less a quarrel than
a kind of dance, in which they collaboratively retrieve the neglected counterdiscourse of modernity. To
separate or police these dancers, or to demand that one partner haughtily abandon the other, would be
to halt the productive communication that transpires between them.
Foucault and His Doubles
Compared to the other thinkers whom Habermas reviews in PDM, Foucault receives a relatively
extended hearing. Habermas situates Foucault in the privileged lineage of post-Nietzschean philosophy,
which means that he does not associate Foucault with the deconstructive madness that besets
Heidegger and Derrida. Foucault instead descends from Nietzsche via Bataille, whose irrational excesses
he partially recuperates. For this reason, Habermas devotes two full chapters of PDM to his account of
the development – and eventual shipwreck – of Foucault's thinking.
Habermas openly applauds the self-corrective exercises that govern the internal development of
Foucault's thinking; this capacity for immanent self-criticism is in fact integral to the counterdiscourse
that Habermas himself intends to retrieve. Habermas also insists, however, that

Page 62
Foucault's fateful turn to genealogy brings this dynamic of internal development to a premature and
definitive close. Foucauldian genealogy, he explains, not only fails to deliver an objectively valid account
of the power relationships it sets out to investigate, but also trades on the empiricist ontology that it is
ostensibly meant to subvert. Rather than provide an alternative to subject-centred reason, Foucauldian
genealogy unwittingly reinscribes the primacy and privilege of the ontological subject:
Foucault's genealogy of the human sciences enters on the scene in an irritating double role. On the one
hand, it plays the empirical role of an analysis of technologies of power that are meant to explain the
functional social context of the science of man. Here power relationships are of interest as conditions for
the rise of scientific knowledge and as its social effects. On the other hand, the same genealogy plays
the transcendental role of an analysis of technologies of power that are meant to explain how scientific
discourse about man is possible at all. Here the interest is in power relationships as constitutive
conditions for scientific knowledge. (Habermas, 1987: 273–4)
This criticism essays a searing indictment. If the explanatory power of Foucauldian genealogy trades on
some such unacknowledged (and ‘irritating’) methodological duplicity, then Foucault himself participates
in the very conceptual disgregation that he proposes as constitutive of the social sciences in late
modernity (see Foucault, 1973: Part II, section 7). According to Habermas, Foucauldian genealogy
accomplishes at best a cosmetic reversal of traditional ontological categories, while leaving unchallenged
the primacy of subject-centred reason. In attempting to defend the normative claims he wishes to
derive from his genealogical investigations, Foucault cannot help but appeal, surreptitiously, to the
robust subjectivism that he has supposedly banished:
In his basic concept of power, Foucault has forced together the idealist idea of transcendental synthesis
with the presuppositions of an empiricist ontology. This approach cannot lead to a way out of the
philosophy of the subject, because the concept of power that is supposed to provide a common
denominator for the contrary semantic components has been taken from the repertoire of the
philosophy of the subject itself. (Habermas, 1987: 274)
Foucault consequently ends up precisely where he expressly vows not to go, exempting himself from the
terms of his genealogical historiography and plunging headlong into ‘an unholy subjectivism’ (Habermas,
1987: 276). Indeed, his embrace of genealogy precipitates a turning away from the dialectic of
enlightenment.
This account of the development of Foucault's thinking establishes the dramatic form of Habermas'
riposte. This drama centres around what might be called the ‘wayward twin’ motif that Habermas
employs throughout the course of his interpretation in PDM. According to the terms of this motif,
Foucault began his career as a kindred thinker and aspiring conservator of the counterdiscourse of
modernity, only to

Page 63
succumb to the black arts of post-structuralism. (As Habermas indicates in the passage that stands as
the first epigraph to this chapter, he judges the ‘tension’ apparent in Foucault's thought to be
constitutive of his very being – a déformation professionelle, as it were.) By treating Foucault as his
wayward twin, Habermas is able to show not only that Foucauldian genealogy fails in its avowed
campaign to chart the movement of shifting power relations, but also that this failure vindicates his own
unwavering commitment to Enlightenment humanism. Indeed, Foucault merits sustained attention in
PDM only because his confrontation with modernity is so similar to Habermas' in many salient respects.
On Habermas' reconstruction, in fact, they share several guiding aims and presuppositions. Both wish to
extend in some sense the project of enlightenment; to articulate a rational critique of scientific
knowledge and authority; to defend the validity of an immanent critical perspective; to explore the limits
of the prevailing regimes of power; to retrieve forgotten and excluded claims to knowledge; to cultivate
alternatives to subject-centred reason; to restore the centrality of practical reason to political discourse;
and, in general, to take the measure of modernity itself.
Hence the disappointment and betrayal that tinge Habermas' evaluation of his wayward twin: in
dabbling in the black magic of genealogy, Foucault strays from the path marked out by their common
opposition to the hegemony of subject-centred reason. This genealogical detour, Habermas insists,
proves fatal to Foucault's otherwise promising confrontation with modernity:
Genealogy is overtaken by a fate similar to that which Foucault had seen in the human sciences: To the
extent that it retreats into the reflectionless objectivity of a nonparticipatory, ascetic description of
kaleidoscopically changing practices of power, genealogical historiography emerges from its cocoon as
precisely the presentistic, relativistic, cryptonormative illusory science that it does not want to be.
(Habermas, 1987: 276, original emphasis)
Habermas thus disputes Foucault's claim to initiate ‘the movement of a radically historicist extinction of
the subject’ (Habermas, 1987: 276). In fact, Foucault's genealogical turn engenders a performative
contradiction, in so far as it invariably violates in practice the theoretical warrant for its implementation.
Foucault can ensure the ‘validity’ of his genealogical investigations only by withholding his own critical
standpoint from the subversive, de-stabilising gaze of genealogy itself: ‘Of course, Foucault only gains
this basis by not thinking genealogically when it comes to his own genealogical historiography and by
rendering unrecognizable the derivation of this transcendental-historicist concept of power (Habermas,
1987: 269). Genealogy is supposed to take the place of critique, but the project of genealogical
historiography comprises nothing more than the unmasking of disguised expressions of power.
Foucauldian genealogy thus discharges an exclusively levelling function; it has no positive or
constructive role to play in retrieving the counterdiscourse of modernity.

Page 64
In order to assess the provenance (and merit) of Habermas' critique of Foucauldian genealogy, let us
turn now to examine briefly the final, ‘ethical’ stage of Foucault's philosophical career. Since Foucault's
work on ethics constitutes the ripest fruit born of his genealogical dissemination, it will provide us with
our most reliable standard for measuring the validity of Habermas' charges. As we have seen, Habermas
interprets Foucault's genealogical turn as a dead end in an otherwise promising course of philosophical
experimentation. This means that Habermas summarily discounts the so-called ‘ethical’ stage of
Foucault's career, which comprises his inventory of the faculties and powers that collectively define the
ambit of agency for modern subjects.
Foucault's turn to ethics is marked by his emphatic rejection of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, on which his
earlier, archaeological studies had ambivalently traded. According to Foucault, the repressive hypothesis
maintains that power is always strictly juridical and coercive, that power contributes only negatively to
the historical formation of subjects.2 After repudiating the repressive hypothesis, Foucault turns in his
later writings to a more balanced investigation of the process that he now calls subjectivation
(assujettissement), whereby human beings are invested with unique powers and faculties and are
thereby transformed into ‘deep’ subjects.3 His unique contribution to ethics thus involves neither the
articulation of a new moral theory, nor the advocacy of alternatives to the prevailing ‘techniques of the
self’ of late modernity.4 He is concerned instead to investigate the historical conditions under which
‘docile’ subjects are formed, and to expose the hidden power relations that are served by each type of
subject.5
In this final stage of his career Foucault undertakes a partial recuperation of the agency of the subject,
outlining the conditions under which subjects might constitute themselves in opposition to dangerous
techniques of subjectivation. Indeed, the subjects depicted in his later genealogies are not simply the
unwitting products of the clandestine discursive practices of late modernity, for they are able to resist
the totalisation of power within its most sprawling and monolithic regimes. In his late writings, he
consequently endeavours to reckon a more ‘objective’ account of the powers gained and lost through
various modes of subjectivation:
What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on
us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms
knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through
the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Rabinow,
1984: 61)
Foucault's rejection of the repressive hypothesis evidences the capacity for self-correction for which
Habermas applauds him. Indeed, Foucault

Page 65
claims to have discovered (and corrected) in his own work an unwarranted preoccupation with the
repressive repercussions of contemporary techniques of subjectivation, acknowledging that he originally
presented the (limited) range of human agency in an overly pessimistic light.6 In fact, his turn to
genealogy was prompted in part by his realisation that his earlier, archaeological investigations had
unwittingly presupposed the truth of the repressive hypothesis. In response to a question about ‘a sort
of shift’ in his research, such that his investigations ‘no longer are concerned with coercive practices but
with the self formations of the subject’, Foucault responds in the affirmative, noting that he now seeks
to illuminate ‘an exercise of self upon self by which one tries to work out, to transform one's self and to
attain a certain mode of being’ (Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 2). He associates this work-upon-
oneself with the exercise of liberty, which he now understands as complementary to the exercise of
power (see Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 11–15).
His genealogies of the modern sexual subject reveal that the process of subjectivation is not strictly
coercive and disabling, as he may at one time have been tempted to believe. Power relations always
also manifest themselves in productive discursive practices, including those that distribute goods and
information, satisfy limited desires, manage resources, regulate the flow of information and encryption,
and secure the material conditions of social harmony. Although modern subjects are rendered docile
through their subjection to a battery of normalising disciplines, they also can turn the productive
faculties invested in them against regimes of power that threaten to accede to domination. As Dreyfus
and Rabinow helpfully observe:
A self that, as its ethical activity, constituted itself as an ongoing public creation by giving a unified style
to its acts would, in contrast, be much less vulnerable to currently available techniques of
power/knowledge. But even as a changed understanding of the self wards off old dangers, it carries
with it new ones. (1982: 257)
Foucault opposes the repressive hypothesis with his genealogies of the various transformations
responsible for the emergence in the modern period of biopower, which organises the resources of
modern societies under the ascetic pretence of attending to the care of the species and the health of
individual human beings. Biopower promises longer life and unprecedented comforts in exchange for a
gradual elimination of voluptuary pleasures. The success of the regimes devoted to the expansion of
biopower demonstrates that truth is not the enemy of power, but its silent partner in a complex network
of totalising strategies. Indeed, the consolidation of biopower is successful to the extent that its enabling
regimes displace its self-aggrandising designs behind a numbing reverence for health and well-being.
Although Foucault locates in the dominant regimes of biopower a masked impulse toward domination,
he also

Page 66
acknowledges their productive, empowering roles in the formation of the modern subject. Indeed, his
ethical investigations reveal that regimes of power can generally realise their ends only if human beings
are transformed into productive subjects, vested with a limited, recursive capacity for self-legislation.
Foucault's investigation into modern techniques of subjectivation thus involves an experimental
rehabilitation of practical reason, which is structurally similar in important respects to Habermas' attempt
to retrieve the counterdiscourse of modernity. While the ‘docile’ subjects fashioned within the dominant
matrix of biopower continue to be defined (and frustrated) by the inherent limitations of subject-centred
reason, they simultaneously acquire residual faculties and powers that enable them to inhabit
strategically the regimes of power they involuntarily serve. Within this complement of residual faculties
and powers there lies a measure of practical, deliberative reason, and perhaps even the critical
ingredients of what Habermas calls ‘communicative reason’. Whereas subject-centred reason is useless
to agents who seek to resist the consolidation of power in sites of potential domination, the practical
reason limned by Foucault enables agents to transcend the limitations of their individualised
subjectivation.
Foucault's turn to genealogy thus represents his attempt to renew the counterdiscourse of modernity,
but at the level of the micro-narrative. Rather than attempt to deduce the general principles of universal
pragmatics, he focuses instead on techniques of the self and voluntary ascesis.7 Foucault may have
abandoned the grand, sweeping meta-narratives of the Enlightenment, but his micro-narratives
nevertheless reflect his confidence in the role of practical reason to identify and to resist potentially
totalising configurations of power. In fact, his ‘radical critique of reason’ is neither as radical nor as
fatuous as Habermas seems to suppose. Foucault's philosophical project may be more accurately
characterised as the concretisation or miniaturisation of enlightenment.
Although Habermas readily acknowledges this final, ‘ethical’ stage in Foucault's career, he places it
within the obnubilating shadow cast by the fateful turn to genealogy.8 This means, for Habermas, that
Foucault's investigation into modern techniques of subjectivation is faulted by its antecedent conception
of human agents as unwitting dupes of autonomous power regimes. Foucault's unacknowledged reliance
on a general theory of power thus prevents him from addressing the myriad complexities of
contemporary subjectivity9:
In place of socialization as individuating (which remains unconceptualized), he puts the concept of a
fragmenting empowerment, a concept that is not up to the ambiguous phenomena of modernity. From
his perspective, socialized individuals can only be perceived as exemplars, as standardized products of
some discourse formation – as individual copies that are mechanically punched out. (Habermas, 1987:
293)

Page 67
The stipulated conditions of historical emergence thus dictate the frame of Foucault's investigation,
thereby precluding any account of subjects as self-determining agents in the robust sense preferred by
Habermas. For example, Habermas claims, the modern sexual subject appears on the historical scene as
an unwitting victim of adventitious normalising encryptions. Simply put, Habermas does not believe that
Foucault has succeeded in renouncing the repressive hypothesis; though noble perhaps in its motivation,
his challenge to this hypothesis simply succeeds in reinscribing the repression he wishes to oppose.
According to Habermas, Foucault's celebrated turn to ‘ethics’ fails to illuminate those productive
moments in the subjectivation process that genealogy was originally supposed to document. Habermas
thus turns the central thesis of The Order of Things against its author: Foucault fails, precisely as he
explains that all practitioners of the human sciences must, to take the measure of man (see Foucault,
1973: section 10). This failure is prefigured, Habermas insists, in the general theory of power to which
Foucault surreptitiously appeals, which effectively rejuvenates the recently rejected repressive
hypothesis. Indeed, the nihilistic presuppositions of Foucault's general theory of power prevent him from
treating techniques of subjectivation in terms of agency, freedom, judgement, and responsibility:
In our context, however, what is primarily of interest is the peculiar filtering out of all the aspects under
which the eroticization and internalization of subjective nature also meant a gain in freedom and
expressive possibilities. (Habermas, 1987: 292)
Despite his impressive repertoire of clever methodological gambits, Foucault is unable in the end to take
the measure of particular, historically defined human beings. In place of the individual ‘agent’, who
presides over the deliberative implementation of practical reason, stands the docile human subject, an a-
volitional drone who cannot help but reflect and serve the mysterious ends of anonymous regimes of
power.
The Possibility and Justification of Resistance
The possibility of meaningful political resistance is crucial to any rapprochement between Habermas and
Foucault, for each wishes to recommend his respective methodology as contributing to a superior
understanding of the practical alternatives available to contemporary agents. As our brief survey of
Foucault's ‘ethical’ writings suggests, in fact, it is possible to map the territory of convergence that
obtains between his investigations and Habermas' own.10
For example, Foucault's stubborn insistence that we are always implicated in the regimes of power that
we oppose (even as we oppose them) conveys an immanentism that Habermas might very well
endorse.

Page 68
Furthermore, Foucault is no less suspicious than Habermas of the subjectivist paradigm of human
agency. Indeed, his focus on subjectivation presupposes that agents are always also patients, that the
freedom displayed in self-constitution always also reflects the implacable influence of normalising
disciplines:
I would say that if now I am interested, in fact, in the way in which the subject constitutes himself in an
active fashion, by the practices of self, these practices are nevertheless not something that the
individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed,
suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group. (Bernauer and
Rasmussen, 1988: 11)
From their common opposition to subjectivism arises another point of possible convergence: Although
Foucault tends to treat subjects as unwitting reflections of the constellations of power that have formed
them, he nevertheless attributes to them a residual power to resist the consolidation of power in
structures of domination. From the feedback loop engendered by the prevailing constellations of
biopower, there emerges a residue of enlightenment, which, if not exactly liberating in the epic terms
that Habermas occasionally prefers, can nevertheless succeed in frustrating the coalescence of power in
sites of potential domination.
To Foucault, this means that human reason is not reducible without remainder to a disguised expression
of anonymous power interests. For Foucault as for Habermas, the project of critique is not limited to
unmasking the disguised power relations that parade under the priestly raimant of subject-centred
reason. The project of critique also comprises an element of deliberative judgement, of orienting
practical reason to the unique, local exigencies of any particular historical epoch. Like Habermas,
Foucault thus insists that something like practical reason can be marshalled to frame a plan of strategic
resistance that would not simply reinforce the status quo. In fact, the whole point of Foucault's late turn
to ‘ethics’ is to account for subjects as invested with the (limited) freedom and power to resist the
threat of domination within the prevailing social order.
The popular interpretation of Foucault as a prophet of extremity, who fetishises the ‘other’ of reason and
foments anarchy, thus trades upon a caricature of his thinking. As constituted in the differential
interstices of its various relationships, power is always amenable – although never perfectly so – to the
claims of reason. For Foucault, power is the ‘other’ of reason only in the limited sense that reason
cannot gain a critical purchase on power an sich, independent of its relational appearances and partial
inhabitations. If this is what Habermas means by the ‘other’ of reason, however, then he has painted
himself and his disciples into an uncomfortably cramped corner: the only way to avoid being labelled a
‘prophet of extremity’ would be to claim that the critical purchase of reason is both potentially and
empirically unlimited.

Page 69
As he indicates in his late essays ‘What is enlightenment?’ and ‘The art of telling the truth’, Foucault is
very much a champion of reason and of the role of practical reason in guiding political activity. Yet he
differs from Habermas in identifying the proper sphere and application of practical reason. Hence his
decision to experiment with genealogy and archaeology: Both are critical methods that attempt to limit
the claims of reason to the local and the concrete, to resist the enduring allure of meta-theories and
meta-narratives.11 Responding to the familiar charge that his attunement to historical discontinuities
subverts the validity of his proffered conclusions, Foucault affirms the structure, order, stability and
reasonableness of his genealogical investigations. Although, as he readily concedes, genealogists
are always in the position of beginning again … that does not mean that no work can be done except in
disorder and contingency. The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its homogeneity,
and its stakes. (Rabinow, 1984: 47)
By drawing attention to his own, inextricable complicity in the structures of power that he investigates,
Foucault effectively refuses what he calls ‘the blackmail of the Enlightenment’ (Rabinow, 1984: 42).12
Demanding, as Foucault alleges, that ‘one has to be ‘‘for” or “against” the Enlightenment’ (Rabinow,
1984: 42), Habermas and kindred thinkers pre-emptively close off the gray area of genealogical
investigation. In doing so, however, Habermas et al. actually exacerbate the risk that they might
contribute unwittingly to the coagulation of capillary power in structures of domination. Simply put,
Habermas yearns for Utopia, which Foucault identifies as an unstable site of false security and relaxed
vigilance, as a hospitable shelter wherein power might consolidate itself silently and efficiently (Bernauer
and Rasmussen, 1988: 18).
According to Foucault, the ubiquity of hidden power relations, which Habermas claims would render all
political deliberations otiose, in fact places a premium on the faculty of practical reason:
One must observe also that there cannot be relations of power unless the subjects are free. If one or
the other were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which he
can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to
exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty. (Bernauer
and Rasmussen, 1988: 12)
If danger lurks everywhere, as Foucault melodramatically opines,13 then one must choose one's
skirmishes judiciously and deploy practical reason in one's resistance to the consolidation of power in
oppressive regimes of domination.
Habermas acknowledges Foucault's overt gestures toward a justification of political resistance, but he
dismisses them as idle and naïve. His

Page 70
strategy here is to show that Foucauldian resistance neither presupposes nor involves the deployment of
practical reason. According to Habermas, in fact, the potentially promising political inflections of
genealogy are negated by Foucault's inability to explain why anyone ought to offer any resistance to
oppressive regimes of power:
But if it is just a matter of mobilizing counterpower, of strategic battles and wily confrontations, why
should we muster any resistance at all against this all-pervasive power circulating in the bloodstream of
the body of modern society [im Blutkreislauf des modernen Gesellschaftskörpers zirkulierenden], instead
of just adapting ourselves to it? (Habermas, 1987: 283–4; p. 33 of the German text)
According to Habermas, then, Foucault reserves no office for practical reason to perform. The
deployment of ‘counterpower’ involves nothing more than the strategic appropriation of power, which
supposedly becomes transformed and ennobled when wielded by heroic genealogists. Since there are no
genuine alternatives to be elected or declined through rational deliberation, Foucauldian genealogy
neither requires nor enables the engagement of practical reason. Although genealogy can perhaps
contribute to the formulation of strategies for resistance, it cannot justify resistance itself.
While perhaps rhetorically effective in ridiculing Foucault and his followers as genealogists-errant, this
rejoinder is both incomplete and logically flawed. Indeed, here some clarifications of Foucault's position
are in order. First of all, Foucault regularly refused to address the general question ‘why resist?’,
patiently explaining that his is a descriptive project of historical investigation. That resistance occurs,
and how it transpires – these are the proper concerns of the genealogist. To take up the ‘why?’
question with respect to resistance would implicate him in the humanist paradigm of philosophy that he
expressly wished to discredit. It would furthermore encourage his readers to associate him with their
own political aspirations, which he consistently claims not to want.
Secondly, resistance is ‘idle’ only in the event that it stands, as Habermas insists, in exclusive disjunction
with the process of ‘adaptation’. (This insistance comprises an example of what Foucault calls ‘the
blackmail of the Enlightenment’.) In that event, ‘power’ and ‘counterpower’ would be qualitatively
indistinguishable, and we would have no good reason to prefer one to the other. This event in turn
obtains only if Foucault subscribes to a totalising theory of power, such that he appeals to the existence
and nature of power in itself, independent of the particular, local relationships to which he typically
restricts his investigations. As Foucault explains, however, ‘I hardly ever use the word “power” and if I
do sometimes, it is always a short cut to the expression I always use: the relationships of power’
(Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 11). In response to this Habermasian challenge, Foucault further
clarifies his position:

Page 71
But the statement: ‘You see power everywhere, hence there is no place for liberty’, seems to me to be
absolutely incomplete. One cannot impute to me the idea that power is a system of domination which
controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom. (Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 13)
Refusing the terms of the either/or presented to him by Habermas, Foucault insists on the inseparable
twinship of ‘resistance’ and ‘adaptation’. Rather than restrict or negate the opportunities for resistance,
in fact, the ubiquity of power relations makes resistance possible:
As soon as there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance. We can never be ensnared by
power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy.
([Power and Sex: 160])
Wishing to derange Habermas' tidy disjunction, Foucault embraces the tertium quid that is constituted
by the convergence of resistance and adaptation. Although power relations contour all forms of human
interaction, not all power relations need be conducive to domination. Or, as Foucault puts it, ‘relations of
power are not something bad in themselves, from which one must free one's self’ (Bernauer and
Rasmussen, 1988: 18). The options that Habermas offers – resist or adapt – are thus misleadingly
presented in the frame of an exclusive disjunction. All strategies of resistance presuppose some measure
of accommodation to prevailing regimes of power. To put Foucault's point somewhat rhetorically:
resistance always already comprises a measure of adaptation, and vice versa.
Habermas' own organic analogy can actually be used to illuminate the extent of Foucault's reliance on
practical deliberation. Victims of a debilitating circulatory illness could simply ‘adapt themselves to it’,
perhaps by allowing an aggressive virus to replicate itself without challenge or opposition. But those
victims who choose to ‘fight’ the illness, regardless of their prospects for survival, are not consigned to
the blind impresses of superstition and faith. They may choose to enter into ‘strategic battles and wily
confrontations’ as a consequence of protracted deliberations – based, in part, on the findings of their
genealogical investigations. To reduce Foucault's reconstructed rejoinder to a formula: genealogy
informs practical reasoning, which in turn enables strategic political resistance. Thus emerges the
distinctly political dimension of Foucauldian genealogy: to expose the movement of power within
structures of domination is to render this consolidation less effective and less dangerous. Power relations
can neither be eradicated nor suspended, but their escalation into structures of domination can often be
neutralised within local regimes.14
In so far as Foucauldian resistance is meant to investigate the limits of power and truth (and thereby
limn the contours of the prevailing games of power and truth), these acts are in fact more thoroughly
reasoned than those sanctioned by the dialectic of enlightenment. Although Habermas

Page 72
would not endorse the practical deliberations undertaken by Foucauldian strategists, he cannot maintain
that their subsequent acts of resistance are either unreasoned or unreasonable. Habermas may judge
Foucauldian subjects unfit to wage global battles against political injustice, but he cannot realistically
fault their capacity to mobilise for local skirmishes against particular forms of oppression and
domination. He can at best ridicule what he judges to be the insignificant goals of their guerrilla
engagements.
Thirdly, the target of Foucauldian resistance is not power, as it appears in any of its relational valences,
but the threat of domination. As Foucault himself puts this point:
That duty [of sounding a warning on the dangers of power] has always been an important function of
philosophy. On the critical side – I mean critical in a very broad sense – philosophy is precisely the
challenging of all phenomena of domination at whatever level or under whatever form they present
themselves – political, economic, sexual, institutional, and so on. (Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 20)
In an interview conducted in 1984, Foucault offers the following account of his distinction between
power and domination:
Facts or states of domination [occur when] the relations of power, instead of being variable and allowing
different partners a strategy which alters them, find themselves firmly set and congealed. When an
individual or a social group manages to block a field of relations of power, to render them impassive and
invariable and to prevent all reversibility of movement – by means of instruments which can be
economic as well as political or military – we are facing what can be called a state of domination. It is
certain that in such a state the practice of liberty does not exist or exists only unilaterally or is extremely
confined and limited. (Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 3)
Habermas may certainly take issue with Foucault's account of domination, or chastise him for his
incessantly paranoid formulations of familiar philosophical problems, but he cannot very well claim that
resistance to the threat of domination is either irrational or unreasoned. If Foucault is unable to justify
his appeal to practical reason, then his precise failure cannot lie in his opposition to the coalescence of
power in structures of domination. Indeed, in response to the threat of domination, we can easily
imagine Foucauldian guerrillas assembling for strategy sessions that might closely approximate the ideal,
mutually reciprocal communication situation described by Habermas himself.
Habermas' rhetorical question – why resist at all? – thus obscures the basic truths that resistance is
possible, and that deliberative judgement is exercised both in choosing the precise target of one's
resistance and in mounting an effective opposition. While it is true that, as Habermas allows, genealogy
will never provide an answer to the general question ‘why resist?’, it does not follow that resistance is
therefore idle, irrational

Page 73
or unjustifiable. In fact, genealogical analysis yields a wealth of historical evidence of strategies of
resistance that have ‘succeeded’ despite their failure to answer the question ‘why resist?’
Indeed, if resistance were warranted only in the event of a satisfactory antecedent determination of the
general, abstract conditions under which one ought to resist at all, and if we are to understand that
Foucauldian strategists are simply unable to accomplish this antecedent determination, then it seems
likely that resistance is rarely, if ever, justified. Yet even if Foucault cannot (and will not) satisfactorily
answer the general question ‘why resist?’, it is not clear that anyone else fares any better – including
Habermas, who can at best promise someday to be able to do so. Habermas' ad hominem thus gathers
its rhetorical force only at the expense of suggesting an implausible standard for justified political
resistance.
As these points collectively suggest, the aim of Foucauldian resistance could never be ‘total’ revolution,
in which an oppressive tyranny is forcibly vanquished and replaced with the absence or opposite of
tyranny. As Foucault articulates this point, there is ‘no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt,
source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary’ (Foucault, 1990a: 95–6). To this limited extent,
Habermas is right to insist that ‘counterpower’ will always bear an ineradicable kinship to ‘power’. But
this kinship magnifies, rather than eliminates, the importance of practical reason in framing strategies of
resistance. And in the gray area marked out by the kinship of ‘power’ and ‘counterpower’, genealogy
may often be of considerable help in assembling the base of historical data to which practical reason
invariably appeals.
Resistance on the model of ‘the Great Refusal’ is not only impossible. It is undesirable for those subjects
who possess a genealogical attunement to the constellations of power within which they find themselves
enmeshed. Foucauldian resistance always requires genealogical preparation precisely because subjects
are always multiply complicit in the structures of power that they also wish to oppose. To take an
example close to the heart of Foucault's own genealogical project – namely, the growing threat of
domination under the expanding umbrella of biopower. How can one possibly oppose the threat of
domination under the banner of biopower without also partaking of its enabling regimes of health and
well-being?
While an impulsive act of blind, indeterminate negation may occasionally seem attractive, it would also
be unreasonable, for it would negate much of what we are and have become. This is not to suggest
that practical reason will always dictate strategies of resistance that aim at or end in capitulation to the
prevailing games of power and truth. The anarchy that Habermas fears remains a live option for
Foucauldian resisters, who may attempt some such indeterminate negation against a particularly
pernicious form of domination. They will not do so, however, in the name of human emancipation, the
rights of man, or any other

Page 74
abstract humanist fantasy. Foucault ferociously opposes the romantic notion that some authentic human
soul, essence, nature or destiny lies within us, yearning to breathe free.
Resistance on the model of the Great Refusal is not merely politically obtuse. It is also unethical in the
peculiar sense that Foucault imparts to this term, in so far as it occludes the aesthetic residues of any
process of subjectivation (see Scott, 1990: 53–65). According to Foucault, to deploy strategies of
resistance is to undertake an ethical project, a rapport à soi, whereby one attempts to realise for
oneself an aesthetically superior constitution of oneself as a subject.15 As he remarks in a 1983
interview:
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to
objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialised or which is done by
experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the
house be an art object, but not our life? (Rabinow, 1984: 350)
According to Foucault, one's status as historical subject – that is, one's patiency with respect to the
prevailing forces of subjectivation – is non-negotiable. This does not mean, however, that one can play
no role in determining the particular, contingent constitution of one's subjectivity. Through resistance,
subjects secure for themselves a novel situation of alignment within the interlocking constellations of
power that collectively define their historical situation. Accruant to each novel situation is an
unprecedented complement of powers and faculties, some of which are enhanced, while others are
diminished, by dint of the subject’s novel terms of engagement. To borrow a Nietzschean slogan: we
‘become what we are’ only through resistance, only through an experimental exercise of the powers and
faculties invested in us throughout the ongoing subjectivation process.
Resistance thus involves what Foucault calls ‘a kind of work on oneself’, for one must cultivate the
unique powers and faculties required for the precise oppositional task at hand. As Foucault explained in
1984, expressly distinguishing his position from Habermas':
I don't believe there can be a society without relations of power, if you understand them as means by
which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behavior of others. The problem is not of trying to
dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give one's self the rules of
law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would
allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination. (Bernauer and Rasmussen,
1988: 18)
Foucault provides a compelling example of the self-referential work he has in mind. Remarking on his
goals in undertaking the genealogical investigations that comprise The History of Sexuality, he says:

Page 75
As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be
sufficient in itself. It was curiosity – the only degree of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon
with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know,
but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for
knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgableness and not, in one way or another
and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? (Foucault, 1990b: 8)
The aesthetic inflection of Foucault's unique orientation to ethics thus renders problematic any attempt
to limn a ‘purely’ political dimension of his thought. Political skirmishes are always also the sites of
ethical experimentation, and we would be mistaken to imagine that Foucault might have a motivation or
justification for political activity that is independent of the ethical project he describes.
Habermas' Genealogical Critique of Foucault
I have rehearsed these points of disagreement not to chastise Habermas for misunderstanding Foucault,
but to develop with more precision some of Foucault's central observations on the possibility of
resistance. It is not my impression, in fact, that Habermas misunderstands Foucault at any fundamental
level. These two chapters of PDM are written with great care and precision, if not with great sympathy.
This is not bad philology, but bad blood. Habermas' misreadings of Foucault are intelligent, calculated
and deliberate, apparently designed to deliver a gesture of provocation, a philosophical slap to the face
of his greatest rival and wayward twin. Like a confident prize-fighter who knows that his elusive
opponent must eventually take a fateful stand, Habermas playfully jabs and pulls at Foucault. What he
may not fully realise, however, is that his wily rival has imperceptibly drawn him into the unfamiliar
arena of genealogical communication.
Habermas is often criticised, even by sympathetic readers, for not attending adequately to the role in
reciprocal communication of passion, affect and all other non-reasonable elements of human intercourse.
The project of universal pragmatics is often described as promising, yet sterile, as pertaining more
appropriately to angels than to mortals. In his lectures on Foucault, however, Habermas decisively lays
all such objections to rest. While he continues to focus primarily on the cognitive elements of
communicative reason, he also displays the passion and prejudice that must also inform reciprocal
communication between consenting adults. In his exchange with Foucault he thus communicates the
affect that motivates the engagement. What we witness in these lectures is the emergence of a
Habermas who communicates on a more primal channel of reciprocal discourse. This is the Habermas
who takes personally Foucault's eccentric challenge to the project of Enlightenment,

Page 76
the Habermas who wishes both to insult his wayward twin and to renew the ties that bind them. This
exchange thus constitutes one of those moments at which the counterdiscourse of modernity reveals
itself for inspection and retrieval.
Why is Habermas so confident of his victory that he will allow himself this rollicking détour from the high
road of universal pragmatics? In the final analysis he does not view Foucault as an advocate of political
anarchy. He may fear the rhetoric of anarchism, especially as it is dispensed by zealous Foucauldians,
but he does not fear Foucault himself as an anarchist. On the contrary, he acknowledges Foucault as an
unreliable partner in the project of renewing the counterdiscourse of modernity. Indeed, Foucault's
greatest weakness is not his apparent fondness for anarchy, but his cryptonormativity, i.e. his
unacknowledged appeal to a hidden framework of norms and ideals. As we shall see, this subterranean
appeal links Foucault to the ongoing project of the Enlightenment.
The charge of cryptonormativity implies that Foucault, unbeknownst to himself and his loyal followers, is
actually playing Habermas' game, and playing it rather badly. If, as Foucault seems willing to admit,
genealogy undertakes a localised or miniaturised project of enlightenment, then Foucauldian resistance
must appeal at some point to the norms that guide the dialectic of enlightenment. That is, Foucault's
complex ‘justification’ of anarchic resistance ultimately must rest on an application of familiar moral
norms. Were we to rehearse Habermas' (unspecified) decryption of the guiding norms of Foucauldian
resistance, our narrative might take the following form: why resist the coalescence of power in
structures of potential domination? Because the linkage of liberty and power is preferable to the
estrangement of liberty and power. Preferable for whom? For those subjects who require both liberty
and power in order to pursue their aesthetic projects of re-constituting the dominant dispositions of
their subjectivation; for those subjects who wish to participate in what Foucault calls ‘the care of the
self.’ Why do they wish to care for their selves? And so on.
Habermas is convinced that at some point in this chain of reasoning, Foucault must eventually reveal the
norms that silently inform his genealogical project. He is equally convinced that these hidden norms will
confirm the residual humanism that imparts to Foucault's thought its particularly compelling – yet
stubbornly vague – political inflections. He is furthermore certain that the game of normativity is best
played in the light of day, illuminated by the afternoon sun of enlightenment.
The charge of cryptonormativity thus confirms the twinship that joins Habermas and Foucault. The
wayward twin has strayed into the heart of darkness, claiming to oppose the steadfast twin while in fact
continuing the work that unites them. PDM thus announces that it is time for Habermas to plunge into
the heart of darkness in order to retrieve Foucault and restore their strained twinship.

Page 77
The most interesting feature of this exchange is not that Habermas is right about Foucault's weakness
for cryptonormativity. Unless we are willing to issue Foucault an übermenschlich exemption, we should
not be surprised that he occasionally refreshes himself at the well of humanism. Rather, the most
interesting feature of this exchange is that Habermas undertakes a Foucauldian genealogy of
Foucauldian resistance. He thereby confirms the explanatory power of Foucault's model of genealogical
criticism, whose theoretical bankruptcy he had proclaimed only a few pages earlier. I suggested earlier
that PDM comprises a gesture of provocation. But this is not entirely correct. In bashing his wayward
twin, Habermas in fact responds to an invitation extended by Foucault himself. That is, the original
gesture of provocation is actually delivered by Foucault, by dint of his audacious claim to oppose
humanism and its burdensome metaphysics of morals.
Let us briefly rehearse a plausible version of Habermas' genealogical riposte to Foucault: Although
Foucault certainly wishes to distance himself from humanism, his own genealogical method also
suggests that it is unlikely that he (or anyone else) has cleanly escaped the historical shadow of
humanism. If humanism is still a problem, an issue, something to be talked about and admonished,
then it probably is not as dispensable as Foucault wishes it to be. Indeed, Foucault himself concludes
The Order of Things by noting the self-referential questions raised by his quixotic attempt to chart from
within the disintegration of the episteme in which he labours (Foucault, 1973: section 10).
To Habermas, who in PDM is a recent but enthusiastic convert to genealogical criticism, this means that
Foucault's thought must bear the imprint of a residually humanistic normativity.16 If strategies of
resistance were entirely bereft of anchorage in something like the bedrock humanism that Foucault
expressly rejects, then we should expect them to ramify anarchically, indiscriminately challenging
‘power’ and ‘counter-power’ alike. But this is not the case, and Habermas discerns a method to
Foucault's genealogical madness. If not for the cryptonormativity that informs his genealogical
investigations, Habermas might ask, why does Foucault side with prisoners rather than wardens? With
psychopaths rather than alienists? With sinners rather than confessors? Moreover, is Habermas' analysis
of Foucault not consistent with Foucault's own analysis of any historian who similarly wished to work
himself clear of the historical shadow that envelops him?
Accepting Foucault's invitation, Habermas eagerly conducts a genealogy of Foucault's ‘anarchism’. He
detects in Foucault's thought a residual moralism revolving around the twin humanist foci of human
freedom and creativity. He digs deeper into the grey genealogical record, secretly exhilarated by the
dust and must that are strictly verboten in the sterile theatre of universal pragmatics. He knows that
Foucault presents a convincing case for the post-humanist status of his thinking; that Foucault routinely
refused to answer the ‘why’ question; that Foucault steadfastly

Page 78
declined the ever available mantle of political lawgiver; and that Foucault consistently declined to
position himself for his interviewers on the political checkerboard.
He also knows, however, that Foucault continued to sit for such interviews, continued to authorise their
translation, publication and dissemination. He knows that Foucault officially requested that prospective
disciples leave his crowded classrooms in Berkeley, but he also knows that Foucault rarely responded to
his growing celebrity by simply refusing to lecture. He knows, in short, that Foucault protested too much
his ‘unwanted’ celebrity, that his overt repudiation of political discipleship had become silently textured
with a covert intimation of unspecified plans for political resistance. He consequently knows that
Foucault, despite his best intentions to remain post-humanist and apolitical, was complicit in his own
popular reception as a charismatic political leader. Foucault had thus become, in his own words, a
‘parrhesiast’, a teller of complex, multiply textured truths that place his truth-telling authority at risk.17
At least one of these textured truths, Habermas might allege, manifests a cryptonormative allegiance to
humanism. Finally, Habermas knows that even if Foucault himself would not address the ‘why’ question,
legions of Foucauldians wait anxiously in the wings to do so on his behalf, even at the expense of
revealing their residual (or not-so-residual) humanist proclivities.
If Habermas is right, then Foucault is guilty, as charged, of cryptonormativity. But if Habermas is right,
then the critical purchase and explanatory power of Foucauldian genealogy have been validated, and by
one of its harshest critics. Indeed, in order to identify and decode the subterranean humanism that
informs Foucault's justification of anarchic resistance, Habermas is obliged to conduct a genealogical
investigation. And to tangle further this already tangled web, we might note in passing that Habermas'
turn to genealogy spares him the trouble of answering the justificatory question that he presses so
insistently upon Foucault. To demonstrate that Foucault too is involved in a normative project involving
practical reason is not the same as actually delivering the justification that he demands of his rival. The
general question ‘why resist?’ may be no easier for Habermas to answer than for Foucault.18
In order to examine more closely the nature of the intersubjective collaboration fostered and
presupposed by genealogical criticism, let us return briefly to Habermas' indictment of Foucauldian
genealogy. He complains in the following passage that Foucault sees the methodological flaws that fault
his genealogical criticism but does nothing to correct them: ‘Foucault is aware of the aporias raised by a
procedure that wants to be objectivistic but must remain diagnostic of its time – but he does not
provide any answer to them’ (Habermas, 1987: 278). This complaint is as unproductive as it is familiar.
Whence the presumption that Foucault must answer the questions that he raises? To be sure, this
would be one possible (and admittedly desirable) consequence of the

Page 79
kind of self-awareness that Foucault evinces. But is it not also (if not equally) desirable that Foucault's
thought embodies these aporias, in a public performance that effectively displays them for the scrutiny
of successor critics?
It is only by dint of such performances – which require, not incidentally, a healthy portion of self-
directed violence – that the web of genealogical criticism continues to expand. Although Foucault
himself is unable to answer for the aporias that fault his genealogical method, he is nevertheless able to
exemplify them in a manner that invites further genealogical commentary and criticism.19 That
Habermas has discerned these unresolved aporias is attributable in large part to the performativity of
Foucault's thought, to his capacity to embody the tensions that his thinking inevitably enacts. Indeed,
the performative character of Foucault's thought makes his cryptonormativity available for detection and
analysis by Habermas. Foucault's pre-genealogical prejudices are thus available for all (save himself) to
see, and Habermas' trenchant criticisms attest to this availability. Rather than collapse under the weight
of self-referential challenge, as Habermas charges, Foucauldian genealogy rebounds with renewed
vigour, as evidenced by the addition of its new adherent.20
Genealogy and Communicative Reason
Foucault may fail precisely as Habermas describes to acknowledge his own complicity in the
dissemination of a cryptonormative teaching circulated under his name. But what follows from this
point? Do we chastise Foucault and abjure the critical aspirations of his genealogical approach, or do we
incorporate (and perhaps neutralise) the personal limitations of any particular thinker within an
expanding web of genealogical communication? If genealogy is viewed as an ongoing collaborative
venture, to be pursued and perfected across disciplines and generations, then how damning is this
criticism? Why should the precipitous leaps, double investments, performative contradictions and
nervous twitches of Michel Foucault (or any other genealogist) jeopardise the larger project of
genealogical historiography? If genealogy survived the well-documented excesses of Nietzsche, only to
be taken up and advanced by Foucault and others, then why should we not expect it also to survive the
foibles of Foucault? Why, in short, is Habermas so concerned to define, and subsequently to
valorise/subvert, the subject positions occupied by himself and Foucault?
Like Foucault, Habermas wishes to extricate himself from the retrograde ontology that supports the
primacy of subject-centred reason. In rendering his final, genealogical judgement of Foucault, however,
Habermas appeals to an extremely traditional, strongly subjectivistic conception of individual agency and
identity. In his zeal to discredit the

Page 80
claims of Foucauldian genealogy, he hypostatises the subject positions occupied, respectively, by
Foucault and himself, thereby granting to each a measure of universality that transcends the
particularity of their historically-defined situations. He thus allows his critique of genealogy to devolve
into a personal indictment of Foucault, who in turn becomes far more central to the project of
genealogical historiography than he himself ever intended. Habermas thus misplaces genealogy itself,
consigning it to the shadows cast by the monument he erects to (dis)honour its wayward practitioner.
Were we so inclined at this point, we might turn the tables on Habermas, smugly exposing the
performative contradiction that faults his critique of Foucault. To do so, however, would merely re-
hypostatise, albeit in a negative polarity, the subject position occupied by Habermas. With respect to
this precise gambit, Foucault warns,
I don't believe the problem can be solved by historicizing the subject as posited by phenomenologists,
fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history. One has to dispense with the
constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that is to say, to arrive at an analysis which can
account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call
genealogy … (Rabinow, 1984: 59)
Rather than wax moralistic on this point and chide Habermas for pledging allegiance to the hegemony
of subject-centred reason, we might more profitably examine his ‘performative contradiction’ from the
standpoint of Foucauldian genealogy.
It will come as no surprise to the practising genealogist that Habermas unwittingly compromises his own
best defence of communicative reason, for such lapses are regular, unavoidable moments within the
feedback loops sustained by any constellation of power. To involve oneself unwittingly in ‘performative
contradictions’ is simply what it means to be a subject, always already multiply enmeshed in the regimes
of power that one wishes to oppose. The ‘performative contradictions’ that Habermas regularly imputes
to his rivals are unavoidable within the webrous domain of genealogy, for the practising genealogist is
always already implicated in the constellations of power that he sets out to investigate. Indeed, Foucault
nowhere promises that his genealogies will either originate in an epistemically pure standpoint or yield
conclusions that immediately trump all competing validity claims. Genealogy is an ineluctably ‘tainted’
science, whose limited successes and halting advances must always be measured against the entangled
complicities of the practising genealogist. So if Habermas means to illuminate Foucault's hidden
investments in the regimes of power he sets out to investigate, then he is participating in a productive
genealogical collaboration initiated by Foucault. In that event, Habermas would actually confirm the
explanatory promise of Foucauldian genealogy, for he would

Page 81
thereby extend the web of genealogical investigation to enmesh Foucault himself.
Habermas' rough treatment of Foucault does in fact constitute an example of collaborative
intersubjectivity, but only if it is regarded from the standpoint of Foucauldian genealogy. A
communication does take place between them, but not one that falls neatly into the categories of
universal pragmatics. Habermas' failure to attempt a charitable interpretation of Foucault is valuable,
that is, precisely in so far as it sheds light on the unacknowledged genealogical complexity of his range
of communication.
In an irony that perhaps eludes Habermas, the disservice he renders in his disputation contra Foucault is
entirely welcome – but only if situated within the compass of genealogical criticism. Whereas Habermas'
neo-Enlightenment charter requires him to cleave to traditional standards of fair, judicious
interpretation, Foucault's genealogical charter demands no such perfunctory politesse. In a passage in
which he describes the genealogical invitation that he claims to have received from Nietzsche, Foucault
explains: ‘The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche's is precisely to use it, to make it groan
and protest. And, if the commentators say I am being unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no
interest’ (Foucault, 1977a: 15). Foucault does not say here that this outburst of interpretive violence
constitutes a ‘valid tribute’ to all schools of philosophy. He expressly specifies ‘thought such as
Nietzsche's', which clearly identifies the genealogical enterprise that he gratefully inherits from his
predecessor. Indeed, although fidelity to his predecessors ‘is of absolutely no interest’ to Foucault,
fidelity to the larger, intersubjective project of genealogical criticism is another matter altogether.
What, then, is genealogical thought, such that it attracts its adherents by encouraging violence towards
its most venerable practitioners? In his seminal essay on Nietzsche, Foucault famously observes that:
[I]f the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there
is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that
they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms …
What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the
dissension of other things. It is disparity. (Foucault, 1977b: 142)
Speaking much later of his own investigative ‘method’, Foucault describes genealogy as,
a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects,
etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field
of events or runs in the empty sameness throughout the course of history. (Rabinow, 1984: 59)

Page 82
As is now regularly noted by sympathetic scholars, genealogy is supposed to constitute a psychologically
astute disposition of historiographical investigation. Genealogy is often recommended for its relentless
attention to the particular, the immanent, the historical, the empirical, the neglected, the forgotten, the
hidden and the excluded. All of this is true. But genealogy should also be recommended for its
embedding effects on its practitioners. To undertake a genealogical investigation is also to place oneself
within an ongoing tradition and community of mutually elevating criticism. This act of embedding
oneself furthermore renews the tradition, by effectively issuing a similar invitation to successor
genealogists. One cannot ‘do’ genealogy in abstraction from other practitioners; genealogy involves a
kind of dance, for which willing (if not sympathetic) partners are indispensable.21
A signal triumph of Foucaudian genealogy lies in its successful operationalisation of the anti-subjectivist
questions posed by Nietzsche: What matters these thinkers themselves? What matters us? What matters
in the tradition of genealogical criticism is the intersubjective web of thought itself, not the insignificant
subject-nodes that accidentally reside and rot within its weave. Foucault himself may collapse under the
weight of self-referential criticism, as Habermas alleges, but Foucauldian genealogy need not. In so far
as it constitutes an ongoing tradition, in fact, Foucauldian genealogy actually derives additional power
and vitality from the performative contradictions of its founding practitioner. Just as the overcoming of
Nietzsche (qua constituent subject) is prefigured in his genealogical ‘invitation’ to Foucault, so is the
overcoming of Foucault (qua constituent subject) prefigured in his ‘invitation’ to Habermas (or anyone
else). In so far as Habermas accepts this invitation, he too participates in the transpersonal tradition of
genealogical criticism, thereby opening his own vaunted subject position to question and challenge. And
although this web of genealogical communication is not sufficiently sturdy to sustain what Habermas
calls ‘universal pragmatics’, it nevertheless can sustain the ‘historical pragmatics’ prized by Foucauldian
genealogists.22 In light of the construction delays that continue to postpone the grand opening of the
ideal, distortion-free communication situation, Habermas might do well to examine more closely the
critical resources arrayed within the web of genealogical communication. Some of his readers would
argue, in fact, that something like this is precisely what he has accomplished over the past decade or
so.23
In this light, we see that Habermas' charge of Foucault's ‘arbitrary partisanship’ is both accurate and
otiose (Habermas, 1987: 276). While it is true that Foucault issues a ‘criticism that cannot account for
its normative foundations’ (1987: 276), this criticism may nevertheless contribute productively to a
growing fund of knowledge sheltered within the tradition of genealogical criticism. Although Foucault is
an arbitrary partisan of the particular strategies of resistance that he deploys, his partisanship is easily
detected and neutralised by successor genealogists

Page 83
– as Habermas himself aptly demonstrates – and without lasting penalty to the larger project of
genealogical criticism.
This neutralisation would issue in the indeterminate negation that Habermas fears only in the event that
genealogical historiography were reducible without remainder to the ‘arbitrary partisanship’ of its various
practitioners. Here again, Habermas focuses on Foucault qua subject while attempting to deliver a
summary judgement of genealogy itself. Because subject positions are relatively unimportant within the
web of genealogical communication, however, genealogy can accommodate – and even welcome – the
arbitrary partisanship that Habermas can neither tolerate nor avoid. Partisanship, which for Foucault
always entails an aggressive (but not necessarily injudicious) complicity in prevailing power relations, is
not an evil to be vanquished, but an ineradicable moment in the subjectivation process that genealogy
can effectively (if only partially) illuminate. In fulminating against Foucault, Habermas thus demonstrates
his own investment in the arbitrary partisanship that is always welcome within the arena of genealogical
communication. In the process, moreover, he both taps and wields the self-corrective power of
Foucauldian genealogy, all the while claiming that he can locate no such power in the genealogical
thought of Foucault himself.
How exactly does Habermas participate (albeit unwittingly) in a collaborative project of genealogical
criticism? Let us revisit Habermas' charge of ‘cryptonormativity’, whereby he means to suggest that
Foucauldian genealogy intimates normative conclusions that are expressly proscribed by its very charter.
As we have seen, Foucault would cheerfully accept the charge of cryptonormativity. Lending voice to a
Habermasian objection that he deems ‘entirely legitimate’, Foucault asks:
If we limit ourselves to this type of always partial and local inquiry or test, do we not run the risk of
letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well not be conscious and
over which we may have no control? (Rabinow, 1984: 47)
A supposed advantage of genealogical criticism, after all, lies in the capacity of its practitioners to
acknowledge in advance their inevitable recourse to the cryptonormative judgements that they
unwittingly dispense. While they are not likely to discern the particular blind spots that vitiate their
analyses, they are usually prepared to own their general complicity in the logic of double investment.
And even if they refuse to concede their cryptonormative implication in the prevailing forms and
structures of their historical epoch, their successor genealogists will promptly do so for them, while
summarily denying their partisan claims of purity and innocence.
Rather than resist the charge of cryptonormativity, Foucault would instead resist the implication that
critics of genealogy might somehow elude the performative contradictions and double investments that

Page 84
Habermas so expertly exposes. The charge of cryptonormativity becomes damnatory, after all, only in
the event that it cannot be levelled equally at all thinkers. In suggesting that Foucault could (or should)
have divested his theoretical framework of all residual traces of ‘cryptonormativity’, in presenting his own
experiments with communicative reason as a welcome alternative to the native confusions of genealogy,
Habermas prematurely closes off a potentially fruitful channel of communication between himself and
Foucault. To be sure, if Habermas can deliver a model of immanent critique that is free of the taint of
‘cryptonormativity’, then his dismissal of Foucault is understandable, if not exactly welcome. But if it is
the case, as many readers protest, that Habermas only issues promissory notes to this effect, then his
estrangement from Foucault would be both unproductive and unfortunate.
More importantly, perhaps, Foucault would also resist the implication that philosophers and critics ought
to try to divest themselves of their partial inhabitation of structures of power. As we have seen, power is
not an evil to be battled and vanquished, but an indispensable component of one's rapport à soi.
Foucault would consequently deny that cryptonormative lapses are fatal to the project of critique.
Genealogy is specifically designed, in fact, to salvage the critical insights of predecessor thinkers from
the cryptonormative theories in which these insights are often entangled. Toward this end, Foucault
officially urges his readers and successors to spare him no scrutiny, to train the critical gaze of
genealogy upon his own unwitting contributions to the consolidation of power in structures of
domination. Because the intersubjective project of genealogical critique outstrips the contributions of any
single genealogist (or any other subject), it can withstand and accommodate the inevitable lapses of
individual genealogists into cryptonormativity. It is for this reason, in fact, that Foucault is not troubled
by the charge of ‘arbitrary partisanship’; he is fully confident that his successors will expose his
signature prejudices and measure his contributions accordingly. Genealogy, in short, is not reducible to
the subject positions of the genealogists who practise it; rather, genealogy is the transpersonal,
intersubjective tradition itself, within the context of which individual practitioners are nourished,
sustained, and ultimately overcome. It is the dance, not the dancers.
It is against this background that we might see Habermas as participating in a tradition of genealogical
criticism that also includes Foucault. Habermas' charge of cryptonormativity implies that he has both
discovered and cracked the code that encrypts Foucault's pre-genealogical normative investments. While
Habermas certainly deserves a great deal of credit for his adept genealogical exposé, he is aided
considerably by Foucault himself, who not only anticipates the charge of cryptonormativity, but also
furnishes the tools of genealogical decryption. In an important sense, then, Habermas is simply
continuing a line of immanent critique that he (proximally) inherits from Foucault himself. Independent
of its

Page 85
eventual accuracy, then, the charge of cryptonormativity signals a nexus of intersubjective collaboration,
which bears a beguiling resemblance to Habermas' own ideal, reciprocal communication situation.
The peculiar affective charge of these criticisms furthermore attests to Habermas' inclusion in a web of
genealogical communication. Just as Nietzsche's unprecedented acts of self-examination spurred
Foucault to issue a ‘valid tribute’ to his genealogical predecessor, so Foucault's penchant for
performativity compels Habermas to excoriate his wayward twin. Unwittingly reprising Foucault's tribute
to Nietzsche, Habermas ‘uses’ Foucault's thought, making it ‘groan and protest’ under the weight of
external criticisms. Although Habermas' interpretation is not faithful to Foucault, the violence he inflicts
is a sign of his unstated fidelity to the larger, intersubjective project of genealogical criticism. Indeed,
this violence helps to obliterate the subjectivist traces left by Foucault's own agenda of personal
interests, such that successor genealogists might negotiate the web of intersubjective communication
without undue distraction from Foucault himself. That is, Habermas too is a genealogist, and his critique
of Foucault serves to expand the web of genealogical collaboration.
As we have seen, however, Habermas' participation in this intersubjective communication is almost
certainly unacknowledged. As much as he might delight in making Foucault's thought ‘groan and
protest', he enjoys no direct access to the genealogical pivot described above, whereby he might
directly voice his own ‘valid tribute’ to Foucault. In keeping with his official position, he must observe the
rational, intersubjective conventions of philosophical criticism – lest he plunge head-long into the
irrational excesses of his left bank enemies. In accordance with his official position, he thus offers a fair
(but definitive) critique of Foucauldian genealogy, such that it is shown to fail on the very terms it
proposes for evaluation. In the course of articulating this critique, of course, Habermas also indulges his
disappointment with his rival, thereby forcing Foucault's thought to ‘groan and protest’ under the weight
of its own performative contradictions. In his ad hominem criticisms of Foucault, Habermas displays his
‘valid tribute’ to the tradition of genealogical criticism. Although many readers will be distracted by the
animadversive tone of these performances, seasoned practitioners of Foucauldian genealogy are well
trained to document and interpret them for what they are. Thus continues the genealogical
communication between Habermas and Foucault, independent of their wishes and intentions.
Conclusion
Commentators who appoint themselves to police the fidelity of Habermas' interpretation of Foucault will
invariably find themselves on the wrong

Page 86
side of the debate. To defend the subject position of Michel Foucault (or anyone else) against the
calumnies dispensed by Jürgen Habermas (or anyone else), much as a plucky chess player might defend
an imperilled queen from the oblique sorties of a rampaging knight, is to reinscribe a subjectivist ethic
that obliges us to honour the ossified subject positions occupied by rival thinkers.
Champions of Foucault may succeed in exacting a greater degree of fidelity to ‘his’ signature insights,
perhaps even in extracting an apology from Habermas (or his lieutenants), but only at the expense of
surrendering the anti-subjectivist beachhead they have already secured for the project of genealogical
criticism. As the subject positions occupied by Habermas and Foucault advance into ever sharper focus,
the circulatory network of regimes and discourses of power – in which these suddenly robust ‘subjects’
are inextricably enmeshed – would recede into the monochromatic background. Real communication, of
the intersubjective, reciprocal variety valued by both Habermas and Foucault, would be indefinitely
postponed, as both sides haggle over the rules of philosophical etiquette.
It seems to me that Foucauldians are mistaken to endeavour to protect their hero from the wrath of
Habermas. If my analysis is correct, then it is Foucault who has invited the exchange; in doing so,
moreover, he initiates Habermas into the grey arts of genealogy. Even if he did not invite Habermas'
response, there is nothing to be gained by fetishising their subject-positions. It would be far more
productive to cultivate the genealogical web in which Habermas and Foucault have enmeshed
themselves. Indeed, if the ‘greatest tribute’ to Nietzsche's philosophy is to make it ‘groan and protest’,
then why would the greatest tribute to Foucault's thought not involve something similar? And who has
elicited more resonant groans and protestations from Foucault's thought than Habermas?
In fact, Habermas has done us an invaluable service, for he has historicised the historicist. Foucault
needs Habermas, or someone like him, to continue the dance from which they collaboratively spin the
web of genealogical communication. It seems to me that champions of Foucault would do well to listen
more attentively to the ‘groans and protests’ emitted from his tortured body of writings. This too is a
form of communication.
Notes
1 For a summary statement of Foucault's critique of humanism, and his wish to separate Enlightenment
from humanism, see his essay, ‘What is enlightenment?’, in Rabinow (1984: 32–50).
2 Foucault discusses the ‘repressive hypothesis’, and his objections to it, in The History of Sexuality
(1990a: 17–49).

Page 87
3 I borrow the term ‘deep subject’ from Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics (1982: 47–9).
4 My understanding of Foucault's turn to ethics is indebted to the reading advanced by Charles Scott in
The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (1990), especially Chapter 3, sections 3–5.
5 This point is put succinctly by Dreyfus and Rabinow: ‘Foucault takes this to be an opportune time for
renewed thought about an ethical life. He does not seek to deconstruct the subject but to historicise
thoroughly the deep self in order to open the possibility of the emergence of a new ethical subject’
(1982: 254).
6 Foucault offers the following description of what he means by his investigations into the processes of
subjectivation: ‘What I wanted to know was how the subject constituted himself, in such and such a
determined form, as a mad subject or as a normal subject, through a certain number of practices which
were games of truth, applications of power, etc’ (cited in Bernauer and Rasmussen (1988: 10)).
7 Foucault thus explains that ‘the self formations of the subject’ comprise ‘what one might call an
ascetical practice, giving the word ‘‘ascetical” a very general meaning, that is to say, not in the sense of
abnegation but that of an exercise of self upon self by which one tries to work out, to transform one's
self and to attain a certain mode of being’ (Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 2).
8 For a fine summary of Habermas' critique of Foucauldian genealogy, see David Ingram, Reason,
History, & Politics: The Communitarian Grounds of Legitimation in the Modern Age (1995: 175–97).
9 Foucault expressly insists that he ‘in no way construct[s] a theory of Power’, in an interview entitled
‘Critical theory/intellectual history’, collected in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas
Debate (Kelly, 1994: 128).
10 For an illuminating account of these areas of common interest, see Thomas McCarthy's ‘The critique
of impure reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School’ (1994). McCarthy undertakes an inventory of the
‘broad similarities between Foucault's genealogy of power/knowledge and the program of critical social
theory advanced by Max Horkheimer and his colleagues in the early 1930s and recently renewed by
Jürgen Habermas' (1994: 243). I am also indebted here to a similar appraisal by Ingram of this territory
of convergence (1995: 192–4).
11 As one might expect, Habermas believes that Foucault's wish to situate himself in the tradition of the
Enlightenment involves him in yet another performative contradiction: ‘How can Foucault's self-
understanding as a thinker in the tradition of the Enlightenment be compatible with his unmistakable
critique of precisely this form of knowledge, which is that of modernity?’ from ‘Taking aim at the heart of
the present’ (Kelly, 1994: 152).
12 For a sustained treatment of this charge of ‘blackmail’, as well as a sympathetic interpretation of
Foucault's ‘disruptive’ rhetorical strategies, see Richard J. Bernstein, ‘Foucault: critique as a philosophical
ethos’ (1994).
13 His precise words to this effect are ‘My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is
dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have
something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism’ (Dreyfus
and Rabinow, 1982: 232).
14 In an interview conducted in 1984, Foucault offers the following account of domination: ‘Facts or
states of domination [occur when] the relations of power, instead of being variable and allowing
different partners a strategy which alters

Page 88
them, find themselves firmly set and congealed. When an individual or a social group manages to block
a field of relations of power, to render them impassive and invariable and to prevent all reversibility of
movement – by means of instruments which can be economic as well as political or military – we are
facing what can be called a state of domination. It is certain that in such a state the practice of liberty
does not exist or exists only unilaterally or is extremely confined and limited (Bernauer and Rasmussen,
1988: 3).
15 For a lucid examination of Foucault's aestheticised turn to ethics, see James W. Bernauer and
Michael Mahon, ‘The Ethics of Michel Foucault’, in Gutting (1994: 141–58).
16 Dreyfus and Rabinow thus note, ‘Foucault is clear that he cannot justify his preference for some
dangers over others by an appeal to human nature, our tradition, or universal reason. His silence on this
matter, while consistent, is nonetheless a source of confusion’ (1982: 264).
17 On the issue of Foucault's parrhesia, see Flynn (1988). Flynn offers a powerful interpretation of
Foucault as a parrhesiast, maintaining that ‘If Habermas failed to find in Foucault the unity of his
thought and practice, it is perhaps because he overlooked the parrhesiast’ (1988: 116). As this
conjecture indicates, however, Flynn (following Foucault) may have adopted a selective interpretation of
the operation of parrhesia. As the example of the deathbound Socrates suggests, the sword of
veridiction is double-edged. The parrhesiast's risk is not simply that he may be martyred for his truth-
telling, but that he may instead (or also) dispense unacknowledged truths about himself, truths that
might facilitate the consolidation of power in sites of potential domination. That is, Habermas may
unearth Foucault's cryptonormativity precisely in attending to his parrhesia. In dispensing his multiply-
valent truths, Foucault may also unwittingly bear witness to his own cryptonormativity.
18 Michael Kelly makes this point succinctly and powerfully in ‘Foucault, Habermas, and the self-
referentiality of critique', in Kelly (1994: 365–400). Kelly persuasively maintains that ‘There is no
essential difference between the self-referentiality of Foucault's paradigm of critique and the self-
referentiality of critique that Habermas himself identifies as a defining characteristic of modernity. For
Habermas to accuse Foucault of being undermined by a predicament he also faces only obscures their
common concern, thereby creating a barrier to their debate’ (1994: 382–3).
19 My focus on the performative dimension of Foucauldian genealogy is indebted to David Owen's
(1995) essay, ‘Genealogy as exemplary critique: reflections on Foucault and the imagination of the
political’. Owen persuasively maintains that the ‘showing’ of Foucauldian genealogy (as opposed to its
‘saying’) manifests the guiding value of autonomy in Foucault's genealogical investigations.
20 I am aware here of an affinity with Kelly, who similarly maintains that ‘Foucault's discourse has just
as much self-corrective power as Habermas', perhaps more because Foucault has more experience with
it, since he was committed to fallibilism from his first text whereas Habermas is a relative newcomer to
it’ (Kelly, 1994: 389).
21 Even Nietzsche, in his Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, acknowledges those ‘English [sic]
psychologists’ to whom he is indebted.
22 As Kelly persuasively remarks, the distance between these two thinkers is not nearly so great as we
are often led to understand (Kelly, 1994: 387–9).

Page 89
23 A compelling case to this effect is found in Ingram (1995), especially Chapters 5–6. See also Kelly
(1994: 390–1).
References
Bernauer, J. and Rasmussen, D. (eds) (1988) The Final Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bernstein, R.J. (1994) ‘Foucault: critique as a philosophical ethos’, in M. Kelly (ed.) (1994), pp. 211–41.
Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P. (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd
edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Flynn, T. (1988) ‘Foucault as parrhesiast: his last course at the Collège de France (1984)’, in J. Bernauer
and D. Rasmussen (eds) (1988), pp. 102–18.
Foucault, M. (1973) The Order of Things [no translator given]. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1977a) ‘Prison talk: an interview with Michel Foucault’, Radical Philosophy, 16: 10–15.
Foucault, M. (1977b) ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, pp. 139–64.
Foucault, M. (1977) ‘Power and Sex: An Interview with Michel Foucault’, trans. D.J. Parent, Telos, 32
(Summer): 152–61.
Foucault, M. (1990a) The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. New York:
Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1990b) The History of Sexuality, Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley. New
York: Vintage Books.
Press.
Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F.G. Lawrence.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Originally published in 1985 as Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne,
Zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.)
Ingram, D. (1995) Reason, History, & Politics: The Communitarian Grounds of Legitimation in the
Modern Age. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Kelly, M. (ed.) (1994) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
McCarthy, T. (1994) ‘The critique of impure reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School’, in M. Kelly (ed.)
(1994), pp. 243–82.
Miller, J. (1993) The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Owen, D. (1995) ‘Genealogy as exemplary critique: reflections on Foucault and the imagination of the
political’, Economy and Society, 24 (4): 489–506.
Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1984) The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon.
Scott, C. (1990) The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.

Page 90
4
TO THINK AND ACT DIFFERENTLY

Foucault's Four Reciprocal Objections
to Habermas' Theory
James Tully
Habermas and other critics raised four objections to Foucault's work up to 1977: Foucault studies
underlying practices rather than what agents say and do and thereby generates a kind of presentism;
his approach is unreasonable because it violates universal validity claims; it is context-bound rather than
context-transcending; and he does not account for the normative dimension of his analysis. Foucault
reformulated his philosophy and reinterpreted his earlier work in response to these sorts of objection
from 1978 to 1984. He replied that practices are to be understood as the way agents themselves
problematise the forms of knowledge, power and ethics in accordance with which they are constituted
and constitute themselves as subjects; a genealogy is reasonable because it tests the universality of a
given, specific validity claim; it transgresses rather than transcends limits in the present; and the
normative dimension of his work is a novel conception of freedom within relations of power (PDM 276;
Kelly, 1994; Owen, 1996).
While Foucault was reformulating his approach he was also working on the classic humanist authors of
the Greek and Roman world. He came to see the status of his own philosophy as akin to theirs: not as a
theory to be elaborated and defended against its critics but as a practical activity, a permanent and
critical exercise of thought on thought. Thus, he saw his own reformulation as an ongoing critical
dialogue or ‘reciprocal elucidation’ of his current research relative to rethinking his earlier work and
responding to his best critics (UP 9–14; FR 336, 381–3; Hadot, 1996). He writes that his philosophy is ‘a
long and tentative exercise that needed to be revised and corrected again and again’ and, in the light of
later studies and objections, it was necessary ‘to go back through what I was already thinking, to think
it differently, and to see

Page 91
what I had done from a new vantage point and in a clearer light’ (UP 9, 11). In this reflection on his
activity of reformulation Foucault applies his philosophical approach to his own philosophy. His
philosophy aims to free us from habitual forms of thought and action in the present, enabling us to
experiment with thinking and acting differently. He is now saying that his own philosophy is subject to
this kind of critique by means of permanent reciprocal elucidation and reworking of it in relation to his
new research and to the objections of his critics.
Since this dialogical elucidation and reformulation is always reciprocal it cannot but throw critical light on
the thought it works against: his early work (in reinterpreting it) and the work of the critics to whom he
is responding (Habermas' philosophy). Foucault's elucidation of his philosophy in critical comparison to
Habermas' objections gave rise to four reciprocal objections to Habermas' work and reasons for
preferring his own: (1) Habermas' approach is less critical: it is uncritical of its own form of reflection
and it is a less effective critique of limits in the present; (2) Foucault's historical approach is not
unreasonable and it is questionable whether Habermas' universalisation of the decentred understanding
of the world is reasonable; (3) Habermas' decentred subject is a historically contingent juridical form of
the subject which, when taken as a regulative idea, tends to hinder the analyses of other ways we are
constituted and constitute ourselves as subjects; and (4) Habermas' normative analysis is utopian
whereas Foucault's is not.
The aim of this chapter is to present these four reciprocal objections to Habermas' approach and
reasons for preferring Foucault's in hopes that a defender of Habermas will reply and thus keep the
work of reciprocal elucidation going. I lay out what the two philosophies have in common in section I
and the specifics of Foucault's in section II and Habermas' in section III. These descriptive sections
provide the basis for the comparison that follows. Section IV is a brief transition to the analysis of
Foucault's four objections in sections V to VIII. The conclusion is that the four objections are sound.
Foucault's philosophy is not only defensible, it provides a critical and effective test of limits in the
present, including the limits that Habermas claims are universal.
I Two Philosophies of Critical Reflection on Limits in the
Present: What They Have in Common
According to Foucault, he and Habermas work within a general problematisation of the present
comprised of, first, philosophical reflection on and analysis of the apparent limits of thought and action
in the present and, second, reflection on and analysis of the forms of reflection one practises and their
relation to the present. This type of modern philosophy can be seen to derive from the Enlightenment
and to have one of its clearest formulations in the work of Kant. Although they share this

Page 92
common problem space, in which the specific aspects of experience that are brought to reflection and
called into question in this distinctive way are limits in the present, they engage in two sharply
contrasting forms of philosophical reflection on these limits. This comparison and contrast is presented
in ‘What is critique?’, ‘What is enlightenment?’ and ‘The art of telling the truth’.
Foucault's form of reflection can be seen to derive from Kant's formulation of an Enlightenment ‘attitude’
or ethos in What is Enlightenment?, an attitude that is ‘at the heart of the historical consciousness that
the Enlightenment has of itself’ (WE, 44). It has been exhibited by Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, Canguilhem
and several members of the Frankfurt School. Foucault has made an original contribution to this critical
tradition by clarifying its distinctive features, applying it in unique ways and differentiating it from the
closely related yet distinct form of philosophical reflection derived from the Enlightenment and practised
by Habermas.
Whereas Foucault's approach is associated with Kant's Enlightenment attitude, Habermas' is derived
from Kant's concept of ‘critique’ in his more formal philosophy. It is a critical ‘theory’ or ‘analytics of
truth’ rather than a critical ‘attitude’ (PP 95). Habermas has made an equally original contribution to this
neo-Kantian tradition of modern philosophy and clarified its distinctive features by defending it against
Foucault, Nietzsche, earlier members of the Frankfurt School, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty,
Charles Taylor and other more contextual and historical philosophers whom he sees as working within
the other orientation to the present (JA 19–113).
For both authors a ‘limit’ is any given ‘form of the subject’ or ‘form of subjectivity’: that is, any of the
multiplicity of ways of speaking, thinking and acting, of being conscious of ourselves as human subjects.
A form of the subject is, in the terms of North American philosophy, similar to a ‘practical identity’
(Korsgaard, 1996: 6–7). Like many twentieth-century philosophers such as Judith Butler, Rorty and
Wittgenstein, Habermas and Foucault agree that there is no a priori form of the human subject and, as
a result, any form of the subject, including the autonomous subject, must be analysed by reference to
processes of constitution or socialisation. ‘I had to reject’, Foucault explains in a manner similar to
Habermas, ‘a certain a priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis of the relationships that
can exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth,
practices of power, and so forth’ (FF 10). Foucault came to this view through criticism of subject-
centred phenomenology and existentialism, dissatisfaction with his earlier recourse to structuralism, and
his reading of Nietzsche (PP 49–50). The lecture ‘What is enlightenment? ’ is the most polished synopsis
of his type of analysis of the constitution of the subject. Habermas developed his view through a
somewhat similar criticism of subject-centred philosophies and dissatisfaction with his earlier work,

Page 93
which was based on an a priori conception of the human subject as the bearer of knowledge-constitutive
interests. In ‘An alternative way out of the philosophy of the subject: communicative versus subject-
centred reason’, he situates his analysis of the constitution of the subject in processes of communication
in relation to other non-subject-centred philosophies from Kant to the present and he refers with
approval to Foucault's ‘What is enlightenment? ’ as a complementary genealogy (PDM 294–327).
It follows that the study of limits consists in the analysis of the procedures through which we are
constituted as subjects; processes of subjectivisation (assujettissement) or, in Habermas' terms, the
practices of ‘socialisation’ through which ‘subjects are constituted as individuals’ in the ‘lifeworld’ (MC
199–200). ‘Subjectivisation’, Foucault clarifies in his last interview, is ‘the procedure by which one
obtains the constitution of a subject, or more precisely, of a subjectivity, which is of course only one of
the given possibilities of organization of a self-consciousness’ (R 12). They also agree that a form of the
subject comes to be recognised as a ‘limit’ through processes of subjectivisation, and so the object of
reflection and analysis, in two distinct ways.
A ‘limit’ can mean either the characteristic forms of thought and action which are taken for granted and
not questioned or contested by participants in a practice of subjectivity, thereby functioning as the
implicit background or horizon of their questions and contests, or it can mean that a form of subjectivity
(its form of reason, norms of conduct and so forth) is explicitly claimed to be a limit that cannot be
otherwise because it is universal, necessary or obligatory (the standard form of legitimation since the
Enlightenment). Both philosophers believe that humans can develop the capacities of thought and action
to call into question and contest both types of limit, albeit in different ways, as for example in their two
different philosophies. Yet, neither claims to hold that such capacities constitute a third-order or
transcendental subject, for, as we have seen above, the second requirement of their shared type of
modern philosophy is to explain this form of reflection on present forms of subjectivity and their types of
reflexivity just as it explains any other – as a ‘historical result’ as Habermas puts it (MC 208) – just as,
say, an ornithologist explains ‘ornithology’ like any other word. Finally, both associate freedom and
autonomy with the development and exercise of these capacities in practice, yet they advance sharply
contrasting conceptions of freedom and autonomy.
Once the two approaches are seen as two forms of rendering problematic and reflecting on limits in the
present since the Enlightenment their similarities come to light, as recent commentators have stressed
(Ingram, 1994: 215–62). However, their dissimilarities are just as important and it is these I wish to
examine. The dissimilarities are not those of humanism and anti-humanism. This influential
misinterpretation of the Habermas/Foucault debate has obscured rather than clarified the differences

Page 94
and similarities between them, as Foucault's interpretation of his and Habermas' philosophies in relation
to the Enlightenment is designed to expose. Humanism is neither a critical ethos nor a critical theory
derived from the Enlightenment but a ‘set of themes’ tied to ‘value judgements’ that have reappeared
over time in European societies. It stands, and was understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries to stand, in ‘a state of tension’ with the Enlightenment and the critical traditions derived from it
(WE 43–5). The relations between their two forms of modern critical philosophy and the older themes
and values of humanism can be understood by keeping them separate and noting specific connections in
the course of our independent comparison of the two philosophies.
II Foucault's Approach
Although both approaches reflect on and analyse limits in the present they do so with sharply
contrasting aims and techniques. The telos of questioning a limit of our thought and action in the
present – a form of our subjectivity – in Foucault's philosophy is to open up the possibility of thinking
and acting differently. It comprises two distinct exercises. The first consists of historical studies
undertaken to bring to light the two kinds of limit: to show that what is taken for granted in the form of
the subject in question has a history and has been otherwise; and to show ‘in what is given to us as
universal, necessary and obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the
product of arbitrary constraints’ (WE 45). These studies thus enable us ‘to free ourselves from
ourselves’, from this form of subjectivity, by coming to see that ‘that-which-is has not always been’ (PP
37), that it could be otherwise, by showing how in Western cultures people have recognised themselves
differently, and so to ‘alter one's way of looking at things’. ‘The object’, Foucault underscores, is ‘to
learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks,
and so enable it to think differently’. The role of philosophy today for Foucault as for Wittgenstein is ‘the
endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently’ (UP 9).
These historical studies begin with a form of subjectivity that the philosopher bears, or with which he or
she is closely associated, and which has become problematic in practice and the focus of reflection (SP
211–13). It is analysed or ‘reproblematised’ under three aspects: practical systems, three axes of
subjectivisation and the generality of a problematisation (WE 48–9, b,c,d). First, the abilities or
competencies that constitute a form of subjectivity are acquired and exercised in practice, in ‘practical
systems’. In response to Habermas' objection, these systems are not ‘conditions that determine’ subjects
‘without their knowledge’ but,

Page 95
like Wittgenstein's language games and Habermas' forms of communicatively mediated interaction in the
lifeworld, ‘what they do and the way they do it’ (WE 48). Practical systems should be analysed from two
different perspectives: ‘the forms of rationality that organise their ways of doings things’ and ‘the
freedom with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the
rules of the game, up to a certain point’.
The ‘forms of rationality’ include Habermas' ‘relations of communication’; the dimension of ‘signs,
communication, reciprocity, and the production of meaning’ (SP 218). In general there are four matrices
of practical rationalities: the organisation of the production of things, the use of sign systems in
communication, relations of power which govern the conduct of subjects, and the means by which
individuals or groups work on their bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being to transform
themselves ethically (TS 18). Turning to the second perspective, Foucault calls the freedom with which
subjects act in a form of practical rationality definitive of a subjectivity (‘citizen’ say) ‘strategic games of
liberty’. He does not mean ‘strategic’ in the contrastive sense in which Habermas uses it (as opposed to
‘communicative’) but the various ways in which subjects act self-consciously in accord with, or in
contestation of, their form of rationality, whether these ways are communicative or strategic (SP 224–6).
Secondly and famously, the forms of rationality and strategic games of freedom in which a form of the
subject is constituted can be analysed along the three axes of knowledge, power and ethics, and, most
importantly, the relations among them. These ‘ontologies of ourselves’ are analyses of the forms of
knowledge in accordance with which we recognise ourselves and are recognised by others, constitute
and are constituted, and question and are questioned as a specific subject of knowledge (‘games of
truth’); the relations of power or governance in which we are guided by others and guide ourselves by
various means to recognise and conduct ourselves in accord with or in contestation of a specific subject
of governance; and the practices of self-formation we use to recognise, constitute and transform
ourselves in accord with a specific ideal of the ethical subject. The phrase ‘constitute and are
constituted’ and the like in the descriptions of the three axes are meant to bring into prominence
Foucault's presumption that forms of subjectivity are not imposed on passive subjects, but (even in the
extreme case of the ‘mad subject’) on free subjects who take a self-conscious part (to varying degrees)
in the acquisition, learning, exercise and modification of the subject-specific competencies. ‘I believe’,
Foucault clarifies, ‘that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more
autonomous way, through practices of liberation’ (PP 50). Practices of liberation refer either to the
strategic games of liberty agents play together in a practical system or to the more individual ‘practices
of the self’ an agent applies to himself or herself. Yet, even here, a subject does not invent the arts

Page 96
of self-fashioning he or she employs. They are ‘proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture,
his society and his social group’ (FF 11).
The analysis of the forms of knowledge in which we identify ourselves and are identified by others as
subjects of a certain kind was originally conceived by Foucault along quasi-structuralist lines with a
largely determined role for the speaking subject (Gutting, 1989). He abandoned this flawed approach
and reconceived analysis in terms of a historical pragmatics of the rules – conditions of ‘acceptability’
(WC 394) or ‘validity’ (FF 17) – in accordance with which the subjects themselves problematise an
aspect of their identity and propose solutions (what he calls ‘games of truth’). He explains in ‘The
subject and power’ that the formation, stability and transformability of the relations of power which
govern our conduct in accord with a specific knowledge of the subject, and against which strategic
games of liberty are played, can be analysed along five principal dimensions (SP 223–4). Discipline and
Punish is the classic example of this form of analysis. Practices of the self are the multiplicity of ethical
practices in Western culture in which one takes up a reflective ‘relationship to oneself’ (rapport à soi)
which is not only an awareness or recognition of oneself as an ethical agent under some strong
evaluation but also the practical formation of oneself under this ideal through exercises (askeses) such
as self-interpretation, consciousness raising, dialogue, dieting, memorisation, working out, confessing,
disciplining oneself to act in accord with natural law, and so forth. To illustrate with an example that
anticipates Foucault's third objection to Habermas (that his form of reflection overlooks ethical practices
of subjectivisation), Foucault interprets Kantian ethics as enjoining that, ‘I must recognize myself as
universal subject, that is, I must constitute myself in each of my actions as a universal subject by
conforming to universal rules’. So, even in the case of Kant ‘the self is not merely given but is
constituted in relationship to itself as subject’ (FR 372). Ethical practices can be analysed along four
main lines (UP 25–30).
The axes of knowledge, power and ethics form a ‘practical system’ in the sense that they cannot be
reduced to one another (neither knowledge nor ethics is, for example, constituted by power as many
critics and followers have erroneously suggested) or treated in isolation (knowledge and ethics are never
entirely free of connections to relations of power). They always exist in complex relations to one
another. It is the objective of the historical study to clarify the complex relations among the three axes
because these reveal what in our mode of being is ‘the product of arbitrary constraints’ and so is
capable of being otherwise (SP 217–19).
Thirdly, since a form of the subject is not a priori but historical, Foucault suggests that we analyse its
‘generality’ rather than its ‘universality’, as Habermas does. To do this we need to come at forms of the
subject from yet another perspective, as ‘forms of problematisation’. Recall that a form of subjectivity is
not a limit outside the experience of

Page 97
the subjects themselves; it is the limit of their experience as thinking subjects from the inside, the
characteristic way they think through the forms of knowledge, relations of power, and practices of the
self through which an aspect of their experience is brought to self-consciousness (their ‘sexuality’, say).
‘Thinking’ in this remarkably reflective sense is ‘freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by
which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem’ (FR
389). The activity of reflective thought is not found only in philosophy and science. It ‘inhabits’ every
practical system of subjectivity; ‘every manner of speaking, doing, or behaving in which the individual
appears and acts as a subject of learning, as ethical or juridical subject, as subject conscious of himself
and others’ (FR 334–5). Practical systems of subjectivity are studied only ‘in so far as they are inhabited
by thought’ in this sense (FR 335).
This account responds to Habermas' claim that Foucault studies the structures that underlie thought and
it challenges Habermas' assumption that there is a fairly clear distinction between relatively unreflective
everyday thought and the reflective activity of questioning a limit (practical discourse). A form of
subjectivity can be seen, therefore, as a ‘form of problematisation’: a general manner in which subjects
render an aspect of their experience problematic, in response to difficulties and obstacles in practice,
reflect on it along the three axes and present diverse responses to it over a period of time. Accordingly,
Foucault locates his studies of ‘the history of systems of thought’ on the narrow path between the
economic and social processes studied by social historians on one side and the universal categories and
formal structures of thought and action studied by Habermas on the other (TS 10).
Given, then, that a form of subjectivity is grounded in the actual practices of self-understanding or,
more precisely, ‘self-problematising’ of the subjects themselves, one can ask the empirical and
comparative question of how general, historically or cross-culturally, this way of being in the world is or
has been. It is not a transcendental limit against which practice is analysed but a practical limit against
which subjects analyse themselves. Most of the forms of subjectivity or problematisations Foucault
studied, solely in ‘the Western societies from which we derive’, are quite general. They have ‘continued
up to our time: for example, the problem of the relationship between sanity and insanity [Madness and
Civilization], or sickness and health [The Birth of the Clinic], the problem of sexual roles [the three
volumes on the history of sexuality]; and so on’ (WE 49). To mention another example, the
philosophical reflection on limits in the present that Foucault and Habermas share is seen by Foucault as
a general problematisation deriving from the Enlightenment (whose genealogy he sketched in ‘What is
critique?’ and ‘The art of telling the truth’).
The second exercise of Foucault's approach is for the specific intellectual as a citizen to circulate her or
his genealogical knowledge in the

Page 98
public and local discussions of and struggles around the form of subjectivity from which the historical
study began and to participate in democratic will formation (PP 265):
The work of an intellectual is … through the analyses that he carries out in his own field, to question
over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people's mental habits, the way they
do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions, and
on the basis of this reproblematization (in which he carries out his specific task as an intellectual) to
participate in the formation of a political will (in which he has his role as citizen to play).
The aim of this civic responsibility is not only to help to enlighten us with respect to the horizon and
historical contingency or arbitrary constraints of our way of thinking and acting and to imagine how life
might go on differently. It is also to see if there are citizens who can develop the reasons and will to
form a ‘community of action’ to experiment with the ‘transgression’ of this specific limit in practice, by
challenging the perhaps universal claims to truth or rightness which legitimise it, by contesting the
relations of power that guide us to act in accord with it or to change the ethical practices involved (FR
385). In short, not only to think differently but to act differently as well. By ‘transgression’ he does not
mean a total revolution or another view of the world but the cautious experimental modifications of our
specific forms of subjectivity. As examples he mentions the ‘specific transformations that have proved to
be possible in the last twenty years that concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority,
relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness’ (WE 46–7).
Although the reasons for engaging in this activity of ‘concrete freedom’ (PP 36) are as various as the
limits in the present, and even those engaged in any given struggle will have, for Foucault as for Rawls,
a plurality of reasons, a general second-order reason for any specific transgression will be to enable the
participants to engage in the specific game or practice of subjectivity with ‘a minimum of domination’:
that is, where this agonic activity in relation to knowledge, power and ethics is not unnecessarily or
arbitrarily constrained (FF 18). Thus, the discovery that a form of the subject is not universal, necessary
or obligatory certainly enables and encourages us to think differently but it does not by itself constitute
a reason for modifying this discovery in practice. Citizens may decide to affirm the form of the subject.
Further reasons are required for change, such as arbitrary or unnecessary constraints.
In summary, the two activities of intellectual and citizen comprise an ‘attitude, an ethos, a philosophical
life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits
that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’ (WE 50).

Page 99
In reply to Habermas' objection that Foucault's approach is ‘context-bound’ we can say that it is
‘context-transgressing’ in two ways without being ‘context transcending’ (as Habermas claims his
approach is). First, the historical studies cause us to transgress the context-bound ways of thinking
about a form of subjectivity. Take Foucault's historical study of prisons, Discipline and Punish, for
example, which he wrote in the context of his involvement in prisoners' reform activities in the early
1970s. The study brings prisons and reform activity into critical reflection; it reproblematises them. The
prison was shown to have a history and to be a much more recent phenomenon than was commonly
supposed. The unexamined assumptions about its normative legitimacy were thrown into question by
arresting contrasts with prior forms of punishment and alternative forms that lost out and were
forgotten in the establishment of modern prisons as we know them. Even more striking, the practices of
knowledge and power employed to observe, discipline and reform prisoners were shown to be dispersed
throughout many other processes of subjectivisation in modern societies, such as schools, universities,
bureaucracies, factories and armies, in which our subjectivity is shaped without our being fully aware of
it. Furthermore, the human sciences were shown to be more closely involved in these practices of
discipline and surveillance than most practitioners had been aware. These effects did not ‘transcend’ the
context in the sense of presenting a higher or more comprehensive ideal against which the prison could
be judged; rather they transgressed the context by causing us to look at practices of discipline and
surveillance in the prison and in other practical systems in different ways and from different
perspectives, from the inside.
The second way the historical studies transgress the context concerns how they are taken up by citizens
and used in contemporary struggles to modify existing relations of power or ethics. Here they do not
provide a normative ideal in accordance with which citizens measure their practices and act. Although a
genealogy certainly frees citizens from false legitimising beliefs about their practices, they are left to
develop the reasons and shared will to act themselves. A genealogy provides a tool kit for understanding
the relations of knowledge, power and ethics in which they think and act, the contingent and arbitrary
aspects of these arrangements, the possibilities of modifying them and the effects of modification in
practice. The modification in practice provides in turn a test against which the original conceptual tools
are assessed and reformulated and put into practice again, thereby forming a ‘permanent critique’. This
non-transcendent and non-dialectical but nevertheless scarcely context-bound view of the reciprocal
relation between critique and practical activity embodies an ‘experimental attitude’. It links ‘as tightly as
possible the historical and theoretical analysis of power relations, institutions and knowledge, to the
movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in reality’ (FR 374).

Page 100
III Habermas' Approach
In contrast, the aim of Habermas' approach is just the opposite: to determine in that which is given to
us as a limit what is really a limit – necessary, universal and obligatory. Such a limit is legitimate
because it cannot be otherwise. To try to transgress it is to think irrationally, to act immorally, or in
general to commit a contradiction in the very performance of the violation of the conditions of
knowledge or normative conduct (an objection Habermas raises against Foucault). Habermas' objective
is, as Foucault puts it, to reconstruct the universal conditions of knowledge and action (WE 46).
However, in order to elaborate and defend his research project against the objections raised to this kind
of Kantian philosophy from Hegel down to contemporary contextualists and neo-Aristotelians (as he calls
them) such as Foucault, Taylor and Rorty, who have emphasised the contextual, historical and
contingent character of human understanding and action, he has reconceived Kant's approach in a
number of fundamental ways. Once these legitimate criticisms of Kant's philosophy are taken into
account it is still possible to generate a universal theory of action, reason, truth and morality, albeit one
that is dialogical rather than monological, grounded in actual intersubjective practices of communication
and socialisation rather than in a metaphysical philosophy of individual consciousness, context-
dependent in a number of ways rather than independent, quasi-transcendental rather than
transcendental, fallible rather than foundational, dependent on hypotheses generated in the empirical
and reconstructive social sciences rather than free-standing, and open to revision rather than certain
(MC, JA). I will now summarise the major features of his universal theory of communicative action,
communicative rationality and morality (discourse ethics) in turn and then his three main types of
argument for them.
Habermas' form of critical reflection begins with a type of universal pragmatics: a reconstruction of the
universal communicative competencies that make possible practical processes of reaching mutual
understanding and agreement (Verständigung). The German word Verständigung is polysemic: it means
‘understanding’ and ‘agreement’ as well as the process of reaching understanding or agreement, and
Habermas uses it in these different senses in different contexts. Although his aim is to reconstruct the
universal conditions of knowledge and action of any form of subject, as Foucault's notes (WE 47), like
Foucault he must begin from within the forms of intersubjectivity moderns bear – ‘what they do and the
way they do it’ (WE 48). For Habermas this hermeneutic starting point is ‘the community of those who
speak and act with one another’ (MC 19). Everyday communication among any form or forms of
subjects involves two ways of coordinating communicatively mediated interaction: by consensus
(Einverständnis) or by influence (Einfluß). The former, communicative action, is claimed to be
fundamental and primary relative

Page 101
to the latter (strategic action) and the ‘only real alternative to exerting influence on one another in more
or less coercive ways’ (MC 19).
‘Communicative action’ is a universal form of interaction in which humans coordinate their plans of
action through the exchange of communicative speech acts oriented towards reaching mutual
understanding and agreement (Verständigung) or (interchangeably) consensus (Einverständnis). This
mode of linguistic action (communicative action) is oriented to understanding and agreement by the
validity claims reciprocally raised and acknowledged or declined. The successful uptake of a speech act
of communicative action turns on the ability of the hearer to respond to the claim by answering ‘yes’ or
‘no’. To put this in a slightly different way (for purposes of comparison below), there is always the
possibility that the validity of an utterance of communicatively mediated interaction will be contested.
Speaker and hearer are placed in a reflective relation of reciprocal obligation: the speaker to support her
claim with reasons if challenged and the hearer either to accept the claim, to say yes, or to prepare to
give reasons if he says no and so questions the claim. The communicators are accordingly obliged, if
challenged, to enter an intersubjective and dialogical game of exchanging reasons to (re)gain
intersubjective recognition of the contested validity claim, or, put differently, they are oriented to
reaching understanding and agreement with respect to the validity claim in question by the exchange of
reasons or ‘argumentation’. Communicative action is therefore internally related to reason-giving through
the unavoidable raising of validity claims.
According to Habermas, communicative speech acts raise three types of claim concerning their validity:
propositional truth, normative rightness (justice) and truthfulness of the speaker. The three validity
claims are universal and correspond to three attitudes (objectivating, norm-conformative and
expressive), three worlds (objective, social and subjective) and three areas of modern societies (science,
law and morality, and aesthetics and ethics). Although every communicative speech act in any society
raises these three validity claims, they are separated in this way only in ‘modern’ societies (or areas of
modern societies). Following Piaget, Habermas calls the process of separation ‘decentring’ and, following
Weber, he associates it with modernisation. Participants in communication who develop this form of
subjectivity, in which they take up these three attitudes towards the world and exchange reasons in the
way appropriate to each of the three validity claims, are said to have a ‘decentred’ consciousness or
understanding of the world. I will refer to this as the ‘decentred form of the subject’ or the ‘decentred
subject’.
‘Communicative rationality’ refers to the ‘forms of argumentation’ by which the three types of validity
claim contested in communicative action are reflectively redeemed through the intersubjective exchange
of reasons aimed at reaching understanding and agreement. Practices of communicatively mediated
interaction will be rational just in so far as

Page 102
the norms of coordination have been or could be agreed to by the communicators themselves through
the appropriate forms of argumentation or ‘practical discourses’. Each validity claim is internally related
to a corresponding form of argumentation or rationality oriented to agreement. However, only the
validity claims to propositional truth and normative rightness are internally related to the idea of
universal agreement on the universal validity of what is agreed. That is, the test of truth and rightness is
doubly universal: everyone in the discourse should agree that the proposition or norm is valid for
everyone (Cooke, 1994: 10).
Conversely, rational ethical argumentation, associated with the third validity claim, is always context-
dependent and non-universal. It is a form of argumentation around the good rather than the right,
evaluation rather than oughtness, and always takes place against a background structure of strong
evaluators shared by the participants. So, for example, Taylor's and Nietzsche's philosophies, in which
there is always a horizon of strong evaluation behind any critical reflection (including Habermas'
reflection on normative rightness according to Taylor), or John Rawls' philosophy, where citizens reach
overlapping agreement on norms of justice from within, rather than apart from, their different
background conceptions of the good, are ethical not moral, and non-universal (JA 26–30, 69–76; RR
119–22).
The rational form of argumentation to redeem a validity claim is based on the universal and idealised
presuppositions rooted in the structures of all communicative action. These presuppositions can be
reconstructed as the rules that constitute the universal, necessary and obligatory procedures of rational
communication and action. The idealised presuppositions that Habermas has reconstructed as
argumentation rules to date can be divided into two kinds: conventional and post-conventional (Cooke,
1994: 29–51; Johri, 1997: 71–82). The conventional rules include logical-semantic rules of consistency,
such as every speaker who applies predicate F to object A must be prepared to apply F to all other
objects resembling A in all relevant respects and different speakers may not use the same expression
with different meanings; rules of mutual recognition among participants, such as every speaker must
assert only what she really believes and a person who disputes a proposition or norm not under
discussion must provide a reason for wanting to do so; and rules of reciprocity, such as no relevant
argument is suppressed or excluded, no force except of the better argument is applied and the
participants are motivated by concern for the better argument.
Communicative action, as we have seen, is a form of interaction coordinated consensually by the
participants, who are under an obligation to suspend the play of power or influence and give reasons, if
necessary, for and against the validity of a norm of coordination. In normal circumstances of
communicative action validity claims are not questioned in an open-ended way. A background horizon or
consensus

Page 103
on facts, shared norms and values provides the conventional ground against which intersubjective
reflection and exchange of reasons in the course of action coordination take place. That is, this
conventional consensus provides the two types of limit (what is taken for granted or seen as universal,
necessary and self-evident) (MC 58–9). The first or conventional kind of argumentation is undemanding
enough (with the qualifications discussed below) to be a rough idealisation of a wide variety of human
forms of conventional communicative action and rationality across most known cultures, since what
counts as a ‘relevant argument’ is, in the context, given by the conventional consensus. It is
generalisable, one might say, in Foucault's sense of being a fairly general feature of forms of human
organisation.
The second or ‘post-conventional’ idealised presuppositions of communicative action are more
demanding and more specific. They define three further procedures of argumentation that ‘burst
asunder’ and ‘transcend’ any conventional consensus by opening all validity claims to critical evaluation
by all involved (PDM 322). Only these fully operationalise the ‘element of unconditionality’ that is ‘built
into the structure of action oriented toward reaching understanding’. It is this ‘unconditional element
that makes the validity that we claim for our views different from the mere de facto acceptance of
habitual practices’ (MC 19). Although they are universally implicit in all forms of communicative action
(MC 100), they are acted on only at the stage of post-conventional communicative action where validity
is explicitly related to universality. These stronger idealised presuppositions include: that every subject
with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in discourse (the principle of universal
moral respect); everyone is allowed to question and introduce any assertion whatever and express his or
her attitudes, desires and needs (the principle of egalitarian reciprocity); and no speaker may be
prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising these rights (the principle of non-coercion).
They entail that no claim is immune to critical evaluation in principle by anyone in accordance with the
conventional and post-conventional procedures, whereas in a conventional discussion what count as a
relevant argument and a relevant participant constrain the discussion. Accordingly, communicative
rationality, as Cooke concludes, ‘gains its critical thrust only in’ the ‘practices of modern lifeworlds in
which all ultimate sources of validity external to human argumentation [of the post-conventional kind]
have been called into question’ (Cooke, 1994: 34).
Finally, Habermas derives two principles of argumentation from the two types of universal
presuppositions of communicative action that complete communicative rationality with respect to claims
of normative rightness. Principle D is a dialogical reformulation of the Roman legal maxim that what
affects all must be approved by all: ‘Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet)
with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse’. Principle

Page 104
U is more specific and is derived from the post-conventional presuppositions. It states that a norm is
valid only if ‘all affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be
anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests (and these consequences are preferred to
those of known alternative possibilities for regulation)’ (MC 65–6, original emphasis). Principle U is a
reformulation of Kant's categorical imperative in terms of dialogical argumentation plus the addition of
(non-Kantian) interests and consequences (MC 65–7):
the categorical imperative needs to be reformulated as follows: ‘Rather than ascribing as valid to all
others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for
purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will
without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm.’
Principle U, in conjunction with the other rules of argumentation, ensures impartiality by compelling each
participant to think about the given situation and anticipated consequences from the perspective of
every other participant, a process of ideal role-taking Habermas calls ‘reversibility’. As the discussion
proceeds the participants gradually criticise partial descriptions of the situation and work up to a ‘we
perspective’ in terms of the core of ‘generalisable interests‘ acceptable to all (RR 118).
The form of argumentation (communicative rationality) over the rightness of a contested norm defined
by the conventional and post-conventional rules and principles U and D is called ‘discourse ethics’ (or,
more correctly, a ‘discourse theory of morality’). It is a universal procedural theory of morality or
‘justice’, for a norm agreed to under these conditions is ‘just’ (JA 29):
That a norm is just or in the general interest means nothing more than that it is worthy of recognition
or is valid. Justice is not something material, not a determinate ‘value’, but a dimension of validity. Just
as descriptive statements can be true, and thus express what is the case, so too normative statements
can be right and express what has to be done.
It is a narrow theory of morality since it deals only with questions of justice (rightness) in the Kantian
sense: that is, questions of the justification, not the application, of norms of justice that are capable of
being formulated in ought propositions (normative) without reference to any conception of the good and
agreed to by the procedures of open-ended questioning. Moreover, unlike conventional argumentation
over a norm, discourse ethics requires that all the participants accept the decentred worldview over all
others and so conduct themselves in accord with this decentred form of subjectivity.

Page 105
Habermas is aware of course that the vast majority of dialogues about norms of coordination in morality
and politics fall outside this narrow range, into the spheres of ethics, pragmatics, application and,
especially, dialogues in which issues of morality, ethics and pragmatics are inseparable. Nevertheless, it
is necessary to restrict universal morality to this narrow range, for only questions of this kind can be
answered in an impartial manner (JA 151, original emphasis):
If we do not want to settle questions concerning the normative regulation of our everyday coexistence
by open or covert force – by coercion, influence, or the power of the stronger interest – but by the
unforced conviction of a rationally motivated agreement, then we must concentrate on those questions
that are amenable to impartial judgment. We can't expect to find a generally binding answer when we
ask what is good for me or for us or for them; instead, we must ask what is equally good for all. This
‘moral point of view’ throws a sharp, but narrow, spotlight that picks out from the mass of evacuative
questions practical conflicts that can be resolved by appeal to a generalizable interest; in other words,
questions of justice.
This form of philosophy is critically related to practice in the following ways. First, as we have seen, the
validation of contested norms is performed by the agents affected. Secondly, Habermas realises that
only a very few, highly abstract norms could meet the demanding conditions of discourse ethics,
perhaps some propositions phrased in terms of universal human rights and duties. Nevertheless and
thirdly, there is a need for such a universal and procedurally neutral morality given the increasing
demand to coordinate action by consensus among humans with diverse value orientations. Finally, the
universally valid forms of argumentation of the decentred understanding of the world can also be used
as a ‘regulative idea’ in morality and politics to guide the evaluation of existing practical systems of
communicative action or forms of subjectivity and so bring to critical light degrees of irrationality,
disrespect, inequality, coercion and lack of autonomy in the present – the traditional aim of critical
theory (JA 51; Cooke, 1994: 1).
Now, I want to sketch briefly the three arguments Habermas advances to lend plausibility to the
universality of this form of communicative action, rationality and morality: a transcendental-pragmatic
argument and two logic-of-development arguments, one relating to individuals and the other to
societies. Recall that his theory is not based on a Kantian transcendental deduction and it is not certain.
It is fallible and finds support in various kinds of philosophical arguments and research in the social
sciences. The first line of defence is a form of transcendental-pragmatic argument developed by Karl-
Otto Apel (1987) which aims to show that any competent communicative actor entering into
communication already presupposes the validity of all the rules and principles of communicative
rationality. An actor who rejects any of them (the ‘sceptic’) can be shown to perform a contradiction. ‘A
‘‘performative

Page 106
contradiction” occurs when a constative speech act k(p) rests on noncontingent presuppositions whose
propositional content contradicts the asserted proposition’ (MC 80). I will discuss this further in section
VI.
Habermas recognises that his transcendental-pragmatic argument is inconclusive. He buttresses it with
two further lines of argument that the decentred view of the world is the highest stage of individual and
social development (that is, to recall, the differentiation of the world into three domains of validity,
corresponding to the external, social and subjective dimensions of reality, with their own standards of
validation, and the recognition that no claim is in principle immune to criticism within the appropriate
forms of argumentation). The first is a reconstruction of Lawrence Kohlberg's stages theory of individual
moral development and Piaget's stages theory of cognitive development that purports to show that the
stages are internally linked by a logic of development with the post-conventional rules and principles of
discourse ethics at the apex (MC 116–94). Kohlberg's transition from adolescence to adulthood, for
example, is interpreted as the transition from conventional (ethics) to post-conventional argumentation
(morality). ‘Viewed in terms of a progressively decentred understanding of the world, the stages of
interaction express a development that is directed and cumulative’ (MC 168, original emphasis; Johri,
1997: 119). The second is a parallel set of arguments about the internal logic of world-historical
development of societies or ‘worldviews’ from primitive or neolithic through traditional and developed to
modern societies with a decentred worldview (MC 127).
These ambitious logic-of-development arguments aim to show that individual and social evolution moves
through progressives stages of development, the stages can be ranked hierarchically by neutral criteria,
and the decentred worldview Habermas associates with modernity represents the highest stage. These
kinds of developmental argument have been used since the late seventeenth century to try to establish
the superiority and universal significance of European ways and they have often been employed to
legitimise European imperialism. They have come under sustained criticism in this century on two main
counts. First, do the data manifest a progressive development or are they arranged in accord with a
developmental framework which is only one among many possible interpretations of the data?
Wittgenstein famously raised this objection to Frazer's Golden Bough (1993) [1890]. ‘The historical
explanation, the explanation as an hypothesis of development,’ Wittgenstein writes, ‘is only one way of
assembling the data’ (Wittgenstein, 1993: 131). Carol Gilligan has raised a similar objection to Kohlberg
and Habermas, pointing out that the empirical evidence suggests that the post-conventional procedures
are not impartial but exhibit a male partiality (Gilligan, 1982; Benhabib, 1993: 148–78).
This debate cannot be settled by recourse to the evidence, for the evidence is gathered and assembled
partly in light of the hypothesis. Accordingly, Habermas and defenders of developmental logics have

Page 107
sought to establish analytically neutral criteria for objectively assessing different stages (forms of
consciousness or worldviews) and this has given rise to a large literature on rationality and cross-
cultural understanding. The problem with this line of defence, as Rorty and Foucault have pointed out, is
that it is prone to circularity, to Eurocentrism or, to use Habermas' own term, ‘presentism’: the stages
are described and ranked by criteria that are not neutral but partial in some way to the purported
highest stage (Schmid, 1982). Habermas is well aware of this problem (MC 210):
An ethics is termed universalist when it alleges that this (or a similar) moral principle, far from reflecting
the intuitions of a particular culture or epoch, is valid universally. As long as the moral principle is not
justified … the ethnocentric fallacy looms large. This is the most difficult part of ethics.
In response to this second well-known objection to developmental logics Habermas argues, on the basis
of a lengthy analysis of articles in the rationality debate in cross-cultural anthropology, that worldviews
can be compared neutrally in terms of their capacity to solve similar problems reflexively and that the
greater ‘openness’ and ‘capacity for learning’ of the decentred worldview show it to be cognitively
superior to, and the rational development of, other worldviews (TC I 62–8). The line of argument that
these criteria are hypothesis-neutral, like his earlier arguments, is ‘suggestive’ but far from conclusive.
As Mira Johri concludes in her careful analysis of Habermas' developmental arguments, the problem of
presentism remains unresolved. Habermas ‘extracts from the articles studied certain elements that could
be construed as supporting’ his position. ‘However, they certainly need not be construed as so doing,
and were not in fact so construed by their authors’ (Johri, 1997: 214). In short, the claims to universal
validity of his theory remain, as he readily acknowledges, suggestive, inconclusive and fallible.
IV Transition to Foucault's Four Reciprocal Objections
Although both approaches work within the general problem of limits which has characterised two schools
of European philosophy since the eighteenth century, they take up very different orientations towards
limits. Foucault's approach aims to enable us to think and act differently by means of critical histories
that exhibit the singularity, contingency and arbitrary constraints of our forms of subjectivity. Habermas’
approach aims to discover a universal form of the subject, the decentred subject, implicit in our forms of
subjectivity, by means of universal pragmatics and developmental logic and to use it as a regulative
idea to evaluate existing practices. These two philosophical orientations are not necessarily opposed.
They could complement one another; one clearing away

Page 108
the contingent and the other explicating the universal so, as Foucault puts it, obedience would be
‘founded on autonomy itself’. On Foucault's interpretation, Kant saw the two critiques in this
complementary way. ‘It would be, I believe, easy to show that for Kant himself, this true courage of
knowing that was invoked by the Aufklärung [the Enlightenment ethos], this same courage of knowing
consists in recognizing the limits of knowledge [the Kantian theory]; and it would be easy to show that
for him autonomy is far from being opposed to obedience to sovereigns’ (WC 387).
Things have fallen out rather differently over the last two hundred years. As Foucault illustrates in ‘What
is critique?’, the relations between these two types of critical reflection have taken a variety of forms. In
the posthumously published draft introduction to the second volume of the The History of Sexuality, he
entertained the possibility that they could coexist as two different and more or less disengaged research
orientations (FR 333–9). However, this would occur only if they agreed on which limits are historical and
which are universal. No such consensus exists. Each claims the same limits as either universal or
historical. Consequently, in the published introduction he takes the view that we see in ‘What is
enlightenment?’ There is a relation of critical engagement between them over the character of limits in
the present that is unavoidable and should be elucidated reciprocally.
This relation of critical engagement is manifested in the comments of Habermas and Foucault on each
other's work and it runs throughout the humanities and social sciences in the tension between general
and universal approaches. Foucault seeks to show that the limits Habermas puts forward as universal,
necessary and obligatory are singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints, and hence
can and should be transgressed in the name of freedom. Habermas seeks to show that, in transgressing
them, Foucault is caught in ‘a self-referential denial of universal validity claims’ (PDM 98). As David
Owen states, it is not enough to say that Habermas fails to demonstrate the universality of his theory of
communicative action, rationality and morality, and so we can carry on our genealogical studies, or that
Foucault fails because he violates universal rules of rationality in his studies, so we can carry on our
universal pragmatics, for neither denies these claims (Owen, 1996: 32). Habermas' approach is a fallible
research project that exists in a space of serious objections and the very aim of Foucault's approach is
to transgress rules that are claimed to be untransgressable. On either Foucault's or Habermas'
conception of reason we have an obligation to respond to the challenges each approach raises to the
claims of the other. Several commentators have either elaborated on Habermas' criticisms of Foucault or
defended Foucault against them. I would now like to examine the strength of Foucault's four objections
to Habermas' approach and his reasons for preferring his own.

Page 109
V Objection One: Habermas' Approach Is Less Critical
Foucault's first objection is that Habermas' sharply contrasting aim and technique render his approach
less ‘critical’ than the Enlightenment attitude. This is not an objection to the search for universal
structures of thought and action by means of transcendental-pragmatic arguments and the
reconstructive sciences, but only to the claim that this tradition of philosophy furnishes an effective
critique of limits in the present. He has two different reasons for this objection.
To see Foucault's first reason, recall that Habermas' philosophy aims to clarify and substantiate a
universal form of the subject, the decentred subject. A person who recognises herself as a decentred
subject has accepted and internalised the decentred view of the world, the view that ‘reason has split
into three moments’. She understands the world to be differentiating into a ‘totality’ of three domains of
validity corresponding to the external, social and subjective dimensions of reality, and these to the three
moments of ‘modern science, positive law and posttraditional morality, and autonomous art and
institutionalised art criticism’ (MC 17). She sorts questions into one of these three compartments,
corresponding to claims of truth, justice and truthfulness, and validates or invalidates them in accord
with the forms of rationality uniquely appropriate to each. These are procedures of intersubjective
argumentation within which the exchange of reasons for and against proceed until agreement is
reached, except in the third, subjective dimension where a horizon of shared values is not questioned.
She sees this organisation of consciousness as the apex of individual and historical development. It is
both the standard against which other forms of self-consciousness and cultures are judged as less
developed and the three categories of ‘cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive’
against which trends in modernity are judged as pathological or emancipatory (MC 17–20).
The decentred form of subjectivity is accepted as universal without certain proof, which is unobtainable,
or philosophical justification. The ‘eminent trends towards compartmentalization’ into the three worlds,
‘constituting as they do the hallmark of modernity, can do very well without philosophical justification’.
The roles of the philosopher are, rather, to provide ‘description and analysis’ of their defining features;
to act as a ‘mediating interpreter’ who guards against the ‘isolation’ of ‘science, morals and art and their
respective expert cultures’ and the ‘colonisation’ of the moral-practical and artistic-aesthetic by the
cognitive-instrumental, and who works towards ‘a new balance between the separated moments of
reason … in communicative everyday life’ (MC 17–19).
Habermas' approach is ‘critical’ in the sense that it describes and analyses a ‘regulative idea’ (JA 51) –
the decentred subject – against which limits in the present can be judged as to their level of freedom
and

Page 110
autonomy. However, Foucault's objection is that it is not critical of its own standard, the decentred form
of the subject, and so fails to meet the second condition of a modern critical philosophy, that it reflect
critically on its own favoured form of reflection. One of the more provocative ways he put this is the
following (UP 9; my italics):
In what does it [philosophy today] consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it
might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always
something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell
them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language
of naïve positivity.
This is the sort of objection that Habermas raises against conventional theories: they presuppose a
conventional horizon and so legitimise what is already known. He tries to avoid it by advancing a
dialogical and procedural theory in which subjects themselves reach agreement on what is true, just and
good. Nevertheless, his approach legitimises ‘what is already known’ by accepting the processes of
decentred subjectivisation as given and self-evident; in Foucault's terms, what we ‘silently think’ (UP 9).
‘Since the dawn of modernity in the eighteenth century’, Habermas states, ‘culture has generated those
structures of rationality that Max Weber and Emil Lask conceptualised as cultural value spheres. Their
existence calls for description and analysis, not philosophical justification.’ The ‘sons and daughters of
modernity have progressively learned to differentiate their culture tradition in terms of these three
aspects of rationality such that they deal with issues of truth, justice and taste discretely rather than
simultaneously’ (MC 17). Discourse ethics also legitimises what is already known in the sense that it will
at best, according to Habermas, justify some ‘basic human rights’ (MC 105, 208), one of the most
familiar features of the present. Moreover, Habermas' philosophy tells people ‘where their truth is and
how to find it’. It tells them to sort their questions into three types and to exchange reasons in accord
with the three forms of argumentation, on the ground that this is simply a description and analysis of
the universal rationality implicit in how they already tend to think and act. In so doing, the approach
starts from, rather than questions, modern processes of subjectivisation.
We have seen that this initial disposition to legitimise rather than question the decentred subject is
further reinforced by the aim and techniques of Habermas' approach. He sets out to develop a genuinely
critical form of philosophy, one which would not take any particular form of the subject for granted.
Although he accounts for the decentred subject in terms of intersubjective processes of individual and
societal development, and so avoids a ‘subject-centred philosophy’ in the sense of an ahistorical and
monological philosophy of consciousness, the account is designed to describe and defend, rather than
question, this form of the subject. Arguments are presented for it being the common element

Page 111
implicit in any form of the subject, the highest stage of development of communicative action and
rationality, and the regulative idea against which other forms of the subject are evaluated. The
transcendental-pragmatic, developmental and reconstructive arguments are employed to support and
defend its presumed universality.
As many commentators have noted, the arguments for the universality of the decentred subject are
structured in a way that insulates it from criticism. An interlocutor who questions using the decentred
worldview as the standard against which to judge forms of reasoning that anthropologists describe in
other cultures, for example, is characterised as an irrational relativist (a position Habermas ascribes to
Winch). The reason for this appears to be Habermas' belief that only modern societies have developed
‘second-order concepts’ (forms of reflection on their own cultural practices) and this achievement leads
to a ‘decentred understanding of the world’ that ‘demands similar processes of learning and adaptation
of any culture that crosses it’ (JA 157, original emphasis). If these developmental and convergence
hypotheses are true, then ‘we must take account of an asymmetry that arises between the interpretive
capacities of different cultures in virtue of the fact that some have introduced “second-order concepts”
whereas others have not’ (ibid.). As a result Habermas confesses that he cannot take seriously those
contextual critics who remain unconvinced of the developmental hypotheses and so engage in more
symmetrical forms of cross-cultural dialogue and reciprocal judgement (JA 157–8):
According to the contextualists, the transition to postmetaphysical concepts of nature and posttraditional
conceptions of law and morality [the ‘decentred understanding of the world’] is characteristic of just one
tradition among others and by no means signifies that tradition as such becomes reflexive. I don't see
how this thesis could be seriously defended. I think that Max Weber was fundamentally right, especially
in the careful universalistic interpretation that Schluchter has given his thesis of the universal cultural
significance of Occidental rationalism.
The problem with this non-serious attitude to his critics is that it presupposes what should be open to
testing, that the developmental hypotheses are ‘fundamentally right’, thereby shielding his preferred
second-order concepts from criticism.
Furthermore, participants in practical discourses cannot question the procedures of argumentation
appropriate to the three validity claims because to do so would be to commit a performative
contradiction. Simone Chambers and Seyla Benhabib deny this last point. They suggest that the claim
that reason has split into three moments may itself be challenged in practical discourses (Benhabib,
1992: 29–38; Chambers, 1996: 158–9). However, if the categories and procedures can be challenged
from within then, by definition, they are not universal. The

Page 112
‘performative’ contradiction is just a good old non-metaphysical contradiction of a rule of one type of
argumentation or one set of categories among others. To concede this is to agree with Foucault,
Toulmin, Taylor and other contextual rationalists. Benhabib acknowledges this (by abandoning U) and
Chambers treats the decentred worldview as one ‘interpretation’ of modernity, thus implying that it can
be compared to other interpretations rather than providing the standards of comparison (Chambers,
1996: 43–56). If, conversely, the categories and procedures cannot be challenged without committing
an irrationality, a performative contradiction, which is surely Habermas' own view, then there is no place
within the theory to take up a critical stance towards this form of the subject.
At the centre of Habermas' form of reflection is a form of the subject which is taken for granted at the
outset and protected from, rather than opened to criticism by the forms of analyses characteristic of his
philosophy. This is not only a failure to be critical in the sense above but also in Habermas' own terms.
His philosophy remains ‘context-bound’. The three categories and forms of argumentation of the
decentred subject can be employed to ‘burst asunder’ the ‘provinciality’ of other forms of the subject
(PDM 322). Yet this decentred worldview is not transcended: it provides the taken-for-granted
background against which questioning takes place in practical discourses as well as in Habermas'
philosophy itself.
From Foucault's perspective, therefore, Habermas' theory is of the same general kind as other subject-
centred philosophies, such as phenomenology and existentialism, even though the form of the subject is
procedural rather than substantive. Foucault was highly critical of this kind of philosophy, especially
when the form of the subject that is defended as universally valid and beyond the need for justification
is the product of the very processes of European modernisation that are ‘so universalizing, so dominating
with respect to others’ (WE 47). These are precisely the processes of subjectivisation that philosophy
ought to take the most critical stance towards and enable us to free ourselves from, at least in thought
(TS 11):
The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not
very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are a part of our most familiar
landscape, and we don't perceive them any more. But most of them once scandalized people. It is one
of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape – that people think are
universal – are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of
universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which
space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.
This line of argument would not be a sound objection to Habermas' philosophy and a good reason to
prefer Foucault's ethos if the decentred

Page 113
subject could be shown to be universal. Habermas concedes that its universality cannot be proven with
certainty. The arguments he marshals are, at best, suggestive, supportive and fallible. As we have seen,
they are highly contentious and widely doubted hypotheses about the nature of truth, meaning,
understanding, consensus, justice, modernisation, moral psychology, human cultures and much else. Be
this as it may, it is not the tendentious status of Habermas' decentred hypothesis that constitutes the
reason for Foucault's scepticism here, although it is a factor. It is not ‘ludicrous’ to defend a dubious
hypothesis against many critics. Rather, it is the inability to think against what is given and defended as
universal in this decentred ‘game of truth’. After stating his objection to the legitimising kind of
philosophy, Foucault explains what he thinks philosophy should do (UP 9):
[philosophy] is entitled to explore what might be changed in its own thought, through the practice of a
knowledge that is foreign to it. The ‘essay’ – which should be understood as the assay or test by which,
in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the
purpose of communication – is the living substance of philosophy.
The objection is that there is no means of testing the decentred subject – the ‘most familiar landscape’
of modern subjectivity – internal to Habermas' philosophy. This is what is uncritical about it. Foucault
suggests that the way to test it is through ‘a knowledge that is foreign to it’; for example, through the
historical study of different forms of subjectivity, as Foucault and the Cambridge School do, or through
inventing different forms of subjectivity as objects of comparison, as Wittgenstein and analytical
philosophers do. Such a test would determine which features of decentred subjectivity are universal and
which are contingent.
It is difficult to see how Habermas would build such a critical test into his approach. When a philosopher
looks at different forms of the subject and their rationalities through Habermas' categories the
decentred form of representation of the data strongly predisposes her to disregard what is ‘foreign’
(different, historical, contingent) and to look for what is presumed to be universal (the three validity
claims) implicit in the ‘confused’ practices. For example, Habermas illustrates this methodological
disposition in his interpretation of Peter Strawson's famous analysis of Freedom and resentment (1974).
In contrast to the approach of Foucault, hermeneuticists and Strawson himself, when confronted with a
moral or political struggle, Habermas tells us to look beneath the actual terms in which the conflict is
problematised by and has significance for the agents involved and discern ‘the violation of an underlying
normative expectation that is valid not only for ego and alter but also for all members of a social group
or even, in the case of moral norms in the strict sense, for all competent actors. It is only their claim to
general

Page 114
validity that gives an interest, a volition, or a norm the dignity of moral authority’ (MC 48–9, original
emphases). Here, his deontological form of problematisation is not held provisionally as an initial way of
interpreting the conflict, to be tested dialogically against how the participants themselves problematise it
as a conflict with moral dignity, but presupposed as the universal form of problematisation that underlies
their non-universal ‘ethical’ characterisation of the conflict and gives it whatever moral dignity it has.
Again, when presented with a form of rationality foreign to the three decentred forms (as, for example,
Winch's understanding of a primitive society) or to one category of them (as, for example, Gilligan's
different interpretation of moral development), Habermas does not distance himself from his own
hypothesis, provisionally holding it as one among other forms of rationality and testing it by means of,
say, Foucault's reciprocal elucidation, Taylor's perspicuous contrast, Rawls' reflective equilibrium or
Putnam's internal realism. Rather, he judges the foreign rationality relative to the decentred hypothesis
as a regulative idea, so the foreign rationality is, by hypothesis, irrational or in the wrong category (TCAI
43–74; MC 179–81). He replies that he cannot do otherwise without performing a contradiction (MC
81). This begs the critical question. To return the charge Habermas levelled at Foucault's earlier
writings, there appears to be an uncritical ‘presentism’ in Habermas' philosophy. Richard Blaug, after a
broad survey of the work of Habermas and his followers, corroborates Foucault's objection (1997: 109):
We are thus redirected in our efforts towards an exploration of the sense in which our existing political
order is legitimate. This is, of course, an entirely valid project, and is presently being fruitfully pursued
by both Habermas and a number of his commentators. But the study of a political order's extant
legitimacy is a far cry from using the theory in order to design legitimate democratic institutions which
may be quite different than those we currently have.
The second reason Foucault thinks that Habermas' approach is less critical than his own is that if, for
the sake of argument, we accept rather than test the decentred subject, we then find that its ‘abstract’
character renders it less effective as a critique than a specific and historical approach (PP 83):
experience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in
unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism. For centuries, religion couldn't bear
having its history told. Today, our schools of rationality balk at having their history written, which is no
doubt significant.
Many contextualists have raised objections to the abstractness of Habermas' philosophy as well as to the
Kantian tradition in general, and

Page 115
Habermas has replied to some of them (MC 205–7). Foucault's objection is complementary yet distinct,
since it gains its rational force through the reciprocal contrast with his own approach.
In Berkeley in 1983 Foucault recounted an earlier conversation with Habermas in Paris where Habermas
mentioned how disappointed he was to find that one of his professors who was an illustrious Kantian
had nevertheless written articles in support of the Nazis in the 1930s. Foucault mentions a similar
experience with Max Pohlenz, a great stoic who also supported the Nazis. What this illustrates, according
to Foucault, is the ‘tenuous ‘‘analytic” link between a philosophical conception and the concrete political
attitude of someone who is appealing to it’. The ‘ “best” theories do not constitute a very effective
protection against disastrous political choices; certain great themes such as “humanism” can be used to
any end whatever’ (FR 374; TS 15). The lesson to be drawn from this experience is to make critical
philosophy less abstract by tying it as closely as possible to specific struggles (FR 374):
a demanding prudent, ‘experimental’ attitude is necessary; at every moment, step by step, one must
confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is…. I have always been
concerned with linking together as tightly as possible the historical and theoretical analysis of power
relations, institutions, and knowledges, to the movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into
question in reality.
There is considerable evidence that Foucault's specific approach does provide an effective critique in a
number of specific struggles in contemporary societies (Barry et al., 1996; Burchell, 1991; Hekman,
1995; Peterson and Bunth, 1997). The price of this commitment to ‘partial and local inquiry or test’
Foucault acknowledges is that ‘we have to give up ever acceding to a point of view that could give us
access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits’ (WE 47).
Conversely, in Habermas' case, there is some evidence that the cost of elaborating a more abstract
theory in order to provide a comprehensive sketch of our universal limits has been to lessen its critical
effectiveness.
In their survey of the application of critical theory to empirical work, Ruane and Todd conclude (1988),
as Ricardo Blaug summarises, that it takes place at ‘a vertiginous level of abstraction’ and ‘tends to
generate something that in fact yields yet more theory, rather than anything practical (Blaug, 1997:
106). In a more sympathetic survey, Blaug (1997) suggests that discourse ethics is more effective when
used to interpret and evaluate deliberative democratic practices and the normative content of
constitutional law, as Habermas suggests in Between Facts and Norms and as Benhabib (1986),
Chambers (1996), Cohen (1991) and Ingram (1993) have argued. Yet, as Blaug comments, ‘something
rather strange is happening here. For all this talk of the public sphere never quite comes down to earth.
Having spent many pages unpacking the

Page 116
nuances of his normative argument, a quite extraordinary number of books and articles on Habermasian
theory end with a somewhat nebulous benediction to its political promise. He goes on to cite a number
of examples of ‘praise … heaped on the public sphere’ and observes that there seems ‘to be a kind of
missing tier of theory – this being an account of what normatively grounded institutions might be like
and how they might actually function’. He concludes, just as one might expect from Foucault's lesson
above, that ‘the limits placed on the theory, and its abstract and universal nature, combine to restrict its
practical implications’ (1997: 112).
True to form, Foucault sketches a genealogy of this difference between them. He associates the drive
towards abstract and universal theory with the ‘universal intellectual’ and the specific, practice-based
critique with the ‘specific intellectual’ (FR 67–75). The universal intellectual seeks to speak about society
as a whole and what is ‘just and true for all’ on the model of ‘knowledge and legitimation’ whereas the
specific intellectual speaks about singular games of truth, relations of power and ethics of the practical
systems in which she is engaged, their historical formation and possibilities of modification. The universal
intellectual derives from the jurist and the juridical tradition in the West (FR 70). Specific intellectuals
have become fairly prominent since the Second World War, with natural and social scientists speaking
out against nuclear weapons, environmental destruction, medical abuse, cultural survival and the like
(FR 71–2). Notwithstanding, as Foucault explains in ‘What is critique?’, the specific intellectual derives
from the early modern humanists and natural lawyers who wrote critical histories of specific oppressive
institutions of governance, such as the Church, monarchies, unjust constitutions and the governance of
women by men. Their aim was not so much to elaborate a universal theory of justice as to criticise the
excesses and arbitrariness of specific forms of governance and so to practise an ‘art of not being
governed so much’ or of ‘not being governed in such and such a manner’ (WC 384). This early modern
humanist tradition of critique tied to the modification of specific forms of governance provided the
background to Kant's Enlightenment attitude in ‘What is enlightenment?’ and thus initiated the tradition
in which Foucault places his own work (WC 385–98). The universal-juridical tradition furnished the
background to Kant's formal critique of the limits of knowledge and so constitutes the basis of the
tradition in which Habermas works (WC 393).
The point of the genealogy is to provide an historical account of the constitution of himself and
Habermas as philosopher-subjects and, secondly, to introduce another reason why Habermas' approach
tends to be ineffective as a critique. The universal intellectual, in so far as she derives from the jurist
and the juridical tradition, abstracts and universalises from specific juridical practices of morality and
politics and their traditions of interpretation in the West, especially the natural law tradition. Habermas
acknowledges this historical point. As a result, her language

Page 117
of description – the language of universal norms and procedures definitive of the decentred worldview –
is ineffective not only because it is abstract but also because it tends to misrepresent other, non-juristic
forms of knowledge, relations of power and practices of ethics in which we are constituted and governed
as subjects (see section VII).
Finally, the genealogy also exposes and frees us from the conventional understanding of Habermas as a
humanist and Foucault as an anti-humanist. If we follow the conventional meaning of ‘humanism’ today,
namely a theory that takes a form of the subject in the present as a normative ideal to be defended
against all comers, then, as we have seen, the conventional understanding is accurate. The decentred
subject, although a juridical subject, plays exactly this role in Habermas' theory. This is what Foucault
means by ‘humanism’ or the humanist ‘Man’ of the modern human sciences when he criticises it
throughout his writings (TS 15; FR 44–5):
Through these different practices – psychological, medical, penitential, educational – a certain idea or
model of humanity was developed, and now this idea of man has become normative, self-evident and is
supposed to be universal. Humanism may not be universal but may be quite relative to a certain
situation. This does not mean that we have to get rid of what we call human rights or freedom, but that
we can't say that freedom or human rights has to be limited at certain frontiers…. What I am afraid of
about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our ethics as a universal model for any kind of
freedom.
If, alternatively, we look at ‘humanism’ historically and critically (as Quentin Skinner (1996) and John
Pocock (1975) have done), it derives from the singular tradition of thought and practice called ‘classical
humanism’ which was developed during the Renaissance by writer-activists and based on the classical
authors of the Roman world, such as Seneca, Cicero and Quintilian. In relation to classical humanism,
the conventional understanding of Habermas as a humanist and Foucault as an anti-humanist is the
wrong way round. Classic humanism developed in opposition to the universal natural law tradition. The
humanists criticised natural lawyers for their ‘abstractness’ and their inaccurate and anachronistic
universalisations from the peculiarities of current juridical practices and traditions of Roman and canon
law. In opposition, they put historical, contextual and interpretive studies at the centre of their
educational system, the ‘humanities’, and used them comparatively to gain a critical distance from their
own legal and political institutions and traditions and to make generalisations. They derived this
philosophical exercise of disengagement from the present by means of comparative historical and
cultural studies from their interpretation of the classic authors, Seneca in particular, similar to the way in
which Foucault derived his philosophical exercise of ‘freeing oneself from oneself’ and ‘thinking
differently’ from the same authors (UP 9–10). Finally, they

Page 118
turned their humanist studies to the criticism of specific forms of governance and ethics in their Italian
city-states and North European monarchies, in opposition to the abstract treatises on natural rights and
duties of the natural law tradition, and developed a conception of concrete civic liberty in opposition to
the abstract freedom of the natural lawyers (Skinner, 1978, 1996). These humanist studies are in their
turn, according to Foucault himself, an early part of the tradition in which he writes and they provided
him with an alternative to the juridical conception of the subject and power (governmentality), just as
the classical authors provided him with an alternative to the juridical conception of morality (ethics).
VI Objection Two: Foucault's Approach Is Reasonable
Foucault's objection that Habermas' approach is uncritical of the decentred subject would be stronger if
he could test it critically himself and show in what Habermas gives to us as ‘universal, necessary,
obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary
constraints’ (WE 45). This would not only enhance the criticism of Habermas' theory but also illustrate
the effectiveness of Foucault's. He does this by using his approach to show that some allegedly non-
contingent presuppositions of communicative rationality are historically contingent and the product of
arbitrary constraints. To do so he must first respond to Habermas' claim that it is irrational to challenge
the presuppositions of communicative rationality by showing that it is reasonable to look on the three
forms of rationality definitive of the decentred worldview, not as identical to reason itself, but as three
forms of rationality among others.
Any form of communicative action involves presuppositions that are conditions of its possibility. A large
part of research in the human sciences is concerned with making conditions of possibility explicit.
Foucault's approach, for example, makes explicit the presuppositions of different problematisations (of
Greek sexuality, nineteenth-century language, labour and life, madness in different periods, and so on).
This kind of historical pragmatics consists in the analysis of the specific presuppositions of different
modes of discourse in so far as they consist in solutions to a general problem. As he summarises (FR
389),
the work of a history of thought would be to rediscover at the root of these diverse solutions the
general form of problematization that has made them possible – even in their very opposition; or what
has made possible the transformation of the difficulties and obstacles of a practice into a general
problem for which one proposes diverse practical solutions. This development of a given into a question,
this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions
will attempt to

Page 119
produce a response, this is what constitutes the point of problematization and the specific work of
thought.
Now, Habermas associates this kind of analysis with R.G. Collingwood, Wittgenstein and their followers
in England (such as Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School), who, like Foucault and Canguilhem in
France, developed a form of analysis of the presuppositions one is committed to in virtue of raising and
answering a specific intersubjective range of questions (MC 83). Habermas' transcendental-pragmatic
analysis of conditions of possibility differs from the family of historical forms of analysis of Foucault,
Collingwood and others in two crucial respects. First, he is concerned exclusively with the procedural
presuppositions of forms of argumentation, rather than with whatever the presuppositions of a specific
form of problematisation or language game might be and thus he is closer, as he notes, to Stephen
Toulmin than to Collingwood or Foucault (MC 50–7; Toulmin, 1984; Toulmin and Jonsen, 1988).
Secondly, and more importantly, he is not concerned with the (contingent) presuppositions specific to
this or that form of argumentation, as Toulmin, Collingwood, Foucault and the Cambridge School are,
but with the non-contingent presuppositions common to all rational forms of argumentation. For the
presuppositions to be ‘non-contingent’ and so universal they must meet two conditions: they must be
such a general feature of human life that they cannot be replaced by a functional equivalent and they
must be shown to be unavoidable. The transcendental-pragmatic reconstruction aims to show that the
conventional and post-conventional rules and principles D and U are the non-contingent presuppositions
of communicative rationality, in the sense of being ‘irreplaceable’ and ‘unavoidable’, and therefore the
transgression of any of them would, by definition, constitute a ‘performative contradiction’ (MC 85;
Johri, 1997: 59).
The way in which the historical pragmatics of Foucault, Collingwood and Toulmin raises an objection to
Habermas' type of transcendental pragmatics has been somewhat obscured by the manner in which
Habermas sets up the debate between himself and his opponents. He advances his argument against a
‘sceptic’ who rejects all the rules, conventional and post-conventional, and principles U and D, and he
appears to believe that Foucault is this kind of universal sceptic (MC 76–109, 99). Foucault, he says, is
caught in ‘a self-referential denial of universal validity claims’ (PDM 286). However, as we have seen in
the earlier exposition of Foucault's object of study – forms of problematisation – it is no part of his
approach (or those of Toulmin and Collingwood) to deny that communicative speech acts involving non-
prudential ‘ought’ propositions commit the actors to some form or other of reason-giving and, eo ipso,
of mutual recognition and reciprocity. Relations of communication involve ‘reciprocity’, Foucault states in
explicit agreement with Habermas (SP 218). In virtue of exchanging

Page 120
speech acts of this kind, humans are willy-nilly under what Foucault calls an ‘obligation of truth’, to
search for the truth by exchanging reasons fairly (FF 15). Historically, this obligation of truth ‘has taken
on a variety of different forms’ and Foucault sees his entire work as a history of how the human subject
enters into and plays these obligatory ‘games of truth’ (FF 1–2; UP 6).
Foucault does not deny that there may be some non-contingent rules common to all games of truth. He
writes that ‘singular forms of experience’, such as historically different practices of communication, ‘may
perfectly well harbour universal structures’. To study what is singular and historically contingent about a
communicative practice ‘does not mean that it is deprived of all universal form, but instead that the
putting into play of these universal forms is itself historical’ (FR 335). But the innumerable attempts to
deduce or reconstruct these universal forms in a set of necessary and sufficient transhistorical rules have
so far not succeeded: ‘what has always characterised our society, since the time of the Greeks, is the
fact that we do not have a complete and peremptory definition of the games of truth which would be
allowed, to the exclusion of all others’. It follows from this obvious feature of our world that there ‘is
always a possibility, in a given game of truth, to discover something else and to more or less change
such and such a rule and sometimes even the totality of the game of truth’ (FF 17). Foucault's approach
is simply a conceptual tool kit to test this ‘possibility’ in Habermas' or any other peremptory definition of
the games of truth.
Consequently, Foucault's enlightenment attitude is a ‘specific’ scepticism (agains the claims of a specific
limit), not the universal scepticism Habermas argues against in his mock dialogues. The obligation to
pursue the truth by exchanging reasons under general conditions of reciprocity, which Foucault and
other contextual rationalists do not doubt, possibly could be explicated in terms of rules something like
Habermas' list of conventional rules. Recall that on Habermas' account these are provisional and
exemplary, not definitive, and simply borrowed from R. Alexy for purposes of illustration (MC 87).
However, these are compatible with a wide variety of historical and cultural forms of communication and
rationality, as well as with a wide variety of accounts of rationality from Plato to Wittgenstein.
Agreement on some such conventional procedures satisfies conditions of mutual recognition and
reciprocity but does not entail agreement on the post-conventional procedures (this is the main theme
of Cooke, 1994).
The one objection Foucault would probably raise to Habermas' list of conventional rules is to rule 1.3
that different speakers may not use the same expression with different meanings. It is difficult to see
how this is compatible with forms of argumentation that move us around to a different point of view, as
a genealogy and Habermas' role-taking are designed to do. This movement is achieved by showing that
the meaning – the sense, reference or illocutionary force – of the shared evaluative

Page 121
vocabulary we use to characterise any form of the subject can be altered by argumentatively or
redescriptively challenging the habitual criteria for the application of the terms in question (Skinner,
1988a; 1996: 138–80). Discipline and Punish, for example, modifies the sense, reference and
illocutionary force of ‘discipline’. If this is correct, then it seems that any exercise of challenging habitual
forms of thought involves using the same expression with different meaning.
Apart from rule 1.3, the limit-specific scepticism of the ‘enlightenment attitude’ raises an objection when
Habermas makes the controversial claim that any communicative action presupposes as well the
irreplaceability and unavoidability of the specific forms of argumentation defined by the post-
conventional rules and principles U and D; that these are definitive of the three and only three moments
of reason. Several of Foucault's historical studies aim to show that some of these rules and the centrality
of the decentred game of truth itself are contingent. As a consequence, it is possible to think differently
and experiment with acting differently without committing a performative contradiction: that is, without
thinking and acting irrationally. In testing the non-contingency of the post-conventional rules of the
decentred game of truth, therefore, Foucault is not engaging in an irrational activity, as Habermas would
have it, but questioning them from within the context of the conventional rules of rationality – accepting
one limit (conventional) in order to test another (post-conventional). This enables him to do within
reason what Habermas himself does not do: break the circle of presentism surrounding the decentred
subject and open it to critical enquiry.
All that Foucault does here to render his historical critique of forms of rationality reasonable is just to
refuse to enter into the form in which Habermas structures the debate or (in Foucault's terms)
‘problematises’ reason; that is, by identifying reason with three contemporary forms of rationality
(cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive). If that problematic is accepted, it
becomes, as we have seen in the previous section, a debate between the ‘guardian of rationality’ and
the irrational sceptics and relativists. As Foucault explains in a discussion of Habermas, ‘that is not my
problem, in so far as I am not prepared to identify reason with the totality of rational forms which have
come to dominate’ (PP 35). This first step of de-identifying ‘reason’ with the dominant forms of
rationality – in order to avoid being forced into an either/or debate and to get himself in a position to
reflect on and analyse those forms – is, Foucault further explains, neither a new technique nor one
derived exclusively from Nietzsche's perspectivism. It is the continuation of the critical task of the broad
Enlightenment tradition in which he works (PP 27):
I think that the blackmail which has very often been at work in every critique of reason or every critical
inquiry into the history of rationality (either you

Page 122
accept rationality or you fall prey to the irrational) operates as though a rational critique of rationality
were impossible, or as though a rational history of all the ramifications and all the bifurcations, a
contingent history of reason, were impossible … I think that, since Max Weber, in the Frankfurt School
and anyhow for many historians of science such as Canguilhem, it was a question of isolating the form
of rationality presented as dominant, and endowed with the status of the one-and-only reason, in order
to show that it is only one possible form among others.
I have presented this defence of the reasonableness of Foucault's critical approach to forms of
rationality as if the burden of proof lies with him because the quotations suggest that Foucault saw the
engagement with Habermas in this way. Perhaps the rhetorical influence of Habermas' claim that he is
the guardian of rationality and defender of cognitivism against the irrational Foucault forced this
defensive stance on him. Whatever the cause, this timid response leaves Habermas' approach in a non-
reciprocal position of dominance, as if anyone who is not prepared to enter the debate on Habermas'
terms needs to justify the reasonableness of their approach, whereas the reasonableness of Habermas'
identification of reason with three contemporary forms of rationality does not require validation, only
description, analysis, reconstruction and mediating interpretation. We can put Foucault's argument that
his approach is reasonable on equal footing if we go on the offensive by reversing the burden of proof
and asking if Habermas' approach is reasonable. The analogous question would be, is it reasonable to
argue that reasonable people engaged in communicative action should come to accept the procedures of
rationality definitive of the decentred view of the world? As we have seen, Foucault always politely
accepted the legitimacy of Habermas' project, denying only that such universal forms of rationality have
yet been discovered and universally agreed to. However, John Rawls raises this bolder question and
answers in the negative.
Like Foucault, Rawls understands Habermas as putting forward a comprehensive and metaphysical
philosophy of the nature of human reason. In contrast to his own non-metaphysical philosophy of
justice:
Habermas' position, on the other hand, is a comprehensive doctrine and covers many things far beyond
political philosophy. Indeed, the aim of his theory of communicative action is to give a general account
of meaning, reference and truth or validity both for theoretical reason and for several forms of practical
reason…. Habermas' own doctrine, I believe, is one of logic in the broad Hegelian sense: a philosophical
analysis of the presuppositions of rational discourse (of theoretical and practical reason)…. His logic is
metaphysical in the following sense: it presents an account of what there is. And what there is are
human beings engaged in communicative action in their lifeworld. (Rawls, 1995: 135–7)

Page 123
Like Foucault, Rawls believes that it is perfectly reasonable for philosophers to work on theories of this
comprehensive kind, to derive theories of justice from them, and to try to convince others of their
validity. It is also reasonable for individual citizens and moral agents, when they have given public
reasons for or against a proposed norm of coordination or individual action, also to embed these public
reasons in their own background comprehensive theories. But, the presupposition of Habermas'
approach is, in addition, that it is reasonable to expect and argue that all citizens and moral agents in a
fair system of social cooperation, in so far as they are reasonable, will come to accept the decentred
view of the world as their comprehensive theory and reason in accord with its three forms of
argumentation. This, on Rawls' account, is unreasonable.
Habermas' presupposition that reasonable communicators will come to agree on the decentred
worldview is ‘unreasonable’ because there will always be reasonable disagreement over highly complex
and abstract doctrines of this general kind. Rawls carefully lists six ‘sources of the difficulties in arriving
at agreement in judgment, sources that are compatible with those judgments being fully reasonable’
(Rawls, 1993: 56–7). These sources are not ‘prejudice and bias, self- and group-interest, blindness and
wilfulness’ but features intrinsic to reasoning over highly complex and comprehensive matters. It follows
from these sources that it will always be unreasonable to expect agreement on a comprehensive
doctrine like Habermas'. Rather, it will be reasonable to accept that there always will be a plurality of
reasonable comprehensive doctrines in any free society, just as there will be a plurality of reasonable
value orientations, and for similar reasons (1993: 58). Therefore, it is reasonable to accept the ‘burdens
of judgment’: to recognise that fully reasonable agents seeking to coordinate their interaction by the
force of the better argument alone will always embrace an irreducible plurality of background
comprehensive doctrines (one of which may reasonably be the decentred doctrine) and so relate to
each other on this understanding, not on the understanding that one comprehensive doctrine can ever
provide the ground of their deliberations.
If Rawls is correct, Habermas is unreasonable. He has failed to accept the burdens of judgement that
follow from the six sources of difficulties in reaching agreement that are intrinsic to reason itself.
Foucault, on the other hand, is fully reasonable in taking Habermas' comprehensive theory as one
among others. Moreover, both Rawls and Foucault draw a similar kind of lesson from the ‘tenuous’
character of complex and abstract reasoning. Foucault turned to a more specific analysis, tied closely to
practice, and Rawls turned towards a political philosophy tied to the way citizens themselves
problematise their communicative interaction in existing constitutional democracies: namely, as free and
equal subjects engaged in a system of social cooperation and willing to accept

Page 124
the burdens of judgement that a plurality of both comprehensive doctrines and value orientations entail
(See Laden, 1997 for an excellent comparison of Rawls and Foucault).
In conclusion, it is not unreasonable to see the decentred understanding of the world as one
(peremptory definition of a) limit in the present among many, to free ourselves from it and to analyse
its alleged universality critically and historically, either in whole or in part, as long as this critical attitude
is specific rather than the universal scepticism against which Habermas defends it. Moreover, Habermas
should approve since it provides a test of the claims he advances concerning the decentred subject,
something he has so far not done himself.
VII Objection Three: A Genealogy of the Decentred Subject
We are now in a position to see how Foucault's historical method might be used to bring out what is
singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints in the decentred limit. It enables us to see
it as one form of the subject among many and not as the regulative idea against which all forms are to
be described and categorised. Foucault did not write a genealogy of Habermas' conception of the
decentred subject. Rather, he wrote a number of genealogies of the juridical form of the subject, several
of these before he read Habermas' work. However, Habermas' conception of the decentred subject is
clearly a major re-interpretation and defence of the juridical form of the subject, one of the greatest in a
long line from Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf through Kant to late twentieth-century juridical moral
and political philosophies. Theories of the juridical subject are standardly, as Habermas says of his own
theory, deontological, formal, cognitive and universal. Foucault's genealogies of the juridical subject run
through his major writings: Discipline and Punish, Power/Knowledge, The History of Sexuality, ‘What is
critique?’, ‘The subject and power’, ‘Governmentality’, and ‘Politics and reason’.
From the beginning Foucault was concerned to show that this way of organising moral and political
action in practice and reflecting on and analysing it in theory, which seems so self-evidently universal
and legitimate to us moderns who are the subjects of it, is in reality much more limited than it appears.
While its characteristic forms of knowledge are partially accurate representations of juridical practices
(since the forms of knowledge are historically woven into the exercise and contest of power in these
practices) they tend to be taken as a normative representation of moral and political practices in general
and, as a result, misrepresent and occlude other non-juridical processes of subjectivisation. The aim of
his historical studies is not to do away with this important and valuable form of subjectivity in the
present, but to show its limitations.

Page 125
The juridical subject is the individual or collective subject of rights and duties. Juridical subjects
coordinate their moral and political action by means of laws or norms. The laws are legitimate or just in
so far as they are universal and based on the agreement or consent of those who subject themselves to
them. The juridical practical systems are the legal and political institutions of European societies in which
power is exercised through the law in a primarily prohibitive manner by and over agents who are
constituted as law-governed bearers of rights and duties. Juridical forms of knowledge are the law-
centred theoretical, jurisprudential and legislative codes and their traditions of interpretation, modes of
application, systems of punishment and theories of revolution against unjust constitutions.
This ‘juridical ensemble’ of discursive and non-discursive elements began to be pieced together in
Europe in the twelfth century with the revival of Roman law and the development of canon law in
practice and the schools of natural law, political and moral philosophy in theory (Thomist and
conciliarist). It has come to be such a major form of the subject in European societies as the result of
four roles. Initially it represented fairly accurately a mechanism of power that was effective under feudal
monarchy: that is, the exercise of power through the law by a sovereign who stood more or less above
the law. Secondly, the claim to universality has been its method of legitimation since the beginning, first
against the particularity of local customs and ways, and later to justify the construction of large
centralised administrative states against the crazy quilt of feudal, confessional, regional and manorial
particularity during the wars of religion. Thirdly, it was used in theory and practice throughout the early
modern period to justify resistance to royal power and to establish limited constitutional rule. Fourthly,
in the form of popular sovereignty, it served to justify resistance to administrative monarchies in the
eighteenth century, the constitutional revolutions of the nineteenth century and the construction and
operation of parliamentary democracies and constitutional republics (PK 103).
At the centre of this system has been the problematisation of the ‘mode of subjection’: the conditions of
legitimate obedience and disobedience. In general, the people are understood to subject themselves to
this system of action-coordination by means of laws under two conditions of legitimacy: the laws are
universal or impartial (in accordance with universal or natural principles of justice) and they are based
on the agreement of the people. Although the consent condition was always present in the form of the
Roman legal maxim that ‘what touches all must be approved by all’, it is only since the late sixteenth
century that it has taken the procedural form so familiar today. When the locus of sovereignty shifted
from the monarch to the people and confessional pluralism was resolved by granting the right priority
over the good, the test of agreement was reconceived as some form of procedure, either hypothetical or
real, which the sovereign people go through themselves,

Page 126
individually (Locke) or collectively (Rousseau) in order to reach agreement on a constitution and subject
themselves to it. From the early modern ‘state of nature’ theories of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and
Locke to the influential social contract theories of Rousseau, Paine and Kant and down to the more
recent deliberative theories of popular sovereignty, such as Habermas' discourse ethics and discourse
theory of law and democracy, diverse solutions have been offered to this remarkably constant
problematisation of legitimacy and obedience.
This can just as well be seen as a problem of ‘sovereignty’, as Foucault often describes it, for the central
concern is that the people are, like the monarch before them, sovereign – free of power – in the
procedures that give rise to and legitimise the juridical system and protected in their individual or
collective sovereignty by the rights (of the ancients and moderns) they acquire by subjection (PK 105).
As he famously wrote in 1975, ‘what we need … is a political philosophy that isn't erected around the
problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off
the King's head: in political theory this still has to be done’ (PK 121).
Several philosophers have cut off the king's head. Charles Taylor has shown that the juridical tradition
hides its own prior good from itself (autonomy) and so is really one ‘ethical’ orientation among others,
not a ‘morality’ categorically separate from and more universal than ethical systems (Taylor, 1989).
Rawls has made a similar point with respect to Habermas, arguing that any procedural account of
justice will contain substantive elements (1995: 170). In an historical and analytical manner, Quentin
Skinner, Richard Tuck and John Pocock have shown how juridical thought and practice developed in
competition with civic humanism, reason of state, utilitarianism and so on, how the juridical subject
gained a certain prominence in Protestant countries in the early modern period and again after the
Second World War, but the multiplicity of forms of legal, political and moral subjects remains. In
showing that the decentred worldview is (one interpretation of) one singular and historically contingent
form of the subject among many and reconstructing the historical struggles around its recent rise to
relative prominence, these genealogies loosen its hold on our moral and political self-consciousness and
enable us to think and act differently. Here Foucault joins hands with Skinner, Pocock and Taylor
(Skinner, 1988b; Burchell, 1991). Foucault's contribution to the quiet subversion of the universal
pretensions of the juridical is distinct in the following respects.
Foucault's central argument is that the juridical, by focusing our attention on the problem of the mode
of subjection and the elaboration of a universal code, causes us, as both theorists and participants in
juridical games, to overlook processes of subjectivisation in politics and, in an analogous fashion,
practices of ethical self-formation in morality, precisely what a ‘critical’ philosophy should concentrate
on. It is not too much to say that his elaborate approach to processes of subjectivisation

Page 127
is designed to bring us round to seeing our politics and ethics from non-juridical points of view.
The first example is Discipline and Punish. He argues that juridical practices and the juridical
representations of coordinated forms of human interaction have, inter alia, served historically, and
continue to serve, to hide and legitimise a specific process of subjectivisation called ‘discipline’.
‘Discipline’ is a form of knowledge organised around a statistical norm of individual and collective
behaviour (the objectifying disciplines of the social sciences) and a form of power relations (disciplining
techniques of developing capacities to think and behave in accord with a statistical norm immanent in
any activity and of continuously monitoring and reforming such processes of normalisation). Here
communicatively mediated interaction is coordinated by means of norms of behavioural regularity that,
as he explains in the central passages of Discipline and Punish, are ‘completely heterogeneous’ in
relation to the universal norms of juridification. That is, we will misunderstand these practical systems,
their specific rationality and what subjects are struggling for in contesting them in the present if we
approach them through a deontological framework or through the ready-made categories of cognitive-
instrumental, moral-practical, aesthetic-ethical, pragmatic and strategic. We need rather to reconstruct
‘what they do and the way they do it’.
Following Marx, Weber and Oestreich, he shows that since the Dutch army reforms of the sixteenth
century normalising processes of subjectivisation have spread throughout the communicative practices of
European societies and, in particular, within juridical practices. The abilities to think and behave in the
ways presupposed by complex procedures of reflection (such as Habermas' forms of argumentation) and
to exercise the rights and duties of juridical subjects are acquired and mastered through processes of
discipline at school, work, prison, court, in the legislature and so forth (PK 105):
the theory of sovereignty, and the organisation of a legal code centered upon it, have allowed a system
of right to be superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as to conceal its actual
procedures, the element of domination in its techniques, and to guarantee to everyone … the exercise
of his proper sovereign rights. The juridical systems – and this applies to both their codification and to
their theorization – have enabled sovereignty to be democratized through the constitution of a public
right articulated upon collective sovereignty, while at the same time this democratization of sovereignty
was fundamentally determined by and grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion.
In The History of Sexuality he wrote a genealogy of a second process of subjectivisation misrepresented
by juridical theorists. Here the subjectifying social sciences, such as psychiatry, interpretation,
counselling and the caring professions, treat us as subjects with an inner meaning or truth

Page 128
that can be revealed through practices of confession, dialogue and consciousness raising (such as
Habermas' practice of reaching mutual understanding). These ‘confessing’ practices of knowledge and
power are also dispersed throughout modern European societies and juridical institutions (HS 59):
Confession plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relations, and love relations, in the most
ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn of rites – one confesses one's crimes, one's
sins, one's thoughts, and one desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the
greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell.
In the later volumes he expanded these studies by showing the astonishing variety of techniques of
ethical self-fashioning by which we impose on ourselves objectifying and subjectifying practices of
discipline, confession and so forth.
Once he had freed himself from the juridical form of reflection with these first two studies, he went on
to write various genealogies of forms of the subject, especially those organised around problems of the
reproduction of ‘life’ (biopower) rather than ‘right’, which he came to see as far more important, in
which we are constituted and led to recognise ourselves both as individuals and as members of
communities, nations and populations. As he puts it in ‘What is enlightenment?’, these enquiries ‘may be
multiplied and specified as much as we like’ but they will all address the three axes of knowledge, power
and ethics and the relations among them that this form of reflection brings to light (WE 49).
The reason why these genealogies are effective, according to Foucault, is not only that they show the
wide variety of specific forms of subjectivity we bear at the level of a history of ideas but, more critically,
because they describe the actual processes of subjectivisation through which we acquire and exercise
the capacities to communicate, act and contest the norms in each. They analyse the training as a result
of which we become masters of the techniques definitive of games of subjectivity. Juridically derived
forms of reflection, by focusing on the mode of subjection and questions of legitimation, disregard or
downplay these practical systems. For example, while juridical theories focus on the justification and
universalisation of rights they fail to describe the systems of knowledge, power and ethics through which
we acquire, exercise and contest the validity of rights through strategies of freedom (FF 19–20). In the
cryptic ‘stakes’ argument in ‘What is enlightenment?’ he presents this as the central justification for the
enlightenment attitude in contrast to the Kantian tradition in which Habermas writes.
During the Enlightenment, or at least on one interpretation of it, Foucault writes, the ‘great hope’ lay ‘in
the simultaneous and proportional growth of individuals with respect to one another’. That is, the

Page 129
historical development of human capabilities to communicate, coordinate activities, control things and to
reflect on them would, it was hoped, coincide with the growth of autonomy and freedom. However, the
relationship between the mastery of techniques and autonomy has not been ‘as simple as the eighteenth
century might have believed’. If we examine the historical development of capacities (here he refers to
his historical studies of the development of capacities through processes of subjectivisation) we see not
the parallel growth of freedom and autonomy but a ‘paradox of the relations of capacity and power’. The
paradox is that the growth of capabilities has led to the ‘intensification of power relations’. As a result,
the question for the enlightenment attitude today has to be quite different from the eighteenth century:
‘how can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?’ (WE
47–8).
One could imagine Habermas replying that it is his question as well. But Foucault's point is that
Habermas' approach fails to address this question. It continues the tradition of enlightenment philosophy
that studies capacities and autonomy in abstraction from underlying and concurrent processes of
subjectivisation and the resulting intensification of power relations. As we have seen in objections one
and two, it predisposes the theorist to look beneath these practical systems and the way subjects act in
them for underlying validity claims and idealised forms of argumentation that are free of power or to
characterise them in abstract terms. This is why Foucault refers to his own work on processes of
subjectivisation in the centre of the argument – only it has been able to bring the relations between the
actual development of capabilities and power relations into critical view. If we continue to work within
Habermas' approach, therefore, we will continue to be determined by the intensification of power
relations behind our critical gaze. Alternatively, if we pursue Foucault's approach, we will be able to
analyse the power relations and processes of subjectivisation connected to the growth of capabilities in
any form of the subject, experiment with disconnecting them, and so answer the question our present
asks of us. Consequently, the stakes are extremely high, and anyone with a general interest in freedom
and autonomy will choose Foucault's approach over Habermas'.
There is no doubt that Foucault meant the ‘stakes’ paragraph to be read in this way, as advancing a
principal justification for his approach relative to Habermas'. The preceding paragraphs elucidate the two
approaches and state that we should pursue his, but no reason is given. The stakes between them are
then laid out. The paragraph that follows the ‘stakes’ argument begins with the connecting phrase, ‘This
[referring back to the question that ends the previous paragraph] leads to the study of . . .’ (my italics)
and goes on to lay out his entire approach in three parts with emphasis on the analysis of relations
between capacities and powers (as in section II above). The clear implication is that if one wishes

Page 130
to address the new enlightenment question of the present one must choose his approach.
VIII Objection Four: Utopia versus Communication-Power-Freedom
The final objection is that Habermas' approach is utopian whereas Foucault's is not. This critical contrast
explains the rather enigmatic references to freedom and autonomy in the ‘stakes’ argument and so the
normative dimension of his work. My discussion of this contrast is indebted to and builds on the fine
analysis by Hindess in Discourses of Power (1996: 130–40).
In an interview conducted shortly after he wrote ‘What is enlightenment?’, Foucault commented (FF
18):
I am interested in what Habermas is doing. I know that he does not agree with what I say – I am a little
more in agreement with him – but there is always something which causes me a problem. It is when he
assigns a very important place to relations of communication and also a function that I would call
‘utopian’. The thought that there could be a state of communication which would be such that the
games of truth could circulate freely, without obstacles, without constraint and without coercive effects,
seems to me to be Utopia. It is being blind to the fact that relations of power are not something bad in
themselves, from which one must free oneself. I don't believe there can be a society without relations of
power, if you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the
behaviour of others.
Foucault is wrong to imply that Habermas believes in a society without relations of power. Practices of
communicative action coordinated by discourses of communicative rationality are rooted in and
surrounded by strategic struggles around the prevailing form of recognition of the subjects involved. As
Habermas puts it in a passage that could have been written by Foucault and that illustrates just how
much agreement there is between them on this point (MC 106):
Practical discourses cannot be relieved of the burden of social conflicts to the degree that theoretical
and explicative discourses can. They are less free of the burden of action because contested norms tend
to upset the balance of relations of intersubjective recognition. Even if it is conducted with discursive
means, a dispute about norms is still rooted in the struggle for recognition.
However, instead of developing a form of analysis that can explicate the practical system in which the
struggle takes place (the processes by which the actors recognise themselves under the contested form
of the subject) and the strategies of freedom to think and act differently

Page 131
available to them, Habermas takes a ‘utopian’ turn. Even though practical discourses are rooted in
strategic relations, they can nevertheless be thought of as separable from them:
practical discourses resemble islands threatened with inundation in a sea of practice where the pattern
of consensual conflict resolution is by no means the dominant one. The means of reaching agreement
are repeatedly thrust aside by the instruments of force.
From this distinction he goes on to conceptualise the practices of coordinating communicative action by
processes of argumentation as games in which claims to truth and rightness ‘circulate freely, without
obstacles, without constraint and without coercive effects’.
Habermas' defence would surely be that it is not utopian but a strongly idealised regulative idea against
which actual games inundated by relations of power can be evaluated in the name of freedom. The
lesson Foucault drew from his genealogies was that this regulative idea is yet another instance of the
juridical presupposition that there is some place or procedure in which subjects are ‘sovereign’ – free of
power and autonomous – and in which they agree on the conditions of their subjection. It is ‘utopian’
according to Foucault first in the strict sense that there is ‘no place’ where humans communicate and
dispute norms without putting into play relations of power. His genealogies provide example after
example. Even islands, one might note, are shaped and formed by the surrounding sea. Secondly, it is
‘utopian’ in the sense of the first objection above, the abstract and ineffective objection. To approach
communicative games in accord with such a utopian regulative idea is to abstract oneself from what is
really going on and the possibilities of concrete freedom within them, the only kind of freedom available
to humans. In contrast, Foucault claims that his approach does the opposite (FF 18):
The problem is not of trying to dissolve them [relations of power] in the utopia of a perfectly transparent
communication, but to give oneself the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics,
the ethos, the practice of the self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a
minimum of domination.
Foucault conjectures that what drives Habermas to build his theory on such a utopian foundation is the
assumption that power is bad in itself and one must free oneself from it. This is a fair conjecture. It is
difficult to imagine a more widely held assumption of contemporary moral and political thought than that
freedom consists in either the freedom from power or the freedom to act in accord with power exercised
through norms validated in conditions free from power (the two conceptions of freedom in Habermas'
theory). Of all the criticisms Foucault's work has incited, the first and foremost is that he challenged this
orthodoxy and

Page 132
turned it around, claiming scandalously that we could be free and rational within the relations of power
that constitute us. He says that we can make sense of this radically different way of thinking about
knowledge, communication and freedom always in the context of relations of power if we understand
relations of power as the ‘means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behaviour of
others’. And he adds by way of illustration an example of the acquisition and transmission of
communicative competencies: ‘I don't see where evil is in the practice of someone who, in a given game
of truth, knowing more than another, tells him what he must do, teaches him, transmits knowledge to
him, communicates skills to him’. Power ‘cannot not play’ a role here and ‘it is not evil in itself. The
problem is not to free oneself from the pedagogical relation of power, as the orthodox conception of
autonomy would demand, but only to discover what is ‘arbitrary’ and ‘useless’ in it (FF 18).
He is certainly correct to say that the plausibility of his argument turns on this understanding of power.
When he discovered that the forms of knowledge he was studying were always related in some way or
another to relations of power in the mid-1970s he had difficulty developing a satisfactory language of
description. He realised that the forms of power were not juridical (derived from a sovereign, exercised
through the law, prohibitive in effect and based on consent) since they were dispersed throughout social
relations, exercised apart from the law or used law as a means, productive and constitutive in effect,
and distantly related to consent. His first hypothesis was that forms of knowledge were internalised and
that relations of power operated directly on the body without the mediation of the subject. The subject
was seen primarily as passive, almost as a tabula rasa, and power was barely distinguishable from
violence and force in what he called the ‘war’ or strategic model in The History of Sexuality. This
formulation disposed him to conceive of practical systems as overall strategies without a strategist that
determined subjects behind their backs.
However, this description made no sense of the other side of what he was studying: the ability of
subjects to resist forms of knowledge and relations of power and to think and act differently. Critics
such as Habermas pointed out the irresolvable difficulties and Foucault criticised his own work for taking
the perspective of power almost to the exclusion of the side of strategies of resistance. He reformulated
his approach and earlier works in response (see introduction and section II of the present chapter). He
began to see that he could make sense of both power and resistance only if human subjects were
active. The acquisition and acceptance of a form of knowledge under which we are recognised as
subjects presupposes subjects who ‘think’: that is, who play an active and reflective role in learning and
questioning. The exercise of power in turn presupposes active subjects who act in accord with or go
against any

Page 133
relation of power, even in the most tightly regulated practical systems such as military training.
This entailed shifting the characterisation of what he was studying (practical systems) from the
background to the foreground, ‘not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but
rather what they do and the way they do it’. The relations of knowledge and power in which subjects
are engaged are understood in the terms in which they themselves ‘problematise’ their experience. The
consequent hermeneutic ‘risk of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we
may well not be conscious, and over which we may have no control’, which his Marxist and structuralist
critics immediately pointed out, is accepted without regret (WE 47). The focus of analysis consequently
shifted from the background ‘strategy without a strategist’ to the foreground of those who exercise
power and those over whom power is exercised.
He quietly announced this profound shift in 1978 in ‘The subject and power’: ‘let us not deceive
ourselves; if we speak of the structures or mechanisms of power, it is only in so far as we suppose that
certain persons exercise power over others’ (SP 217). The problem was to introduce these aspects of
agency without introducing a subject that transcends constitutive relations of power: that is, without
undermining his central insight that subjects always act in relations of power just as they think in
relations of knowledge (Patton, 1994). His solution is a revolutionary conception of power-in-relation-to-
freedom.
Power, he explains, is not juridical in nature. It is not ‘a renunciation of freedom, a transference of
rights, the power of each and all delegated to a few’. Power is not ‘a function of consent’ or ‘the
manifestation of a consensus’ (SP 220). This is not new. However, he immediately goes on to reject his
earlier hypothesis of power as a strategic ‘relationship of violence’ that directly ‘acts on a body or upon
things’. The ‘relationship proper to power would not be sought on the side of violence or struggle’. It is
‘neither warlike nor juridical’. The bringing into play of power relations often involves the use of violence
and the obtaining of consent, but violence and consent are the ‘instruments and results’ of power, ‘they
do not constitute the principle or basic nature of power’ (SP 220–1).
Rather, the exercise of power is ‘a mode of action upon the actions of others’, the ‘way in which certain
actions modify others’ (SP 219–21). Unlike violence, two features of agency must be present: that the ‘
‘‘other” (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognised and maintained to the very
end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses,
reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up’ (SP 220). The exercise of power, then, ‘consists
in guiding the possibility of conduct’ of others by various means, which can be strict or relaxed, imposed
by others or exercised on ourselves by ourselves, in order to constitute relatively regular and predictable
forms of ‘conduct’ (forms of the subject).

Page 134
As we might well expect, Foucault presents a genealogy of this concept of power. A relation of power is
best understood in terms of the early modern concept of ‘government’ developed by humanists such as
Guillaume de la Perrier in France and Thomas Elliott in England (G 91). ‘Government’ did not refer only
to the ways in which the conduct of subjects is governed in political relationships (‘government’ in the
narrow sense) but in any relationship among partners. It ‘designated the way in which the conduct of
individuals or groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of
families, of the sick’, in all ‘modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were
destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people’ (SP 221). As he explains in
‘Governmentality’, these practical systems of government have continued to develop and spread
throughout European societies up to the present (as his genealogies show) but the concept of
government has come to be applied almost exclusively to ‘government’ in the modern, narrow sense of
the juridical institutions of the state. Thus, in construing relations of power in the broad terms of
governmentality and seeing these as ‘co-extensive with every social relationship’ that involves ‘the
possibility of action upon the action of others’ (SP 224), he not only transgresses contemporary
assumptions about power and freedom and distinctions between public and private so that he can study
a broad range of contemporary struggles (SP 211–12). He also revives and adapts the specific language
that has been used historically to describe and problematise these processes of subjectivisation. He
underscores this genealogical point in ‘What is critique?’ by locating one origin of his critique in early
modern practices of governmentality and the forms of critique that developed in contestation of them.
He then redescribed his study of discipline, pastoral power, biopower and so forth in the language of
‘forms of government’ (FR 338).
Turning now to the two features of agency in any relation of power, freedom is defined in relation to
power as the range of possible actions available to those over whom power is exercised (SP 221):
Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only in so far as they are free. By this we mean
individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of
behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized.
Just as in any game of truth there is always the possibility of raising a question and thinking differently
to some extent, so too in games of power there is always the possibility of contesting a rule and acting
differently. If there is no possibility of action, as when a person is in chains, then there is no freedom
and also no power. It is a physical relationship of constraint. Power and freedom, then, are correlative
on this modified Nietzschean account. Freedom is the precondition of power, ‘since freedom must exist
for power to be exerted, and also its

Page 135
permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a
physical determination’. He characterises the relationship between power and freedom as ‘agonic’ (SP
221–2):
At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will
and the intransigence of freedom … an ‘agonism’ … a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal
incitation and struggle; less a face to face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent
provocation.
What he means is that in any relationship of power one is able through various mechanisms to guide
the conduct of others or to guide others to conduct themselves in a fairly constant manner and with
reasonable predictability. There is a range of possible ways in which subjects can act yet still be
governed. For instance, in educational institutions students and teachers can learn, study, attend
classes, raise questions, seek the truth, modify the curriculum or strike in a wide variety of ways and still
‘conduct’ themselves as this form of the subject, as ‘students’ and ‘teachers’. Given that power acts on
the mental and physical ‘actions’ of agents, there will always be some range of free play even in the
most tightly regulated regimen. Accompanying the agonic free play in any game of power, by which the
rules of the game are modified en passant, is always the possibility of insubordination, of challenging the
relation of power itself by escape or confrontation. This more radical possibility is the condition of
‘permanent provocation’.
When a direct confrontation does occur, as in a revolt, one side is unable to guide the conduct of others
and the relation of power and freedom between governors and governed is transformed into a face to
face ‘relation of confrontation’ between ‘adversaries’ (SP 223–5). A relation of confrontation continues
until a new or restored relation of power is established. Accordingly, the ‘intensification of power
relations to make the insubordinate submit can only result in the limits of power’. Either the
intensification is successful and the insubordinate is reduced to inaction (then ‘victory over the adversary
replaces the exercise of power’) or the intensification causes a ‘confrontation with those whom one
governs and their transformation into adversaries’. The more free play is restricted and the more the
radical possibility of insubordination is a distant one, the more the relation of power and its means of
support approximate a ‘structure of domination’ (SP 226; FF 12). The agonic interplay between power
and strategies of freedom exists, therefore, in the range of possible thought and action between these
two extremes of ‘domination’ and adversarial confrontation. (SP 225; FF 12).
With this understanding of power and freedom Foucault returned to Habermas' concentration on
relations of communication. Although communicating is ‘always a certain way of acting upon another
person or persons’ this is not what he means when he claims that Habermas is

Page 136
wrong in holding that games of truth could circulate free of power. Relations of communication, which
‘transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium’ are
distinguishable from relations of power which guide the conduct of others. Nevertheless, relations of
communication always overlap in complex ways with relations of power and with the acquisition and
exercise of human capacities or techniques in any practical system. The application, for example, of
technical capacities in work implies both relations of communication and of governance among the
workers, managers, owners and so forth. Relations of communications in turn imply the exercise of
capacities (at least the linguistic competencies to use signs) and, ‘by modifying the field of information
between partners’, ‘produce effects of power’. They ‘can scarcely be dissociated’ from training
techniques, processes of domination or the means by which obedience is obtained. To illustrate the
relations between communication, power and capacities, Foucault presents a remarkable sketch of an
educational institution which we can use as an exemplar of a genealogy of the relations among
communication, power and abilities in a practical system (SP 218–19):
there are also ‘blocks’ in which the adjustment of abilities, the resources of communication, and power
relations constitute regulated and concerted systems. Take for example an education institution: the
disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations which govern its internal life, the different activities
which are organised there, the diverse persons who live there or meet one another, each with his own
function, his well-defined character – all these constitute a block of capacity-communication-power. The
activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior is developed
there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communication (lessons, questions and answers,
orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the value of each person and of
the levels of knowledge) and by the means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure,
surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy).
Any real or imaginable island of communication and dispute resolution will involve a sea of relations of
these and similar kinds. To acknowledge, analyse and call into question these sorts of relations among
knowledge, communication and power is not to conflate them or to invalidate the knowledge acquired
and tested in the practical system (FF 16):
We can show, for example, that the medicalisation of madness, i.e. the organisation of medical
knowledge around individuals labeled as ‘mad’ has been linked, at some time or another … to
institutions and practices of power. This fact in no way impairs the scientific validity or the therapeutic
efficacy of psychiatry. It does not guarantee it but it does not cancel it out either.
‘The subject and power’ and its elaboration in later writings constitutes an adequate and effective
account of freedom in relation to power without positing a utopian position, procedure or subject free of

Page 137
power. It is the normative dimension of Foucault's approach. To illustrate, let us imagine and analyse
from Foucault's agonic perspective specific subjects who contest a rule by which their conduct is
governed and enter into negotiations over its validity. Let us further imagine that you and I are
members of the plural ‘we’ who have constituted ourselves as a community of discussion and action in
the course of the contestation, as Foucault describes democratic will formation (FR 385, section II).
First, as Foucault puts it and as David Owen has gone on to explore in great depth, calling the rule into
question in dialogue and contesting it in practice will not be the prolegomenon to freedom but the
practice of freedom, the enlightenment ethos, itself: ‘the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into
question of power relations and the “agonism” between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom
is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence’ (SP 223; Owen, 1995).
We will not look immediately for an underlying deontological norm of expectation that has been violated
but always for the way we subjects problematise the rule, for this will be the language in which we are
led to recognise and conduct ourselves as this specific form of subject, the form of recognition and
subjectivity that we are in fact contesting. We will be aware that a great deal of alteration in our
thought takes place in virtue of the modification of the rules within a specific language of the subject
rather than by translating it into one of the three decentred forms. For example, the great changes
brought about by the ecology movement have arisen from challenges within dominant scientific
language ‘concerning nature, the equilibrium of processes of living things, and so forth’. It was ‘not by
playing a game that was a complete stranger to the game of truth [in the natural sciences today] but in
playing it otherwise’ (FF 15).
We will take the same attitude when examining the forms of argumentation used to resolve the dispute.
We will not evaluate them relative to the peremptory definition of the conventional and post-
conventional rules and principles D and U in order to find the truth. The processes of argumentation we
use and the questions we raise both within them and about the processes themselves will be our focus,
recognising again that there is always a possibility in any game of negotiation to alter the rules of the
game. Moreover, we will compare these forms of argumentation with others, as Foucault and Toulmin
have done, to free ourselves from their seeming unavoidability and irreplaceability. That is, we will
analyse them just as in this chapter we have analysed the ways Owen, Taylor, Rawls, Gilligan and
others have questioned Habermas' decentred understanding of the world as the meta-norm with which
we ought to govern our conduct: by questioning rules and principles and the arguments employed to
legitimise them. We will take this as a reasonable procedure.
If the disputed rule is claimed by one of us to be a norm of the kind stipulated by discourse ethics we
will treat this form of argumentation as any other, looking for the possibility of questioning some or all
of the

Page 138
procedures, as we have done in the previous sections. Fashioning ourselves into subjects capable of
testing and acting in accord with universal laws will of course be one recommendation and we will treat
this interlocutor with equality and reciprocity in our obligation to the truth. The questioning this proposal
receives will be a good critical test of its claim to be universal. We will also listen to and learn from the
reasons of those who wish to submit to a spiritual tradition, have cultural or gender differences
recognised, or speak from other modes of subjection, ethical orientations and comprehensive doctrines.
We will not seek consensus at this abstract level of what Foucault and Rawls call a comprehensive ‘vision
of the world’. We will look on such an idea as unreasonable and ‘dangerous’ (WE 46). In so doing we
accept the postmodern burdens of judgement (Connolly, 1997).
Reaching an overlapping consensus in light of our background differences will be an important
consideration but, as Foucault explained to Taylor in a discussion of Habermas, even this kind of
agreement cannot function as a regulative idea or ‘regulatory principle’: that is, the unquestioned form
of reflection on processes of argumentation and coordination of communicative action (FR 379).
Consensus can function only as a ‘critical idea’, as one heuristic form of reflection among others whose
limitations must always be open to question. Consensus is ‘a critical idea to maintain at all times: to ask
oneself what portion of nonconsensuality is implied in such a power relation, and whether that degree of
nonconsensuality is necessary or not, and then one may question every power relation to that extent’
(FR 379).
There are, as we have seen, two reasons for this critical stance to consensus-centred analyses of
politics. First, there is the possibility in any game of truth of challenging the consensus and thinking
differently, so there is always the possibility of reasonable disagreement. Any consensus will be a
negotiated or agonic consensus all the way down, recognising and accommodating reasonable
disagreement or failing to do so. Secondly, consensus is not the basis of a power relation, but, at best,
its instrument or result, so it cannot itself guarantee our freedom from arbitrary power. The only
‘guarantee of freedom is freedom itself’ (FR 245). Foucault means that there will be a tenuous
connection between any agreement and its application in practice. Hence, we must be just as concerned
with the second half of his ethos: to tie the negotiated agreement as tightly as possible ‘to the test of
concrete practices’, to the practice of freedom (WE 50). Implementation, then, will not be seen as a
separate and secondary category but as part and parcel of the permanent critique.
Most importantly, we will analyse historically the relations between the contested rule, the forms of
negotiation and relations of power. Genealogies of the processes of subjectivisation under the contested
description of the subject and of historical strategies of freedom in

Page 139
relation to it will be written and circulated in the discussions, as Foucault did in relation to struggles
around the rules of psychiatry, prisons, medicine and sexuality. The same will be done for the relations
of power involved in the games of negotiation and implementation, exposing the obstacles, arbitrary
constraints and unnecessary coercive effects, and designing mechanisms to modify or compensate for
them. We might, to take one among many examples, explore the extent to which the procedures of
yes–no positions, reversibility and universalisation in Habermas' forms of negotiation are related to male
power and elite forms of argument that silence and intimidate culturally and class-different others, aim
at victory over the adversary rather than mutual understanding and exclude more conciliatory genres of
reaching understanding and agreement. These sorts of connection to relations of power in Habermas'
model are suggested by Iris Marion Young in her sketch of a genealogy (1996: 123):
The deliberative model of communication derives from specific institutional contexts of the modern West
– scientific debate, modern parliaments, and courts (each with progenitors in ancient Greek and Roman
philosophy and politics, and in the medieval academy). These were some of the aspiring institutions of
the bourgeois revolution that succeeded in becoming ruling institutions. Their institutional forms, rules,
and rhetorical and cultural styles have defined the meaning of reason itself in the modern world. As
ruling institutions, however, they have been elitist and exclusive, and these exclusions mark their very
conceptions of reason and deliberation, both in the institutions and in the rhetorical styles they
represent. Since their Enlightenment beginnings, they have been male-dominated institutions, and in
class- and race-differentiated societies they have been white- and upper-class dominated. Despite the
claim of deliberative forms of orderly meetings to express pure universal reason, the norms of
deliberation are culturally specific and often operate as forms of power that silence or devalue the
speech of some people.
These studies will enable us to see our island of disputation and negotiation as it is, in the rough and
agonic sea of relations of power, rather than from the point of view of a utopia free of power. With this
tool kit in hand we will be in a position not only to think differently but to begin the cautious
experiments in acting differently, in modifying our rules of interaction and practices of self-formation in
such a way that the specific game in question can now be played with ‘a minimum of domination’. In so
doing we may overlook something universal beneath what we are thinking and doing and we will always
find that we have to begin again. This is a risk Foucault recommends we take in exchange for this
‘patient labor’ on actual existing limits in the present by means of an approach that gives ‘form to our
impatience for liberty’ (WE 50).

Page 140
Notes
1 The five principal dimensions of the analytics of relations of power are (1) the systems of
differentiations which permit one to act on the actions of others; (2) the types of objectives pursued by
those who act on the actions of others; (3) the means of bringing power relations into being: by arms,
words, economic disparities, complex means of control, surveillance, customs, consent and so on; (4)
the forms of institutionalisation; and (5) the degrees of rationalisation (SP 223–4). For an excellent
exposition and explanation see Mitchell Dean, Governmentality (1999).
2 The four main lines of analysis of ethics are the determination of the ethical substance, the mode of
subjection, the form of ethical work, and the telos of the ethical life (UP 25–30).
Glossary of Abbreviations
FF The Final Foucault, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
FR The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.
G ‘Governmentality’ in G. Burchell et al., eds, The Foucault Effect, Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1991, pp. 87–104.
HS The History of Sexuality, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979.
JA Justification and Application, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
MC Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
PDM The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1987.
PK Power/Knowledge, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Press, 1980.
PP Politics, Philosophy, Culture, New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall,
1988.
R ‘Final Interview’, Michel Foucault, Raritan, 1 (Summer 1985): 1–13.
RR ‘Reconciliation through the public use of reason’, Journal of Philosophy,
92(3): 109–31.
SP ‘The subject and power’ in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault:
Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
pp. 214–32.
TCAI The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
TS Technologies of the Self, London: Tavistock, 1988.
UP The Uses of Pleasure, New York: Vintage Books, 1985.
WC ‘What is Critique?’, in J. Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century
Answers to Twentieth-Century Questions, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996, pp. 382–98.
WE ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in FR, pp. 32–50.
References
Apel, K.O. (1987) ‘The problem of philosophical foundations in light of transcendental pragmatics of
language’, in K. Baynes, J. Bohman and T. McCarthy (eds), After Philosophy: End or Transformation?
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 250–90.

Page 141
Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (1996) Foucault and Political Reason. London: University College
London Press.
Benhabib, S. (1986) Critique, Norm and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press.
Benhabib, S. (1992) Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Blaug, R. (1997) ‘Between fear and disappointment: critical, empirical and political uses of Habermas',
Political Studies, 45 (1): 100–17.
Burchell, G. (1991) ‘Peculiar interests: civil society and governing the system of “natural liberty” ’, in C.
Gordon, G. Burchell and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. pp. 119–
50.
Chambers, S. (1996) Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Cohen, J. (1991) ‘Deliberation and democratic legitimacy’, in A. Hamin and P. Pettit (eds), The Good
Polity. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 17–34.
Connolly, W. (1997) ‘Refashioning the secular’. Paper presented at Research of the Social Sciences
seminar Australian National University, September 1997.
Cooke, M. (1994) Language and Reason: a Study of Habermas' Pragmatics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dean, M. (1999) Governmentality. London: Sage.
Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Gutting, G. (1989) Michel Foucault's Archeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Habermas, J. (TCAI) (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston,
MA: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (RR) (1995) ‘Reconciliation through the public use of reason’, Journal of Philosophy, 92
(3): 109–31.
Hadot, P. (1996) Philosophy as a Way of Life. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hekman, S. (ed.) (1995) Rereading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Foucault. Pittsburgh: Penn
State University Press.
Hindess, B. (1996) Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ingram, D. (1993) ‘The limits and possibilities of communicative ethics for democratic theory’, Political
Theory, 21 (2): 294–321.
Ingram, D. (1994) ‘Foucault and Habermas on the subject of reason’, in G. Gutting (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 215–61.
Johri, M. (1997) ‘On the universality of Habermas' Discourse ethics’. Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University,
Department of Philosophy, Montreal.
Kelly, M. (ed.) (1994) Critique and Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Korsgaard, C. (1996) The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laden, A. (1997) ‘Constructing shared wills: deliberative liberalism and the politics of identity’. Ph.D.
dissertation, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Owen, D. (1995) Nietzsche, Politics, Modernity. London: Sage.
Owen, D. (1996) ‘Foucault, Habermas and the claims of reason’, History of the Human Sciences, 9 (2):
119–38.

Page 142
Peterson, A. and Bunth, R. (1997) Foucault: Health and Medicine. London: Routledge.
Pocock, J.G.A. (1975) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rawls, J. (1995) ‘A reply to Habermas', Journal of Philosophy, 92 (3): 109–78.
Ruane, J. and Todd, J. (1988) ‘The application of critical theory’, Political Studies, 36: 533–8.
Schmid, M. (1982) ‘Habermas' theory of social evolution’, in J. Thompson and D. Held (eds), Habermas:
Critical Debates. London: Macmillan. pp. 162–80.
Skinner, Q. (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. One: the Renaissance. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Skinner, Q. (1988a) ‘Language and social change’, in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin
Skinner and his Critics. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 119–34.
Skinner, Q. (1988b) ‘A reply to my critics’, in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and
his Critics. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 231–89.
Skinner, Q. (1996) Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Strawson, P. (1974) Freedom and Resentment. London: Routledge.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Toulmin, S. (1984) An Introduction to Reasoning. New York: Macmillan.
Toulmin, S. and Jonsen, A. (1988) The Abuse of Casuistry: a History of Moral Reasoning. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1993) [1890] ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’, in J. Klage and A. Nordman (eds),
Philosophical Occasions. Indianapolis: Hackett. pp. 118–55.
Young, I.M. (1996) ‘Communication and the other: beyond deliberative democracy’, in S. Benhabib (ed.),
Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press. pp. 120–36.

Page 143
5
QUESTIONS OF CRITICISM
Habermas and Foucault on Civil Society
and Resistance
Samantha Ashenden
The concept ‘civil society’ plays a prominent role in contemporary political discourse, locating a space of
criticism and resistance to the state and forms of bureaucratic organisation and articulating the
possibility of an alternative mode of social organisation to that of the state-society relationship
engendered by the Keynesian welfare state.1 In this chapter I take up the characterisations of the
modern welfare state and of civil society provided by Habermas and by Foucault in order to show how
they provide different ways of thinking politically about the challenges which confront us.
I will suggest that while the revival of use of the term ‘civil society’ in the context of debates about the
role and future of the welfare state signifies a number of deep-seated problems with the forms of
welfare state-society relations dominant in Western Europe during the twentieth century, there are limits
to what mobilising the concept ‘civil society’ can do to ground social criticism and to articulate alternative
visions. In other words, I will claim that we cannot move smoothly from recognising problems
engendered by modern state-society relations to providing an alternative normative framework premised
on ‘civil society’. First, because the term ‘civil society’ fails fully to grasp the complexities and dynamics
of modern state-subject relations; it is based on a juridical account of power inadequate to the task of
analysing modern strategies of government. Secondly, this concept is tied, in the work of Habermas,
Cohen and Arato and others, to an understanding of criticism which contains rather than resolves the
antinomies signified by the term ‘civil society’, thus presenting a problem with respect to grounding a
critical account through developing this concept. Consequently, while deploying the term ‘civil society’
may have freedom-enhancing effects in specific

Page 144
contexts,2 refining the terms of contemporary political institutions and discourses, it may also be a term
which constrains our critical capacities by tying us to what we already are.
The first section of this chapter locates the concept ‘civil society’ historically and within current debates.
The second and third sections examine the alternative accounts of the emergence of modern social
relations, the welfare state and civil society provided by Habermas and by Foucault. The fourth section
focuses on what is at stake in these authors' contributions to the illumination of contemporary relations
of government. The final section considers how the different characterisations of modern social
formations provided by these two writers, along with their respective modes of analysis (reconstructive
science and genealogy), entrench different understandings of criticism and of the practice of resistance.
The Concept ‘Civil Society’: Historical Context and Current
Usage
We can trace the history of the concept of civil society from the equation of civil society with political
society to the ‘emancipation’ of civil society from politics which accompanied the breakdown of
feudalism. This was expressed in eighteenth-century debates concerning the negotiation of the
relationship between civic virtue and civil virtue in the context of newly emerging forms of private and
commercial life. Seligman (1992, 1993) discusses the separation of civil society from political society in
the work of the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, elaborating how, for these thinkers (principally
Hutcheson, Ferguson, Hume and Smith) ‘civil society’ was a solution to the problem of resolving the
tension between the one and the many, unity and diversity, of providing a vision of a unified social
order and simultaneously recognising the autonomy of legal, moral and economic spheres. These writers
turned to the ideas of natural sympathy and moral affections to underpin their accounts of a social
order based on innate mutuality. This became the basis of the idea of civil society as a spontaneous
order. Within this work, civil society was itself seen as an ethical arena, a space of interaction and not
simply of market exchange.
The eighteenth-century conception of civil society which emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment
contained a number of different strands of thought. The writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were
centrally concerned with the relationship between wealth and virtue, material advance and the moral
progress of society. They took from Montesquieu a modern notion of political freedom in terms of
economic progress, social refinement and a balanced constitution (Oz-Salzberger, 1995a: xiii) but had
differing degrees of trust in the capacity of modern commercial society to deliver social progress. For
example, while Smith expressed

Page 145
considerable faith in the development of commercial society and its division of labour, Ferguson sought
to revive the classical meaning of the civic and to balance modern political economy with republican
elements of government.3
The ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were transported to Germany with translations of Ferguson's
Essay on the History of Civil Society (1768) and Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776–8 and 1794–6), among others. Oz-Salzberger (1995b) details the German
reception of Scottish ideas at the end of the eighteenth century. She notes that ‘civil society’ has a
standard German translation as bürgerliche Gesellschaft and that this concept has common historical
roots in Aristotle's politike koinonia and polis and in the Latin societas civilis and civitas (1995b: 142).
However, in the eighteenth-century German context, the concept of civil society remained within the
jurisprudential tradition alien to Ferguson and was understood to mean ‘all political ties which form any
kind of government’ (1995b: 144, 146). Oz-Salzberger goes on to note that the German reception of
Ferguson's Essay lost the civic activist meanings of the English terms ‘civil society’ and ‘citizen’ (1995b:
145, 151–2).4
With Hegel, ‘civil society’ became a private sphere of trade and social interaction counterpoised to the
public realm of law and government, the state. Hegel's account of civil society as comprising the system
of needs, the administration of justice and police was a realm of conflict between particular interests in
sharp opposition to the state; Hegel's philosophy resolved the tension between the individual and the
community through the subsumption of particular interests beneath the unfolding of the universal, and
civil society lost its autonomy.5 When Marx took the term civil society from Hegel he focused on civil
society as the system of needs, that is, on economic relations. This turned the traditional meaning on its
head, locating civil society as the realm of individual egoism and self-interest, as ‘bourgeois society’ and
as something to be overcome. The Scottish Enlightenment meaning of ‘commerce’ as social intercourse
and communication as well as economic transaction was thus lost in Marx's focus on productive
relations.6
The question of the relation between state and society has been elaborated in a sociological direction by
writers who have focused on the development of modern democratic citizenship and the welfare state
(see Arendt, 1958; Bobbio, 1989; Habermas, 1984, 1987a, 1996a). These accounts stress how, through
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the bourgeois emancipation of society from the state has been
replaced by a reappropriation of society by the state in the shift from a constitutional to a social state.
These accounts suggest that a conflict exists between the protected and the participating citizen. How
are we to understand the dynamic established by this conflict? And, if civil society was the product of
the early modern European separation of state and society, how are these relations configured in the
late twentieth century?

Page 146
Contemporary evaluations of ‘civil society’ fall broadly into two camps.7 Some writers interpret civil
society to refer to the realm of individualism which developed with the Enlightenment and the economic
relations of capitalism (MacIntyre, 1994). From this, predominantly critical, position civil society is
associated with individualism, the rule of law and markets:
the coherence of civil society rests not on common language, conventions or territory but on market
exchange, the rule of law, impersonal means of communication and sometimes shared coercive
authority; that is, it rests more on common procedures and less on shared morality and belief. Civil
society is closest of all human groupings to having no substantive purpose. These things are left to
individuals and associations, the role of which is therefore enhanced. (Black, 1988: 73–4)8
Others separate civil society from economic relations and from the family, using civil society to refer to a
non-market, non-state sphere of ‘social life’. This way of conceptualising civil society predominates in
recent articulations of the theme, providing the notion of a realm of ‘private individuals’ communicating
freely in a ‘public context’, the ‘free associations of civil society’. This latter way of theorising criticism
and resistance to the state within contemporary political discourse is one which regards civil society as
the locus for the potential development of critical public spheres capable of generating resistance to
forms of unaccountable expert authority and administrative power. This is the way in which Habermas
and, following him, Keane (1988) and Cohen and Arato (1992) use the concept. In relation to the
‘rediscovery of civil society’, Habermas comments:
the now current meaning of the term ‘civil society’ … no longer includes a sphere of an economy
regulated by labour, capital and commodity markets and thus differs from the modern translation,
common since Hegel and Marx, of ‘societas civilis’ as ‘bourgeois society’ (‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’).
Unfortunately, a search for clear definitions in the relevant publications is in vain. However, this much is
apparent: the institutional core of ‘civil society’ is constituted by voluntary unions outside the realm of
the state and the economy and ranging from churches, cultural associations, and academies to
independent media, sport and leisure clubs, debating societies, groups of concerned citizens, and grass-
roots petitioning drives all the way to occupational associations, political parties, labour unions and
‘alternative institutions’. (Habermas, 1992: 453–4)
The rest of this chapter examines the work that the term ‘civil society’ is asked to perform in
contemporary political discourse, raising the question whether and in what ways this concept can be a
productive locus for the organisation of our critical energies. In order to provide substantive grounds on
which to judge this issue, we now turn to Habermas' and Foucault's characterisations of the emergence
of modern social relations

Page 147
and to their arguments concerning the character of modern welfare states.
Habermas: Modern Social Relations, Juridification and the
Dilemmas of the Welfare State
Habermas' work provides a complex analysis of the development and dynamics of modern state-society
relations. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) plots the emergence of a ‘bourgeois
public sphere’ in eighteenth-century European society as a result of the rise of the modern state and the
development of capitalist economic activity. On Habermas' account, the separation of state and civil
society which developed with the growth of commercial life facilitated the emergence of a modern public
sphere. This occurred through the development of print media and the establishment of coffee houses in
which open discussion of the issues of the day could take place. Thus, this period saw the development
of the idea of society as separate from the ruler and of a public of private individuals debating the
authority of the state through engaging in the ‘public use of reason’ (1989: 27). Habermas characterises
eighteenth-century civil society as ‘the genuine domain of private autonomy [that] stood opposed to the
state’ (1989: 12).
According to Habermas, this bourgeois public sphere provided a site for the emergence of critical
rational debate:
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people coming
together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public
authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the
basically privatised but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour. The medium
of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people's public use of their
reason. (1989: 27)9
Habermas suggests that through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there has been a progressive
‘refeudalisation’ of the public sphere as a result of the emergence of commercial mass media and the
welfare state. The former replaced critical public opinion formation with manipulation,10 the latter
development transformed the form of the state from a constitutional to a social state and re-fused
relations between the state and society. With these transformations Habermas argues that the critical
potential of public opinion has been denuded as the functioning of the public sphere has shifted from
that of rational debate to the negotiation of interests. At the same time, the development of the welfare
state has been inimical to the continued formation of critical public spheres within civil society because it
produces forms of clientelism and a bureaucratisation of everyday life, through which citizens become
subjects whose consciousness is characterised by ‘generalised particularism’.

Page 148
In his recent work, Habermas has taken up the theme of the relation of state and society as
characterised by a distinction between the system and the lifeworld (1984, 1987a). Habermas examines
the impact of the welfare state more closely in this later work. By examining the major themes he
develops using the system/lifeworld distinction we can see how he locates ‘civil society’ as a privileged
site for the redemption of modernity.11
The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984, 1987a) provides an account which claims to
explain the development of modern ‘social pathologies’ and to provide critical reflection upon them.
Fundamental to Habermas' theory is the distinction between two categorically different types of action
and processes of rationalisation. Habermas distinguishes purposive rational action and communicative
action. The first action type represents action oriented to success; the second, communicative action, is
oriented toward reaching an understanding. This latter form of action takes place essentially through
language and refers to the interaction of at least two subjects (1984: 85–6). Within this framework of
two action types, Habermas reformulates Weber's account of the process of societal rationalisation,
proposing two separate evolutionary dimensions corresponding to the two action orientations.
The theory of social evolution proposed by Habermas to explain the rationalisation process involves a
two-level concept of society, system and lifeworld, corresponding to the two action orientations.
Habermas claims that the system or sphere of material production and purposive rational action is
progressively differentiated from the lifeworld context of symbolic reproduction through the process of
rationalisation. The modern lifeworld is formulated as ‘a reservoir of taken for granteds, of unshaken
convictions that participants in communication draw upon in cooperative processes of interpretation’
(Habermas, 1987a: 124). The lifeworld is reproduced through communicative action and serves as a
background source of situation definitions which undergo rationalisation in terms of the attainment of
‘communicatively achieved understanding’ as opposed to ‘normatively ascribed agreement’ (1984: 70).
Enlarging on previous sociological concepts, Habermas argues that the lifeworld is symbolically
reproduced and structurally complex, involving the processes of cultural reproduction, social integration
and socialisation, functions which have been differentiated through evolution (1987a: 152). Within this
account the lifeworld is defined as the private nuclear family and the public political sphere.
The concept of ‘system’, in contrast, refers to those mechanisms in modern society that are ‘uncoupled’
from the communicative context of the lifeworld and are coordinated through functional interconnections
via the media of money and power (1987a: 150). System integration concerns the material reproduction
of society and is organised principally through the institutionalisation of purposive rational action in the
modern economy and state. In contrast to the lifeworld, then, the rationalisation

Page 149
of systems can be regarded as an increase in their bureaucratic complexity and ‘steering capacity’
(1987a: 152). The system, for Habermas, comprises the modern economy and state administration.
Thus, Habermas suggests that we conceive of society as ‘a system that has to fulfil conditions for the
maintenance of sociocultural lifeworlds’ (1987a: 152). While the lifeworld and system have different
developmental logics and are progressively ‘uncoupled’ in modern society, nevertheless they remain
interdependent. The system remains anchored in the lifeworld and is dependent upon the structural
possibilities and limitations which develop with the rationalisation of the lifeworld (1987a: 148); it is from
this sphere that the economic and political subsystems differentiated and it continues to be the basis of
their normative support and reproduction, even as they become increasingly bureaucratic and divorced
from the lifeworld context.
In turn, the lifeworld becomes ‘mediatised’ to the extent that ‘delinguistified media of system integration’
are used to relate the system and lifeworld. This process occurs through the social roles of employee,
consumer, citizen and client which crystallise around these exchange relations. In assuming these roles,
actors detach themselves from the lifeworld and adapt to formally organised domains of action (1987a:
185). According to Habermas, this ‘mediatisation’ of the lifeworld takes on the form of an ‘internal
colonisation’ when the delinguistified media of the system take over the essential symbolic reproduction
functions of the lifeworld itself, thereby ‘objectifying’ or ‘reifying’ social relationships. The internal
colonisation of the lifeworld produces pathological effects as the lifeworld has some essentially symbolic
functions, that is it is concerned with socialisation, social integration and understanding, all of which rely
on communicative action and thus cannot be replaced by delinguistified media (1987a: 208).
Habermas recognises that the colonisation thesis is very abstract; he suggests that it may be tested by
means of evidence concerning the ‘juridification of communicatively structured areas of action’ (1987a:
356). ‘Juridification’ is used here to refer to ‘the tendency toward an increase in formal (or positive,
written) law that can be observed in modern society’ (1987a: 357). Habermas distinguishes the
expansion of law into previously informally regulated domains from increased density of law in the form
of more detailed statements. In Volume 2 of The Theory of Communicative Action he is primarily
concerned with the former, and traces this extension of law through four stages towards the
institutionalisation of the democratic welfare state.
In so far as juridification supplants a communicative context of action with the law as a medium, this is
linked to the colonisation thesis. Through the extension of law as a medium of state administration,
monetary compensation and therapeutic assistance supplant the independent organisation of the
lifeworld and ‘spread a web of client relations over the private spheres of life’ (1987a: 364). Habermas
uses the example of

Page 150
legal intervention into social life through welfare policies as an instance of juridification leading to
pathological colonisation. This is because, according to Habermas, the situations regulated by welfare
policy are ‘embedded in the context of a life history and of a concrete form of life’ which necessarily
suffers ‘violent abstraction’ if it is to be dealt with within a legal and administrative, that is ‘formal’,
framework (1987a: 363). Thus the dilemma of increasing the scope of the welfare state is that welfare
guarantees destroy ‘consensual mechanisms that coordinate action’, transforming them into
administration through the media of money and power so that ‘from the start, the ambivalence of
guaranteeing freedom and taking it away has attached to the policies of the welfare state’ (1987a: 361).
At the centre of Habermas' argument concerning the juridification of the lifeworld through intervention
by the welfare state is the hypothesis that the establishment of legal principles such as welfare rights
means ‘not increasing the density of an already existing network of formal regulations, but rather,
legally supplanting a communicative context of action through the superimposition of legal norms’
(1987a: 369). Legal intervention into social life fundamentally transforms the relations within it and
therefore, from Habermas' perspective, precipitates pathological effects as ‘in these spheres of the
lifeworld we find, prior to any juridification, norms and contexts of action that by functional necessity
are based on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action’ (1987a: 369).
For Habermas, the welfare state is a central mechanism in the monetarisation and bureaucratisation of
the lifeworld; this produces pathological effects by reducing or usurping the essential functions of
communicative rationality inherent in lifeworld interaction. This theory suggests that the major channels
of conflict in modern capitalist societies are not based on class but result from the self-destructive
consequences of system growth; these conflicts arise and exist along the ‘seam’ between the system
and the lifeworld as the result of lifeworld responses to the threat of colonisation.
Habermas argues that the conditions of ‘pathology’ which result from systemic mechanisms penetrating
the symbolic reproductive spheres of the lifeworld are the result of ‘selective’ or one-sided rationalisation
so that the economic and political system has come to dominate many aspects of the modern lifeworld.
He claims that what is needed is a shift in this balance; that the purposive rational orientation of the
system is not inherently harmful, but that it must be brought under the control of the ‘communicative
rationality’ of the lifeworld. There is a need to retrieve the potential for rationality of practical and
communicative activity. Therefore the possibility of an undistorted intersubjectivity ‘must today be wrung
from the professional, specialised, self-sufficient culture of experts and from the system imperatives of
the state and economy which destructively invade the ecological basis of life and the

Page 151
communicative infrastructure of our lifeworld’ (1986: 210). Habermas sees the possibility of such
resistance in civil society, specifically in new social movements as movements emerging from the
lifeworld and organised along the ‘seam’ between lifeworld and system. He suggests that we need to
‘erect a democratic dam against the colonising encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the
lifeworld’ (1992: 444).
Thus, Habermas provides a diagnosis of modern social formations as comprising differentiated realms of
system and lifeworld, where the latter is under threat of ‘colonisation’ by the former through the
monetarisation and bureaucratisation of life. For Habermas, the possibility of criticism lies in the
immanent features of communicative action. He suggests that we can entrench resistance to systemic
tendencies to ‘colonise’ the lifeworld by building a ‘democratic dam’; the possibility of a retrieval of the
rational possibilities of modernity is therefore tied to the rationalisation of the lifeworld, the
reinvigoration of the associations of civil society and the institutional guarantees of a constitutional state.
Habermas' recent work is an attempt to reconcile and move beyond the limits of liberalism and
republicanism through a procedural account of law and democracy which combines liberal
constitutionalism with associations in civil society forming ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ publics respectively
(Baynes, 1995). Within this there is a hoped-for rejuvenation of the public sphere delivering a version of
deliberative democracy.
Foucault: Governmentality and the Aporia of Modern
Political Rationalities
Foucault provides a distinct account of contemporary social relations derived from an analysis of the
‘governmentalisation’ of life within modern political rationalities. We can specify Foucault's account of
‘civil society’ and of the ‘welfare state problem’ by examining the themes of biopolitics, governmentality
and the emergence of liberal political rationalities.
In Discipline and Punish (1977) and in The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (1979a) Foucault develops the
theme of biopolitics as an expression describing the general rationality of modern power: ‘biopower [is
used] to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life’ (1979a: 143). The beginning of this period
of the exercise of power over life is dated from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth
century, the period of the formation of the modern prison and of concern over, and new knowledges of,
population. Biopower combines two axes: one centred on the body as a machine to be made useful
through discipline, an ‘anatamo-politics of the human body’; the second focused on the supervision and
regulation of the species body, a ‘biopolitics of the population’. These together form two

Page 152
poles of the organisation of ‘power over life’ (1979a: 139). The focus of this ‘bipolar technology …
characterised a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through
and through’ (1979a: 139).
Biopolitics is thus characterised by a double focus: a focus on the individual body, its disciplining,
usefulness, efficiency and so forth; and a concern with the ‘species body’ (1979a: 139), questions of
demography, the health and regulation of the population. This is coterminous, at the level of knowledge,
with the emergence of the idea of the individual case history, the documentation of the details of an
individual's life, and the development of statistics. Foucault argues that these individualising and
totalising forms of knowledge are made possible and linked by the development of the human sciences
and by panoptic and confessional technologies as institutional sites for the emergence of the concerns of
the ‘sciences of man’. These forms of knowledge and power link the welfare of individuals with the
nation state and forms of political rule in new ways.
In his work on governmentality (1979b), Foucault links his general concern with biopolitics as a modern
form of power over life to the question of political rationality, of ‘rationalities of rule’ as specific forms of
the conduct of conduct. Foucault defines government in a general way as ‘the conduct of conduct’, a
way of doing things or as an ‘art’ through which individual and collective conduct is conducted (Foucault,
1988, in Burchell, 1993: 267). ‘Governmentality’ signifies a concern with a range of institutions,
apparatuses and knowledges which constitute, regulate and survey the political domain.
Foucault presents an historical thesis concerning the ‘governmentalisation’ of the state as a result of a
confluence of new knowledges and techniques of rule which emerge in the sixteenth century and
develop as practices of government from the eighteenth century. He documents a shift from sixteenth
century raison d'état to modern mechanisms of government, arguing that a new art of government is
formed around the problem of population.
Within the recognition of population as an issue and the possibility of its management we see the
emergence of a domain of the social and the development of a range of new techniques of government
centred on regulating and surveying this domain. Central to this is ‘the welfare state problem’; ‘the
tricky adjustment between political power wielded over legal subjects and pastoral power wielded over
live individuals’ (1988: 67). Foucault, then, clearly distinguishes juridical or ‘sovereign’ forms of power
(power as right, law, repression) from disciplinary or ‘normalising’ forms of power (power as the capacity
to organise, sustain and enhance life). The two are linked: the modern individual is simultaneously a
citizen with rights, part of a juridical polity, and a subject of normalisation, part of welfare society.
Indeed, the emergence of this nexus of governmental relations is accompanied historically by the
development

Page 153
of modern notions of citizenship. In this way practices concerning the management of populations are
linked with discourses of sovereignty which remain as their justification. The modern epoch is thus
characterised by ‘this … heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous
disciplinary mechanism’ (Foucault, 1980: 106). This analysis opens a space in which to consider
liberalism as a mode of government (see Burchell et al., 1991; Rose and Miller, 1992) and to explore
the ways in which the welfare state and civil society are conjoined in modern society.
Liberalism, as a critique of state reason, involves a political and an epistemological revolution. With its
emergence we see first, the idea of economy and society having natural laws, thus the liberal problem
of the appropriate boundary between state action and inaction, where, secondly, this boundary is
organised through the elaboration of methods of government by means of which liberty and security are
linked, the rule of law and the idea of a realm protected against the state relying upon an ordering and
management of social existence. Within liberalism, appropriate roles for the state are defined by
reference to an already existing autonomous economy and society, the state's role being to secure the
self-reproducing existence of these processes, enforcing ‘natural’ processes with mechanisms of security
through ‘social government’.
From his specification of the relation of sovereignty, discipline and government Foucault concludes that:
We must … see things not in terms of the substitution for a society of sovereignty of a disciplinary
society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a governmental one; in reality we
have a triangle: sovereignty–discipline–government, which has as its primary target the population and
as its essential mechanism apparatuses of security. (1979b: 19; my italics)
Modern liberal political rationalities combine the ‘city-citizen game’ and the ‘shepherd-flock game’. That
is, we are simultaneously citizens with rights produced through law, and subjects of discipline and
normalisation produced through partnership and positive knowledge. The ‘welfare state problem’ is that
of reconciling ‘law’ with ‘order’, producing ‘the social’ as a governed domain. This process involves a
continual negotiation of the public and the private, achieved through the deployment of forms of
normalising knowledge and expertise:
it is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is
within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on; thus the
state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of
governmentality. (Foucault, 1979b: 21)
In this way of conceptualising relationships, ‘civil society’ is neither an ideological construct nor an
‘aboriginal reality’, a natural given repelling

Page 154
government or opposing the state. Rather civil society is a ‘transactional reality’ (Gordon, 1991: 23) at
the interface of political power and the government of populations. Civil society is a ground for a
problematisation and for the development of a set of innovative techniques of government; it is both an
object and an end of government. As a concept it collectively organises social experience and is a site of
governmental organisation concerning the conduct of ‘autonomous’ individuals.12 As such, the term ‘civil
society’ encompasses the tensions between the natural and the managed within liberalism: it is not the
point of their resolution. Thus, Foucault makes the following statement: ‘I haven't spoken about civil
society. And on purpose, because I hold that the theoretical opposition between the state and civil
society which traditional political theory belabors is not very fruitful’ (Foucault, 1991: 163–4).
We are now in a position to reflect on the different accounts of the welfare state and of civil society
developed by Habermas and by Foucault, assessing the stakes of this debate for the analysis of
contemporary relations of government and the implications of these analyses for the question of the
practice of criticism.
Specifying the Welfare State Problem
Maybe what is really important for our modernity – that is, for our present – is not so much the
étatisation of society, as the ‘governmentalisation’ of the State. (Foucault, 1979b: 20)
Habermas and Foucault raise similar concerns relating to the development of technical complexes of
knowledge in the name of enlightenment and the accompanying scientisation of politics. Both focus on
the implications of contemporary state–society relations in the context of the development of modern
welfare states. However, they frame these concerns in very different ways. Habermas analyses the
welfare state in terms of state and society meshing through processes of juridification and colonisation;
Foucault discusses the welfare state in terms of the aporia of law and order which this set of relations
exhibits.
According to Habermas, the welfare state repoliticises the market and produces forms of clientalism.
The welfare state is a central aspect of the monetarisation and bureaucratisation of the lifeworld.
Welfare states were designed to produce and maintain social integration but have significantly failed in
this task as their juridical-administrative form produces pathological effects by reducing or usurping
communicative relations, replacing them with money and power. In the face of this, Habermas suggests
reaffirming the importance of procedures underpinning the constitutional state, coupled with a
reinvigoration of the civil associations of the public sphere. This is given sustained attention in Between
Facts and Norms (1996a). Here, Habermas builds on his earlier

Page 155
analysis of the distinction between the system and the lifeworld to develop a propositional theory of law
and democracy which he argues is capable of regrounding the legitimacy of the welfare state by forging
closer links between the public spheres of civil society and the state. By briefly examining some features
of this later argument, we can see how Habermas recognises but then overlooks important aspects of
the welfare state highlighted by Foucault: its normalising character. We will see that the path taken by
Habermas' analysis then reiterates and refines rather than challenges the limits of contemporary political
reason.
Habermas characterises the dilemma of the welfare state as comprising a ‘dialectic of empowerment and
tutelage’. He suggests that ‘built into the very status of citizenship in welfare state democracies is the
tension between a formal extension of private and civic autonomy, on the one hand, and a
‘‘normalisation”, in Foucault's sense, that fosters the passive enjoyment of paternalistically dispensed
rights, on the other’ (1996a: 79). However, recognition of the ‘normalising’ dimensions of welfare states
slips from Habermas' account as he focuses on this process as one of ‘juridification’. For example, he
suggests that we can divide the freedom-enhancing from the tutelary aspects of the welfare state,
stating that:
materialised law is stamped by an ambivalence of guaranteeing freedom and taking it away…. Still, it
would be rash to describe this structure itself as dilemmatic. For the criteria by which one can identify
the point where empowerment is converted into supervision are, even if context-dependent and
contested, not arbitrary. (1996a: 415–16, original emphasis)
That is, Habermas suggests that we can separate legitimate from illegitimate law by examining its
sources in relation to processes of democratic will formation.
Habermas suggests that the ‘peculiarly ambivalent effects’ (1996a: 42) of the welfare state occur
because of the inadequate institutionalisation of the democratic genesis of law. Law, separated from its
sources of validity in autonomous public spheres and the formal institutions of democratic legitimation, is
‘instrumentalised’ and ‘deprived of its internal structure’ (1996a: 429). The solution to the dilemmas of
the welfare state thus consists in further democratisation: ‘With the growth and qualitative
transformation of governmental tasks, the need for legitimation changes; the more the law is enlisted as
a means of political steering and social planning, the greater is the burden of legitimation that must be
borne by the democratic genesis of law’ (1996a: 427–8, original emphasis). In this way ‘the undesirable
effects of welfare-state provisions can be countered by a politics of qualifications for citizenship’ (1996a:
391).
We should note that this formulation is dependent upon eclipsing the tensions between juridification and
normalisation such that legitimate law is theorised as banishing power. Habermas states that ‘the
constitutional state has a twofold task: it must not only evenly divide and

Page 156
distribute political power but also strip such power of its violent substance by rationalising it’ (1996a:
188–9; my italics). This in turn rests upon the presupposition of a lifeworld that remains substantially
free from power. Let us examine these two aspects of Habermas' account.
In relation to the first point, when Habermas states that ‘under the premises of his theory of power,
Foucault so levels down the complexity of societal modernisation that the disturbing paradoxes of this
process cannot even become apparent to him’ (1987a: 291), he occludes the productivity of Foucault's
work in recognising tensions between law and order, juridical and normalising practices. For Foucault,
the welfare state is an expression of the combination of citizenship with subjecthood, legal with
normalising power, which organised on the plane of the social through the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries and which involves not just legal determinations of right but the development of a range of
positive knowledges of the social domain (see also Burchell et al., 1991; Donzelot, 1979): for Foucault,
modern social relations are characterised by a triangle ‘sovereignty–discipline–government’. From this
perspective, Habermas' account is inadequate to the task of resistance to the increased codification and
surveillance of life as it focuses on law as a solution.
To elaborate, Foucault highlights a central difficulty within Western political reason, that of reconciling
law and order without the subordination of the former to the latter. This produces scepticism about
invoking a politics of resistance founded on the notion of civil society as independent of and opposed to
the state. From this point of view Habermas' critical theory is inadequate to the task of resistance to the
increased codification and surveillance of life as this theoretical framework precludes the analysis of the
problem of power at the level of government.
In relation to the second point noted above, in Habermas' account of the lifeworld, and specifically of
civil society as a privileged site of criticism and resistance, further difficulties emerge. We have seen that
Habermas develops his account of modern social relations through a distinction between system and
lifeworld. This theoretical framework has been important in much of the rekindling of interest in civil
society as a productive term for theorising modern social relations. The distinction between system and
lifeworld grounds Habermas' attempt to provide a specifically critical theory of society in his account of
communicative action and the rationalisation of the lifeworld. In this, the lifeworld is positioned as an
arena of potential autonomy and communicative rationality which persists despite the colonising
tendencies of the system.
This is exhibited clearly in Habermas' formula for the solution of legitimation problems in the
constitutional states of advanced capitalist societies. He grounds the legitimacy of lawmaking in the idea
of ‘spontaneous inputs from a lifeworld whose core private domains are intact’ (1996a: 417): ‘legitimate
law reproduces itself only in the forms of a

Page 157
constitutionally regulated circulation of power, which should be nourished by the communications of an
unsubverted public sphere rooted in the core private spheres of an undisturbed lifeworld via the
networks of civil society’ (1996a: 408; my italics).
Within Habermas' work the distinction between system and lifeworld operates not only as an analytical
or descriptive device but as a normative distinction; this is the basis of his claim to provide a
distinctively critical theory (Habermas, 1984, 1987a, 1987b). In developing this account Habermas
transforms an hypothesis about the historical differentiation of spheres into a foundational claim and in
the process any critical purchase on the idea that the ‘lifeworld’ is an historical category, formed in
relation to the development of the liberal state, is lost. In effect, Habermas' theory operates in a similar
manner to liberal accounts, constructing a sociologised version of the public/private distinction and
constituting the ‘private’ or ‘lifeworld’ as a realm of freedom, autonomy and consensual action (see
Fraser, 1989; Honneth, 1991).
This essentialisation of the lifeworld is a logical and structural requirement of Habermas' critical claim
that the lifeworld is, of necessity, radically distinct from the system and that, therefore, the juridification
of lifeworld relationships produces forms of ‘pathological colonisation’. That is, the claim that
‘colonisation’ has ‘pathological’ effects depends upon the claim that the lifeworld is by nature and
essentially different from the system.
Critics such as Fraser (1989) have noted that Habermas' line of thought substantially eclipses the
possibility of recognising power relations within the lifeworld. However, while agreeing with aspects of
Fraser's critique, I want to suggest that this criticism cuts to the core of Habermas' account more
radically than Fraser recognises and that a fundamental problem with Habermas' formulation is more
properly considered to be the result of the hypostatisation of the categories ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’
which occurs as a necessary product of his move from philosophy to politics.13 This is tied directly to
the structure of Habermas' critical theory and to his ‘solution’ regarding the legitimation of law through
an appeal to communicative ethics. That is, Habermas' normative theory is premised on the possibility of
determining a ‘proper’ relation between state and civil society. In this way, Habermas' account replicates
the tensions between the natural and the managed found within liberalism.
The idea of the lifeworld and of civil society as a realm outside of and standing in opposition to the state
is inadequate to address the political problems presented by contemporary state–society relations. This
way of framing the issues misses the constituted character of private autonomy, civil society and the
state, suggesting instead a ‘no-place’ outside of power from which to practise criticism. Habermas'
account thus reproduces the features of liberal political theory in substantially post-liberal social
contexts.14

Page 158
These comments are not to suggest that the concept ‘civil society’ has no value but it is to suggest that
forms of political identification and mobilisation organised around this concept face the problem of
confronting issues of government which are specific and irreducible to, for example, questions of the
legal codification of rights and citizenship. This leads us to the next level of argument regarding the
character of criticism and of politics.
Questions of Criticism
We have interrogated the term ‘civil society’ in relation to the work of Habermas and Foucault. The
concerns of these two writers overlap; both situate themselves in relation to the Enlightenment and both
exhibit a concern with the development of our critical capacities. However, Habermas and Foucault
develop very different styles of reasoning. Habermas' project is that of reconstructive criticism within
which the idea of civil society is brought into the service of emancipatory social science. Foucault's work
takes the form of a number of genealogies within which concepts are to be interrogated as to their use
within practical systems for the ways in which they constitute and circumscribe our capacities to act.
These two writers thus provide different ways of rendering the concept ‘civil society’ up for judgement.
In conclusion, we will examine the different styles of reasoning and practices of criticism engaged in by
Habermas and by Foucault. Habermas' project of reconstructive criticism rests upon an account of
communicative consensus which operates as a regulative ideal giving direction to his critique. Foucault
suggests that the practice of criticism consists in giving a description, providing a genealogy of what we
are in order that we may open space in which to think differently about what we might become. In
relation to the place which ‘civil society’ occupies in these accounts, it becomes apparent that for
Habermas this is presupposed as the ground of critique while for Foucault ‘civil society’ is a term to be
interrogated for the ways in which it structures and delimits our political imaginations. I wish to suggest
that Foucault's question is prior: rather than presuppose that we must use this vocabulary we should
first ask broader questions concerning its emergence and deployment. While Habermas refines and
reiterates the terms of contemporary political reason, Foucault challenges us to think again about our
conceptual and practical limits.
Habermas' and Foucault's different styles of reasoning are tied to divergent understandings of what it
means to practise criticism. Habermas' theorisation of the relation between system and lifeworld grounds
his attempt to provide a critical theory of society in communicative action and in the rationalisation of
the lifeworld. The lifeworld is regarded as an arena of potential autonomy and communicative rationality
capable of

Page 159
disclosing the ideal of an undistorted intersubjectivity. This grounds his understanding of civil society as
a privileged locus of resistance to the colonising impetus of system imperatives. In this the lifeworld, and
in particular civil society, provides the possibility of an outside of power disclosed by the immanent
features of communication.
In counterpoising reason and domination, and in specifying civil society as a privileged locus of
resistance to domination, Habermas reworks the eighteenth-century question of the one and the many
through making a distinction between the real and the ideal. He does this by talking of ‘discourse’ as
separate from convention; practical discourse is located in and emerges from specific contexts and
conflicts, yet is seen as separable from them. Habermas argues that the conditions of discourse require
that ‘participants in argumentation proceed on the idealising assumption of a communication community
without limits in social space and historical time…. This perspective thus enables them to do justice to
the meaning of context-transcending validity claims’ (1996a: 322–3, original emphasis). This abstraction
divides theoretical reflection from the experience of political commitment, a move which should be
refused. Criticism need not involve positing an ‘ideal’ or ‘counterfactual’ against which to measure the
existing situation but is a matter of ‘making facile gestures difficult’ (Foucault, 1988: 155):
We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such a
reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of
emptiness, and deny its necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces.
(Foucault, 1989: 208)15
Rather than search for universally valid criteria of justice (for example, in an ideal of communicative
consensus), Foucault suggests the more modest approach of giving an account of what we are, of the
relationships that constitute and circumscribe us. This is not to dismiss normative questions but to
suggest that in so far as genealogies bring our modes of acting upon ourselves and others into relief,
this is already to question what we are and to open space in which to reflect critically on what we might
become. In this account, freedom consists not in a transcendental moment of agreement beyond social
space and historical time but in the recognition of difference in history and in our effective capacities to
act in the phenomenal world.16
The interplay of the real and the ideal not only produces an unhelpful moment of abstraction in
Habermas' argument, it also reveals the legislative aspects of his thought. Habermas' specification of a
regulative ideal of communicative consensus capable of grounding universal criteria of justice is an
attempt to specify the necessary limits of reason and to provide a determinate answer to the question of
enlightenment. The appeal to communicative rationality provides a foundation for legitimacy

Page 160
in the possibility of rational agreement. With this, Habermas attempts to provide grounds for a
determination of the proper relation between the state and civil society through an account of
communicative rationality and discursive democracy. He thus refines and reiterates the categories with
which contemporary political rationalities operate, with the aim of making the realities of politics match
more closely his ideal of an unlimited communication community. However, in its appeal to a horizon of
rational consensus this approach forecloses much possibility for thinking and acting politically and
threatens to produce a version of public morals rather than an ethos of politics. Is politics about
consensus or contestation? Or the articulation of the two?17
There may be tactical arenas in which deploying the term ‘civil society’ expresses our commitments and
can help us to refine in important ways what we already have, but to use this as the ground of
resistance is to tie the form of our identifications and to make them unmovable – to render them from
political discourse – as well as to reduce processes of contestation as imaginable only along the seam
between ‘state’ and ‘society’.
We need to displace the concept ‘civil society’ from its privileged position in contemporary political
discourse in order to render it up for judgement. In this Foucault's approach is productive as it is an
approach which takes the givenness of our concepts as a question to be addressed rather than as a
terrain to be refined.
Notes
An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Oxford Political Theory Conference in January
1997; I would like to thank the participants at that conference for their incisive comments. Thanks also
to David Owen and Paul Hirst for wide-ranging discussion of some of the themes presented here, and to
Kevin Knight for his encouragement and close critical scrutiny of this chapter.
1 Across the political spectrum, ‘civil society’ is regarded as providing an alternative site for their
organisation of welfare activity from that of the state or the market. For example, recent Institute of
Economic Affairs publications in Britain valorise civil society as a realm of voluntary organisations
(church, family and so on), which remove ‘politics’ from welfare and return it to a properly ‘moral’
sphere (Green, 1993). Alternatively, Keane (1988) (echoing Habermas, 1976, 1984, 1987a) has argued
that social democracy has placed too much reliance on the state as an instrument of social change,
abandoning the mobilisation of the population for the management of social life, thus replacing the self-
activity of citizens with bureaucratic intervention. Keane suggests that a return to the Keynesian welfare
state is neither possible nor desirable, instead suggesting the redefinition of the relationship between the
State and a reconstituted civil society, returning welfare previously provided by the state to individuals
and communities in a legally underpinned and democratically constituted civil society. Similarly, Cohen
and Arato (1992) take up Habermas' work to develop an

Page 161
account of ‘civil society’ as a privileged locus of criticism of the colonising tendencies of modern
bureaucratic organisation.
2 For example, in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European fight against absolutism and in
Eastern Europe prior to 1989 the term ‘civil society’ had a salient point of reference in indicating the
development of a ‘parallel society’ to that of the state. In such contexts, the term ‘civil society’ may
provide a basis for a moral-political critique of an existing regime of political rule.
3 Important distinctions between Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, which fall beyond the scope of this
chapter, are discussed in Berry (1997), Hont and Ignatieff (1983) and Oz-Salzberger (1995a, 1995b).
4 She notes that the German translation of ‘civil’ as ‘first, “belonging to a polity [Stadt] and its
constitution, bürgerlich, politisch”; and second, “well-mannered [gesittet], or höflich as opposed to
wild”’ (1995b: 152) produces two meanings which are not etymologically linked, undermining the
connection between political society and civilisation found in the English text. Thus, ‘the clash of
paradigms which is recognizable in the English text’ (1995b: 151) was lost in translation.
5 Hegel's account of civil society and its relation to the Scottish Enlightenment is dealt with in detail in
Waszek (1988).
6 Keane notes that Marx's failure to recognise and value other aspects of civil society, such as the
bourgeois freedoms of an independent press, freedom of assembly and representative government,
exposed the idea of socialism to political dictatorship, (1988: 59).
7 See Kumar (1993) and Bryant (1993) for debate concerning the general usefulness of this term in
contemporary political analysis.
8 Black goes on to say that civil society brings about the accommodation of individuals who have no
relation to one another; the institutions of civil society providing mechanisms for ‘ignoring people with
whom one has no business’ (1988: 73). As such, he suggests that civil society is the antithesis of
culture. As we will see, Habermas' account suggests the opposite: civil society, as a central component
of the lifeworld, is constituted by background cultural assumptions and ways of life (see Habermas,
1984, 1987a).
9 Compare Kant: ‘For this enlightenment, however, nothing more is required than freedom; and indeed
the most harmless form of all the things that may be called freedom: namely, the freedom to make
public use of one's reason in all matters’ (1996: 59).
10 There have been a number of criticisms of the one-dimensional character of this account: see
Thompson (1990, 1995) and Calhoun (1992). See also Habermas' response to his critics in Calhoun
(1992).
11 There is a change in Habermas' use of categories between The Structural Transformation and The
Theory of Communicative Action; in the former there is a threefold division of family, civil society and
state; in the latter a fourfold division of family, public political sphere, economy and state. In Habermas'
later work, civil society becomes synonymous with the public political sphere and is considered to be
part of the lifeworld.
12 Hindess develops this theme in terms of the ambiguous ontological status of the liberal individual: the
figure of the autonomous individual is simultaneously presupposed by liberalism and is an
accomplishment of liberal techniques of government directed at the formation and preservation of
autonomous subjects capable of regulating their own behaviour (Hindess, 1996a: 73). Thus, liberalism

Page 162
presupposes rational individuals and at the same time seeks to produce rational individuals. Liberal
government is thus concerned with the intimate functioning of individuals in a manner impossible fully to
conceptualise within the language of sovereignty (Hindess 1996b: 131).
13 At the philosophical level, Habermas' account of communicative consensus has the status of a
regulative ideal against which to test existing communicative resources. This produces a form of critique
which is not dependent on locating a universal subject of history, a traditional form of ideology-critique;
rather, Habermas focuses on the immanent possibilities of criticism which exist within communication
itself (Habermas, 1992). However, once this is tied to a social-theoretical and political account, that is,
once this ‘regulative ideal’ is given substance, it is hypostatised.
Fraser fails to problematise the way in which the very structure of Habermas' critical theory relies upon
a foundational division of system and lifeworld to ground the possibility of communicative ethics. Fraser
herself wishes to retain a notion of truth free from relations of power, claiming that it is too early to
abandon the humanist project in ethics. See Keenan (1987) for an alternative reading of some of these
issues.
14 Connerton makes a similar point when he states: ‘the dualism of reason and domination did indeed
have a reality when it was first directed, in the eighteenth century, against the system of absolutism; at
that time it referred to the concrete possibility of real, revolutionary events. But the dualism is no longer
so apposite. Habermas' essays are exercises in a mode of thought whose basis lies in a historical period
the politics of which can no longer be our own; so that, despite his strenuous efforts to re-establish
their topicality, they are politically defective in the current social context’ (1980: 107).
See also Hirst (1997) on the limitations imposed by viewing civil society as a realm outside governance.
15 It is for this reason that genealogy is central to Foucault's practice of criticism: see Foucault (1996).
16 In this sense, Foucault's practice of criticism is not context-bound but, rather, ‘context-transgressing’
without being ‘context-transcending’ (Tully, Chapter 4 in this volume). It thus exhibits a concern with
enlightenment as ethos rather than as epoch; enlightenment as the concern to give reasons and provide
challenges in an ongoing struggle in which we are always already beginning again (Owen 1995, and
Chapter 1 in this volume).
17 Habermas' attempt to produce a propositional theory to underpin universally valid criteria of justice
can be regarded as a pre-emptory closure of the question of justice. In this, Habermas' recent work
reverses the critical approach of the earlier Frankfurt School who suggested that it was necessary to
move ‘backward toward truth’, recognising that there is ‘something missing’ in our present.
References
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baynes, K. (1995) ‘Democracy and the Rechstaat: Habermas' Faktizität und Geltung’, in S.K. White
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Page 163
Berry, C.J. (1997) Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Black, A. (1988) State, Community and Human Desire. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Bobbio, N. (1989) Democracy and Dictatorship. Cambridge: Polity.
Bryant, C.G.A. (1993) ‘Social self-organization, civility and sociology: a comment on Kumar's “Civil
Society” ’, British Journal of Sociology, 44: 397–401.
Burchell, G. (1993) ‘Liberal government and techniques of the self’, Economy and Society, 22 (3): 267–
82.
Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality.
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Calhoun, C. (ed.) (1992) Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cohen, J. and Arato, A. (1992) Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Connerton, P. (1980) The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Donzelot, J. (1979) The Policing of Families, trans. R. Hurley. London: Hutchinson.
Elshtain, J.B. (1995) ‘In common together: unity, diversity and civic virtue’, in M. Walzer (ed.), Toward a
Global Civil Society. Oxford: Bergham Books.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith. Harmonds-worth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1979a) The History of Sexuality Volume 1: an Introduction, trans. R. Hurley.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1979b) ‘Governmentality’, trans. P. Pasquino, Ideology and Consciousness, 6: 5–21.
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon; trans. C. Gordon,
L. Marshall, J. Mepham and K. Soper. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The subject and power’, trans. L. Sawyer, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Foucault, M. (1988) Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. L.
Kritzman. London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1989) Foucault Live, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. J. Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e).
Foucault, M. (1991) Remarks on Marx, trans. R.J. Goldstein and J. Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e).
Foucault, M. (1996) ‘What is critique?’, in J. Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century
Answers and Twentieth Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fraser, N. (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory.
Cambridge: Polity.
Gordon, C. (1991) ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller
(eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Green, D.G. (1993) Reinventing Civil Society: The Rediscovery of Welfare without Politics. London:
Institute of Economic Affairs.
Habermas, J. (1976) Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy. London: Heinemann.

Page 164
Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of
Society, trans. T. McCarthy. London: Heinemann.
Habermas, J. (1986) ‘Questions and counterquestions’, in J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity.
Cambridge: Polity. pp. 192–216.
Habermas, J. (1987a) The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2: Lifeworld and System, trans. T.
McCarthy. Cambridge: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1987b) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence. Oxford: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger. Cambridge:
Polity
Habermas, J. (1992) ‘Further reflections on the public sphere’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the
Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (1996a) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy, trans. W. Rehg. Cambridge: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1996b) ‘The unity of reason in the diversity of its voices’, in J. Schmidt (ed.), What is
Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Hall, J. (ed.) (1995) Civil Society. Cambridge: Polity.
Hindess, B. (1996a) ‘Liberalism, socialism and democracy: variations on a governmental theme’, in A.
Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and
Rationalities of Government. London: University College London Press.
Hindess, B. (1996b) Discourses of Power: from Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hirst, P.Q. (1997) From Statism to Pluralism: Democracy, Civil Society and Global Politics. London:
University College London Press.
Honneth, A. (1991) The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. K. Baynes.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hont, I. and Ignatieff, M. (eds) (1983) Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the
Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1996) ‘An answer to the question: what is enlightenment?’, Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (1784),
reprinted in J. Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth
Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Keane, J. (1988) Democracy and Civil Society. London: Verso.
Keenan, T. (1987) ‘The “paradox” of knowledge and power: reading Foucault on a bias’, Political
Theory, 15 (1): 5–37.
Kumar, K. (1993) ‘Civil society: an inquiry into the usefulness of an historical term’, British Journal of
Sociology, 44: 375–95.
MacIntyre, A. (1994) ‘The theses on Feuerbach: a road not taken’, in C. Gould and R. Cohen (eds),
Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Owen, D. (1995) ‘Genealogy as exemplary critique: reflections on Foucault and the imagination of the
political’, Economy and Society, 24 (4): 489–506.
Oz-Salzberger, F. (1995a) ‘Introduction’ to A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oz-Salzberger, F. (1995b) Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century
Germany. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Page 165
Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992) ‘Political power beyond the state: problematics of government’, British
Journal of Sociology, 43(2): 173–205.
Seligman, A. (1992) The Idea of Civil Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Seligman, A. (1993) ‘The fragile ethical vision of civil society’, in B. Turner (ed.), Citizenship and Social
Theory. London: Sage.
Thompson, J.B. (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass
Communication. Cambridge: Polity.
Thompson, J.B. (1995) The Media and Modernity: a Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity.
Waszek, N. (1988) The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel's Account of ‘civil society’. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers.

Page 166
6
NORMALISING DEMOCRACY:
Foucault and Habermas on Democracy,
Liberalism and Law
Mitchell Dean
In any case the property of an object or fact, called normal in reference to an external or immanent
norm, is the ability to be considered, in its turn, as the reference for objects or facts which have yet to
be in a position to be called such. The normal is then at once the extension and the exhibition of the
norm. It increases the rule at the same time that it points it out. It asks for everything outside, beside,
and against it that still escapes it. A norm draws its meaning, function and value from the fact of the
existence, outside itself, of what does not meet the requirement it serves.
(Georges Canguilhem, 1991: 238–9)
I
This chapter addresses the related issues of democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law in the work of
Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. It does this in two different ways. The first is by general
discussion and the second is the making of a particular argument. The general discussion is necessary in
order to provide a warrant for the task of this chapter at all. At first sight, there is perhaps no area in
which the construction of a Foucault/Habermas ‘debate’ would appear more contrived. Foucault offered
very little in the way of systematic reflection on ‘democracy’ and the ‘rule of law’ and his remarks on
these topics appear as asides made in the analysis of the practices and forms of rationality that are his
central concerns, such as discipline, sovereignty, liberalism, biopolitics and government. It might be
suggested that, for Habermas, by contrast, the problem of ‘is democracy possible?’, i.e. how can we
develop truly democratic institutions in the contemporary world, stands at the heart of

Page 167
his entire work, and indeed this has led to his recent attempt to develop a normative procedural theory
of law and democracy. On the simple grounds of the quantity of sustained theoretical attention, it would
appear that the question of democracy and law is one on which Habermas might have much to offer us
and Foucault very little.
Perhaps more fundamental than the quantity of time and effort are the respective thinkers' vastly
different approaches and the consequences of these approaches. Foucault simply nowhere undertook –
to the present commentator's knowledge, at least – a systematic analysis of the institutions of liberal or
representative democracy, nor did he consider democratic values and principles as such. Broadly
speaking we can subsume Foucault's positions on democracy under his general treatment of questions
of enlightenment and liberalism, a position that can be summed up by his famous refusal of the
‘blackmail of the Enlightenment’ and his determination to provide intelligibility to the ways in which
‘universals’ such as truth, justice and liberty are played out in any particular present.1 One might also
wish to view his later deliberations on freedom as the capacity for self-directed conduct, found variously
in his accounts of ancient ethical practices, of relations of power, and of the task of critical thought, as
predisposing Foucault to a set of political arrangements that encourages the development of such a
capacity, optimises its exercise in power relations and fosters a critical intellectual ethos of permanent
critique.2 At its most fundamental, Foucault is little concerned with the ideal of a ‘true democracy’, or
even with the project of the reconstruction of democratic principles, and more with (1) the analysis of
the historical conditions under which particular democratic forms emerge; and (2) the manner in which
we can exercise freedom within particular systems of practices in societies that call themselves
democratic.
In asking how a truly democratic society is possible under contemporary conditions, Habermas views
himself as undertaking a project that is different from American political theory, which he characterises
as seeking to ‘design basic norms of a well-ordered society on the drafting table’ (1994b: 101). By
contrast, he conceives of his project as revealing the actual normative conditions encountered in the
contents of practices. Thus his ‘reconstructive’ theory of law and democracy is concerned to uncover the
normative content of democracy and legitimate lawmaking. The legitimacy of democratic procedure
rests, he further insists, on the character of the processes of communication that secure political opinion
and will-formation (e.g. Habermas, 1996a: 448–9). The legitimising force of democratic procedures, in
other words, is found in the normative contents of what Habermas calls ‘communicative action’, that is,
action oriented to mutual understanding.
The consequence of these different perspectives is that Foucault adopts a substantive analysis of
modern forms of rule as an ongoing and necessary critical task where Habermas seeks to uncover the
normative

Page 168
contents of their operation in order to clarify such norms and to contribute to a debate about the
development and reformation of democratic procedures and deliberative structures. Foucault devotes
more attention to the substantive analysis of liberalism as a rationality and critique of forms of rule and
Habermas to the normative theory of democracy as a set of procedures that derive their legitimacy from
the actual conditions under which humans enter into communication.
In this chapter I shall outline in turn Foucault and Habermas' approaches to questions of democracy,
liberalism and law. In the course of this general discussion an unexpected point of contact between
Foucault's historical work on biopower and norms and Habermas' proceduralist theory of democracy
emerges. This point of contact has led me to a somewhat curious argument that, I think, is more than a
curiosity. This is fully explored and explicated in the final part of the chapter. I shall state that argument
now to alert the reader to where we are going.
Much of the so-called Foucault/Habermas debate has consisted in attempts to defend the genealogical
histories of Foucault against the charges of relativism, cryptonormativism and presentism raised by
Habermas in his lectures on modernity (1987a). It is not surprising that those who broadly support the
kind of work undertaken by Foucault would have immediately tended to adopt a defensive posture given
the virulence of Habermas' critique. However, in adopting such a posture, these friends of Foucault find
themselves in some danger not only of arguing on their opponents' terrain but also of losing sight of the
reasons they might have for preferring Foucault's style of work in the first place. Among these reasons
would be the capacity for Foucault's genealogies to generate historical analysis that leads us to reflect
critically on the conditions of contemporary forms of thought and argument.
The present chapter illustrates precisely this latter point about the capacity of genealogical analysis to
investigate the conditions of certain forms of argument. Having participated in the defensive manoeuvre
elsewhere,3 I shall argue here that Foucault's genealogies of forms of power and government can help
make intelligible the unacknowledged historical conditions of Habermas' project of a proceduralist theory
of democracy and law. One way of understanding these conditions, I contend, is to be found in
Foucault's account of the emergence of ‘biopower’, a power over life that aims at the regulation of
populations, and its consequences for the transformation of law in advanced liberal democracies.
Broadly, Foucault's genealogy of biopower suggests that law is transformed from a ‘juridical system’
allied with the theory and practice of sovereignty to one that partakes of the regulatory functions of
norms. From this perspective, Habermas' proceduralist theory of democracy can be understood as (1)
having this transformation as its historical condition and (2) misunderstanding this set of historical
conditions as providing a universal set of norms of law and democracy. My critique of Habermas' self-
understanding, however, does not stop there.

Page 169
A further point is that Habermas does not simply state the tacit and existing normative features of
democratic and other practices, as he claims, but that he actively engages in a project of normalisation.
By this I mean that Habermas establishes a set of norms with which to judge existing political theories
and, more significantly, democratic and legislative practices. Such an argument depends, of course, on
the clarification of the concept of the norm. Following the work of François Ewald, I argue that norms
should not be understood as metaphysically derived values imposed from the outside on a group but as
communicatively generated ‘counterfactuals’ that refer to the group from which they are derived. I
further argue – following Georges Canguilhem – that the process of normalisation requires only the
pointing out of norms, not their prescriptive imposition. ‘The normal’, as he said, ‘is then at once the
extension and the exhibition of the norm.’ Given its dependence on notions of norms and the normative,
perhaps the strangest thing about Habermas' project is how little reflection on the conditions under
which such terms are used is undertaken.
II
Foucault's relation to liberal democracy and its characteristic institutions such as the legislature and
judiciary remained a highly circumspect one. One could cite here his discussion with Maoists in the early
1970s in which the court is viewed not as an institution for the administration and implementation of
‘popular justice’ but as one whose ‘historical function is to ensnare it [i.e. popular justice], to control it,
and to strangle it, by reinscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus’ (Foucault,
1980a: 1). Perhaps Foucault's flirtation with the Maoists can be forgiven in retrospect. He certainly came
to reject the fairly standard quasi-Marxian ultra-leftist version of ‘state theory’ these remarks betray. Yet,
however dated these positions quickly became, they do indicate a stubborn scepticism about the
normative claims that are usually derived from liberal-democratic institutions that remains a feature of
his political thought.
Another indication of Foucault's approach to the question of democracy is found in his 1976 lectures on
power, right and sovereignty (Foucault, 1980b). Here he argues that it is necessary to extract our
conceptions of power from what he calls the ‘juridical-political theory of sovereignty’. According to this
view, sovereignty derives from the effective mechanism of power under feudal monarchy and is an
instrument and justification of the construction of the ‘large scale administrative monarchies’. A concept
of power based on the theory of sovereignty is incompatible with the operation of mechanisms of power
such as discipline in several ways. It leads us to view power as centralised within the juridical,
administrative and executive arms of the state, to regard its targets as pre-constituted

Page 170
subjects, and hence to consider issues of the obligation or consent of these subjects as key to
understanding power. Discipline, however, arises in multifarious institutions and practices without a
definite source, works upon bodies and their forces to ‘construct’ subjects, and produces forms of useful
and docile conduct. The notion of sovereignty directs our attention to questions of legitimacy and
consent; that of discipline raises ones of normalisation through corporeal training. Nevertheless, the
persistence of the theory of sovereignty can be attributed at least in part to the fact that juridical
systems ‘have enabled sovereignty to be democratised … while at the same time this democratisation of
sovereignty was fundamentally determined by and grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion’
(Foucault, 1980b: 105).
A more elaborate version of his view of the representative institutions of parliamentary democracy can
be found in Discipline and Punish:
Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the
politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded, and formally egalitarian
juridical framework, made possible by the organisation of a parliamentary, representative regime. But
the development and generalisation of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these
processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in
principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-
power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. And, although,
in a formal way, the representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without
relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the
base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. The real, corporeal disciplines constituted the
foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation
of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It
continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make effective mechanisms
of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The ‘Enlightenment’,
which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. (Foucault, 1977: 222)
Foucault's position here is elaborated in relation to his account of the emergence and proliferation of
disciplinary practices within multifarious institutions in the eighteenth century. His central concern in this
passage is not with representative institutions, the institutions of sovereignty or law, with notions of
social contract, nor with associated Enlightenment ideals, but with the somewhat subterranean history of
the swarming of the minute mechanisms that were both coercive and enabling across the social body
and that formed a kind of ‘counter-law’ or even ‘infra-law’.
The description of a system of liberal-democratic rights as ‘formal, juridical liberties’ harks back to a
critique of the formalism of the law that dates at least to the French Revolution itself and that finds its
most influential expression in the denunciation of the bourgeois legal order as

Page 171
the juridical expression of capitalist relations of class exploitation by Marx and Engels. Foucault here,
however, manages to introduce a novel inflection into that rather worn-out trope. Instead of liberal-
democratic rights and freedoms being means for the legitimation of a fundamentally unjust and unequal
social order, they are rendered ‘formal’ by the insidious mechanisms that operate at the level of
individual bodies and ensure the docility and usefulness of citizens. The point is that individuals can be
understood both as bearers of democratic rights and liberties and, at the same time, as subjects formed
by mechanisms of power such as discipline. The implication is that any examination of democracy needs
to take into account both the political arrangements that protect the rights of citizens and enable them
to exercise these rights and the normalising mechanisms of power that foster certain capacities and
ensure their submission among these citizens.4
Perhaps the most interesting of Foucault's statements about law from the mid-1970s are found in The
History of Sexuality, Volume One. There he suggests that the development of biopower – or the power
over life – had the effect of the ‘growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense
of the juridical system of the law’ (1979: 144). Far from representing the view that law ceases to be
important, Foucault's argument is that law is increasingly invested with norms and operates more and
more as a norm. Judicial institutions become ‘incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical,
administrative and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory’ (ibid.). In passing, it is well
to note that Foucault's use of the term ‘regulatory’ connotes an association with the norm and
normalising powers. Foucault's argument that we have entered into a phase of ‘juridical regression’
despite the proliferation of the framing of constitutions, codes and the ‘whole continual and clamorous
legislative activity’, is that the function of law as a coercive technique of sovereignty has been displaced
by its role in normalising power. Law cannot ‘help but be armed’, for Foucault (ibid.), but this feature is
increasingly displaced by its regulatory functions.
Foucault's account of the displacement of law by norm is elaborated by his colleague, François Ewald
(1990). From a rich analysis, I shall draw out several features of norms and normalisation. A norm is a
way for a group to provide itself – or be provided – with a common denominator without recourse to a
point of externality. Adolphe Quetelet suggested a theory of the statistically determined ‘average man’
among a population (e.g. of average height) as a ‘fictional entity’ that is nevertheless ‘society itself as it
sees itself objectified in the mirror of probability and statistics’ (Ewald, 1990: 145–6). Norms in
themselves are counterfactual and self-referential: they operate as if there were such an average man,
and they refer to nothing but the characteristics of the population so normalised. Moreover, these norms
can be produced according to different logics, for example those of discipline, of probabilistic logic, and
of the communicative logic of the technical norm.

Page 172
If we consider the technical norm, argues Ewald (1990: 148), normalisation is less concerned with
establishing a model than with reaching an understanding regarding the choice of a model. The essential
question is not the production of objects that can act as a standard but the establishment of procedures
that will lead to a general agreement regarding the choice of norms and standards. In discourses of
technical standardisation all norms of terminology, of spatial measurement and of quality are
interdependent and this interdependence arises from the fact that what is normalised is not a world of
things but language itself, its vocabulary, notation, writing, signs, locutions, its relation to numbers and
diagrams, its syntax and so on. ‘Normalisation’, for Ewald's analysis of industrial standardisation (1990:
151), ‘is the institution of the perfect common language of pure communication required by industrial
society’.
A norm, then, is not simply a value, however arrived at, but a rule of judgement and a means of
producing that rule (Ewald, 1990: 154). A norm creates an equivalence in that all are comparable in
relation to it; but it also creates differences and inequalities in so far as it enables each to be
individualised and hierarchically ordered in relation to it. The norm is thus intrinsic to the group that
applies it to itself and hence is a form of regulation and stabilisation which is independent of all
philosophical or religious values. This means that the norm itself is ‘post-metaphysical’ – it depends on
values that are relative to the group and are revisable, rather than absolutes. What is significant about
the norm – and this perhaps distinguishes it from certain other values – is that it does not derive from a
general view of the cosmos, of being or of human nature, but from the characteristics or attributes of
the things, activities, facts or populations to which it is to be applied.
The kind of law which is compatible with normative practices is one in which laws are produced with
reference to the particular society it claims to regulate and not to a set of universal principles. For
Ewald, this kind of law no longer emanates from the sovereign's will but from the collectivity, without
being willed by anyone in particular. It provides the group with sovereignty over itself but that
sovereignty derives not from the social contract nor from the general will but from the community's
relation to a common standard. Ewald gives the example of the resolutions of the United Nations which
become a means for evaluating conduct according to a set of agreed-upon norms rather than as a
binding constraint. A rather more mundane example is traffic law. We might regard traffic laws as both
coercively enforced constraints (through fines, licence confiscations, etc.) and a set of norms by which
road users regulate their conduct (e.g. norms of the maximum speeds for safe driving on certain roads).
While such laws still partake of a juridical system of law, that is, law as an instrument of sovereignty,
their function is to set and maintain norms for the regulation of conduct. The deployment of punitive
instruments in this instance of course serves the most

Page 173
‘biopolitical’ of ends: the maintenance of the life and well-being of the population.
In light of this consideration of the norm and normalisation we might understand Foucault's general
orientation towards liberal democracy found in the cryptic summary of his lectures on government in
1978. By now, the opposition between the theory of law and the language of war has been replaced by
a new way of thinking of power as ‘government’ defined generally as the conduct of conduct, or the
somewhat deliberate attempt to shape our own and others' conduct.5 Here he argues that there is no
necessary relation between liberalism, the rule of law and representative democracy:
Liberalism does not derive from juridical thought any more than it does from an economic analysis. It is
not the idea of a political society founded on a contractual tie that gave birth to it; but in the search for
a liberal technology of government, it appeared that regulation through the juridical form constituted a
far more effective tool than the wisdom or moderation of the governors. Liberalism sought that
regulation in ‘the law’, not through a legalism that would be natural to it but because the law defines
forms of general intervention excluding particular, individual, or exceptional measures; and because the
participation of the governed in the formulation of the law, in the parliamentary system, constitutes the
most effective system of governmental economy. The ‘state of right’, the Rechsstaat, the rule of law, the
organisation of a ‘truly representative’ parliamentary system was, therefore, during the whole beginning
of the nineteenth century, closely connected with liberalism, but … the democracies of the state of right
were not necessarily liberal, nor was liberalism necessarily democratic or devoted to the forms of law.
(Foucault, 1997: 77)
There is no necessary, internal relation for Foucault between liberalism, law and representative
democracy. Liberalism considered as a rationality and technology of government rather than as a
political philosophy has a certain rationale for the adoption of the rule of law – its generality and
exclusion of the particular – and for representative institutions – they permit the participation of the
governed in the ‘governmental economy’. Now I don't wish to evaluate this view here except to note
two things. In this passage, at least, Foucault appears to be saying that it is the formal properties of law
that lend to its being taken up by liberalism as an instrument of government. His account of law is not
therefore concerned with either the legitimacy of law which Max Weber, for example, finds in its formal
properties or law as a source of the legitimacy of particular regimes. Secondly, Foucault seems to be
pointing to a circularity in this liberal rationality of government that can provide a ‘non-sovereignty’
version of representative democracy. Rather than saying that the governed should be the source of
sovereignty because of their intrinsic rights and liberties as individuals or as members of a political
community, he is suggesting that for liberalism the governed ought to participate in

Page 174
the election of governors because government already depends on the liberties and capacities of the
governed exercised within an economy.
Now, I wish to make a move that departs from exegetical interpretation and which puts together what I
have been saying about laws and norms. Liberalism then, for Foucault, has a fundamental affinity not
with the law but with the norm. There are at least two senses in which this is the case. The first is that
liberalism seeks to establish norms of good government. The most general norm of liberal government is
that of the changing balance between governing too much and governing too little. In the course
summary just quoted, Foucault suggests that liberalism should be approached neither as a never-
realised utopia nor as a particular set of institutional arrangements but rather as an instrument of
critique of previous forms of government, of current forms that one seeks to reform and to exhaustively
review and of potential forms whose abuses it is necessary to limit (1997: 75). Liberalism seeks to
establish norms of government first as a form of critique of alternative forms of government and more
significantly against those political rationalities such as Staaträson and Polizeiwissenschaft that sought a
comprehensive and detailed regulation of all areas of individual and collective existence in the service of
the happiness of the population and the strengthening of the state.
Liberalism also establishes such norms as a practice of self-review, as a continuous practice of deciding
between what Jeremy Bentham would have called the agenda and non-agenda of government. Foucault
thus argues that liberalism is not to be regarded as an ideology in which society represents itself in a
particular way but rather ‘as a practice, which is to say, as a ‘‘way of doing things” oriented toward
objectives and regulating itself by means of a principle of sustained reflection’ (1997: 74). Thus liberal
government is oriented to constantly establishing and reviewing its own norms of good government, of
governing efficiently and economically but at the same time governing in such a way as to secure the
objectives of good government: the welfare of the population, the security of the state, etc. Liberalism is
a normalising critique of government rather than a specific set of institutions or form of ideology.
However, like the norm, liberal critique starts not from the sovereign but from society, an entity that
both exists outside the state and encompasses it. Thus liberalism finds the norms of government not in
divine or natural law, nor even in the state and its own reason, but in the forces, tendencies and laws
found in society. It finds those norms of government in the laws of the market, and of production and
consumption, discovered by the political economists, in the tendencies of the population discovered by
Malthus, and the conflicts and factions of civil society discovered by the Scottish Enlightenment.
Foucault's concern here is not with liberalism as a normative theory of politics but as a distinctive
rationality of normative government. He is concerned to analyse the multifarious forms that liberalism
takes, he

Page 175
kind of critique it initiates, the distinctive instruments and technologies it employs, the objectives it
seeks, and the effects it has. Among these effects, as I have just noted, is the formation of society itself
as a governable entity constituted through particular processes, laws and tendencies that depend on the
actions and choices of free but disciplined subjects. Such an account of liberalism, then, does not start
with the supposition of the pre-existence of a moral community of self-governing subjects that forms
itself by contract or communication into a sovereign entity. Rather, it starts from the multiple empirical
occasions on which various authorities in liberal democracies have posed questions about the correct
methods of governing and expressed anxiety about the optimum normative regime.
The second sense in which liberalism has an affinity with the norm follows from what we have already
noted about discipline. Foucault pointed out the duality of the political individual as a subject shaped
through normalising practices and as a citizen with rights and liberties. The relation of liberalism to
government can be thought about from each of these perspectives on the political subject. Examined
through the notion of the citizen, the question for liberalism is to define a form of state compatible with
the citizen's rights and liberties and to establish a political form that allows the aggregation of citizens'
diverse interest. Examined through the figure of the normalised subject, the problem becomes how to
shape the liberty of the citizen in such a way as to ensure that she exercises freedom responsibly and in
a disciplined fashion. Thus nineteenth-century liberalism is not only concerned with the development of
representative institutions compatible with individual citizens' rights but with ensuring that individuals as
members of a population know how to exercise those rights properly. Liberalism is thus as much
concerned with the appropriate normalising practices to shape citizens' liberty as it is with guaranteeing
their rights and liberties.
In brief, Foucault is concerned with the formation of society, the economy and the population as
governmental artefacts and not with the social determination of political forms, which will be Habermas'
concern. His work opens up the possibility of analysing the different ways in which the capacities and
attributes of citizens are formed through practices of government and the way forms of freedom are
shaped by political and governmental practices. The point of such an analysis is not to show how
democracy and law are cynically used by a certain form of political thought and action but how they
have come to be inserted into particular modes of government, for what reasons and to which ends. His
point is to reawaken in us a sense of the historically specific lack of necessity of the kinds of
conjunctions we take for granted. It is to alert us to the contingency of these assemblages, and to the
dangers and fragility of the relations between liberalism, law and democracy.

Page 176
III
In contrast to Foucault, the question of ‘is democracy possible?’ stands among Habermas' abiding
concerns. In his introduction to Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas
McCarthy (1989: xii) makes the point that ‘one could do worse than to view Habermas’ work in the
twenty-five years since Strukturwandel through the lens of this question'. While this concern may have
remained largely implicit in his earlier work, Habermas' recent work, particularly Between Facts and
Norms (1996a), has turned directly to the question of democracy and law. As he makes clear in a recent
interview, ‘only a form of democracy conceived in terms of a theory of communication is feasible in
highly complex societies’ (Habermas in Carleheden and Gabriëls, 1996: 2). In this book, Habermas
argues that democratic procedures are the only means by which the legitimacy of rules changeable by
legislators can be secured in pluralistic societies without comprehensive religious or metaphysical
worldviews (1996a: 448). Most importantly, however, the legitimising force of democratic procedure is
provided by the fact that such procedure gives a discursive character to political will and opinion
formation. Thus in reconstructing the normativity of law and democracy, Habermas leads us to the
normativity found in communication itself.
For Habermas, democratic procedures gain their legitimacy from the quality of the deliberation that
those procedures secure and the degree to which they allow action oriented to mutual understanding to
enter into decision making. The quality of that deliberation can only be established with the help of the
theory of communicative action. That theory both recognises that there are uses of language other than
communicative action, and establishes its primacy.6 Habermas is hence concerned to specify the
concept of communicative action and to distinguish it from instrumental or strategic uses of language.
Very broadly, communicative action is concerned with the use of language to reach mutual
understanding solely through ‘illocutionary’ speech acts, that is, drawing on Austin, ones in which the
speaker performs an action. It is distinguished from strategic action in which language is used to pursue
instrumentally defined goals, and in which speech acts take a ‘perlocutionary’ form, i.e. they seek to
bring about something in the world. Of particular interest to Habermas are those kinds of perlocutionary
effects that are not made explicit in the speech act and that could not be revealed to the participants
without affecting their understanding and acceptance of it. Because the perlocutionary effects of a
speech act depend on understanding what the speaker is saying – its illocutionary success – the
instrumental or strategic use of language is parasitic upon the communicative act. For a normative
account of democracy to be rooted in the theory of communication then entails that democracy
concerns the establishment of procedures by which the communicative use of language can enter via
processes of will and opinion formation into the decision-

Page 177
making and implementing institutions without the results of deliberation being pre-programmed by those
institutions or any other system-imperative for instrumental ends.
To say that democracy depends on discourse which itself depends on communication entails an
understanding of communication and an understanding of practical or rational discourse. Habermas' view
of communication is trenchantly sociological (Chambers, 1996: 241–2). It is through communication that
we reproduce our lifeworld: communication enables cultural reproduction, the passing on of meanings
and traditions, social integration, the sharing of norms of cooperation and interaction, and socialisation,
the acquiring of identities. What is passed on, shared and shaped are the social norms that are present
in all societies and necessary for their reproduction over time, for their members to live together
peacefully, and for the interaction of different socially formed identities and roles. The reproduction,
mobilisation and contestation of norms is also a part of the development of such societies. In such a
process, humans are often called upon to give ‘good reasons’ for the acceptance of an existing or new
norm. Norms are thus up for renegotiation through communication. None of this is new to sociology
derived from Weber, Durkheim or Parsons. It is the next step that turns sociological insight into a theory
of political and legal legitimacy.
The real-world sociological account of order is overlaid with an ideal account of the legitimacy of formal
political institutions (Chambers, 1996: 243–4). The legitimacy of these institutions is secured by the facts
of communication already known – particularly by the fact that socially transmitted norms become
available for criticism, defence and justification. However, political legitimacy is secured by formalising,
clarifying and universalising the process by which we decide on acceptable norms. Practical or moral
discourse refers to the set of ideal conditions by which we can consciously lay a consensual foundation
for the acceptance of existing norms and the creation of new ones.
Habermas' notion of practical discourse follows from this theory of communication and is set inside an
understanding of different types of rational discourse. He distinguishes between three types of validity
claim – claims to truth, to normative rightness and to truthfulness – the first two of which can be
redeemed discursively. The redemption of validity claims means that when participants in
communication raise such claims they are able, if required, to give ‘good reasons’ for these claims. What
count as good reasons in statements concerning the truth of the objective world are provided by the
canons of empirical induction. Habermas' theory of morality seeks to provide a principle of
argumentation for questions of normative rightness analogous to such canons (Owen, 1996: 124). Thus
to redeem claims is to provide evidence of the truth of them or to justify action according to accepted
norms or the choice of controversial norms. The discursive redemption of such validity claims
presupposes, however, that all can participate if they so

Page 178
wish on the basis of reciprocal recognition and communicative freedom – the conditions of an ideal
communication community.
From this account of communicative action and the conditions of rational discourse, Habermas derives
the principle of universalisability (U) or principle of morality, i.e. a test of the validity of moral statements
that parallels the process of empirical induction for truth claims (1990: 70–1; Owen, 1996: 124). This
test is one in which ‘impartial judgments are judgments that would gain universal agreement in an ideal
communication community’ (Chambers, 1996: 233). Thus rather than the test of successful
universalisation being found in the ‘monological’ Kantian categorical imperative which asks whether a
world regulated by my maxim would be logically consistent, Habermas claims that the question we ask
ourselves would be a ‘dialogical’ one closer to ‘would everyone agree to be regulated by my maxim?’
(ibid.). Habermas cites McCarthy on this shift:
Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must
submit my maxim to all others for purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis
shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a general law to what all can will in
agreement to be a universal norm. (Habermas, 1990: 72)
In earlier work the principle of morality is viewed as a kind of master principle from which other
principles such as the principle of discourse ethics (D) were derived (Habermas, 1990: 71). On this
account, principle D, which concerns actors as participants in rational discourses, already presupposes
that it is possible to justify the choice of norms. In the theory of law and democracy, however, principle
D is reconceived as a ‘more general principle that applies to all action norms prior to any distinction
between moral and legal norms and principles’ (Baynes, 1995: 208; Habermas, 1996a: 450–7). D states
that ‘only those norms of action are valid to which all possibly affected could assent as participants in
rational discourses’ (Habermas, 1996a: 459, 107). Principle U is then introduced at the same stage as
the democratic principle which states that ‘only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with
the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that has in turn been legally constituted’
(Habermas, 1996a: 110).
Habermas thus now insists on a clear demarcation between the principles of discourse and morality. D
applies prior to any distinction between law and morality and the principle of morality emerges
coterminously with the principle of democracy, i.e. the principle of legitimate lawmaking (Baynes, 1995:
208). Habermas thereby tries to avoid the privileging of morality over law that results in a favouring of
private morality and private autonomy over civic autonomy. Indeed he wishes to argue that there is a
complementary relation between morality and law so that the principle of legitimate lawmaking makes
up for certain

Page 179
deficits of morality, for example its cognitive indeterminacy and motivational uncertainty. Law requires
morality to take into account all relevant and specific circumstances, and ensures a compliance that
mere moral insight cannot (Baynes, 1995: 208).
This relation of morality and law can be further explicated through the distinction between
communicative action and communicative power. Communicative power is both continuous and
discontinuous with the concept of communicative action. Communicative power displays the features of
communicative action in that it
only forms in public spheres which constitute intersubjective relations on the basis of reciprocal
recognition and the use of communicative freedom, that is, spontaneous positions for-or-against
regarding emerging themes, reason and information. (Habermas, in Carleheden and Gabriëls, 1996: 8)
However, as Baynes has shown (1995: 213), Habermas wishes to avoid an over-hasty identification of
communicative power with a form of action that orients itself to the ideal of a rational consensus in the
manner constitutive of moral argumentation. Communicative power is formed from the overlapping and
intermeshing of a variety of (more or less institutionalised) pragmatic, ethical-political and moral
discourses. To clarify, moral questions are concerned with basic issues of justice and rights, ethical
issues with substantive questions of identity, and pragmatic ones with the best means of achieving
particular ends. It is only moral questions that are required to meet the most rigorous test of
universalisability and demanding standards of rational consensus. Communicative power thus arises from
institutionalised processes of rational public will and opinion formation that comprise processes of both
understanding and bargaining.
The acceptance of bargaining and compromises that might rely on mutual threats rather than mutual
understanding allows Habermas to acknowledge conflicting values and interests that are beyond the
achievement of consensus and the existence of strategic interactions within political processes (1994b:
5). However what he regards as legitimate bargaining already presupposes the existence of ‘a prior
regulation of fair terms for achieving results, which are acceptable for all parties on the basis of their
differing preferences’ (ibid.). Strategic interactions thus affirm rather than deny that the priority of
legislation is to establish procedures according to universalistic principles of justice – moral questions in
the sense that Habermas construes them after Kant.
The ‘equiprimordiality’ of the principle of democracy and the basic moral principle means that democracy
or popular sovereignty is not subordinate to a system of basic rights so Habermas does not have to
subscribe to what he regards as either a broadly ‘liberal’ or ‘civic republican’ resolution of the conflict
between the two (1996a: 295–302). Habermas' general position is that rights are neither pre-political
rights

Page 180
grounded in the inviolability of a private sphere nor dependent upon the ethical substance of a self-
governing community but rather are mutually conferred in acts of intersubjective recognition. This
means that the relation between democracy and the rule of law is not a contingent but a necessary one.
For lawmaking to be legitimate there must be an interpenetration of the legal form and the principle of
discourse ethics. Such an interpenetration develops if the legal form is made use of by the political
sovereign in an exercise of the citizens' public autonomy. However, a notion of public autonomy must
rest upon the idea of rational discourse and thus of citizens' obligation to those norms that they could
have agreed to in an ideal communication community. When such norms are realised in law they carry a
coercive authority which needs to be grounded in the principle of democratic lawmaking and a system
of rights.
Habermas' position, then, seeks to incorporate and go beyond what he understands as the two
competing conceptions of the democratic state and politics. It must avoid both the liberal reduction of
the democratic process to the compromises between diverse interests and the republican reduction of
democracy to the ethical and political self-understanding of a particular community and the consequent
normative favouring of individual rights or popular sovereignty. In his model of ‘deliberative politics’,
Habermas seeks to take elements from both sides and to integrate them in a conception of the ideal
procedure for deliberation and decision making.
According to this view, practical reason no longer resides in universal human rights, or in the ethical
substance of a specific community, but in the rules of discourse and in the forms of argumentation that
borrow their normative content from the validity basis of action oriented to reaching understanding. In
the final analysis, this normative content arises from the structure of linguistic communication and the
communicative mode of sociation. (Habermas, 1996a: 296–7)
This position enables Habermas to chart the various normative relations between state and society
found in the three models of democracy. For republicanism, ‘the opinion and will formation of citizens
forms the medium through which society constitutes itself as a political whole’ (1996a: 297). Democracy
is thus regarded as the political self-organisation of society as a whole. The targets of republican critique
consist of the depoliticisation of the population through party politics, the mass media and so on. The
objective of such a critique is for the political public sphere to be revitalised in such a way that the
citizenry can reappropriate bureaucratically alienated power and form itself into a truly democratic
society. On the liberal view, the relation between state and society can only be bridged by democratic
process grounded in the constitutionally enshrined basic rights, the rule of law, the separation of powers
and so on. For Habermas, a liberal conception of politics is state-centred in that

Page 181
politics is primarily centred not on the ethical life of a self-governing community of citizens but on the
limitation of the state. For republicanism, the emphasis lies with the social and communal input to state
administration; for liberalism it lies with the output of government activities.
For his own position, Habermas seeks to chart a normative stance that is stronger than liberalism and
weaker than republicanism (1996a: 298–9). With republicanism, he gives weight to the political opinion
and will formation of the community. However, this is no longer conceived as the collectively acting
citizenry but as ‘the institutionalisation of corresponding procedures and conditions of communication’
and the ‘interplay of institutionalised deliberative processes’ (ibid.), i.e. will and opinion formation occurs
not collectively but intersubjectively in a kind of decentred society that ties the political system into the
peripheral networks of the public sphere. By doing so he hopes to avoid not only a republican notion of
the social whole centred in the state as instrumental macro-subject but the liberal model of a system of
constitutional norms balancing and mediating between different powers and interests. Decision making
is hence undertaken through the communicative networks of the public sphere rather than by the
collective actor of the citizenry or through political processes that arise blindly out of the mere
aggregation of decisions.
Like liberalism, Habermas respects the boundaries between state and civil society but distinguishes civil
society from the economic system and public administration. The socially integrating force of solidarity
must develop through widely diversified and more or less autonomous public spheres, as well as
through procedures of democratic opinion and will formation institutionalised within a constitutional
framework, and must be able to hold its own against the system-centred steering mechanisms of money
and power. This latter points ties Habermas' account of law and democracy to his earlier meta-historical
account of the rationalisation and colonisation of the lifeworld found in The Theory of Communicative
Action. I shall elaborate on this below.
As far as liberal-derived questions of legitimacy are concerned, Habermas views legitimacy as arising
from the procedures and communicative presuppositions of processes of opinion and will formation.
These function as the ‘sluices for the discursive rationalisation of the decisions of an administration
bound by law and statute’ (1996a: 300). The political system acts as a subsystem for the production of
collectively binding decisions and is situated amidst the communicative structures of the public sphere
that act as ‘sensors’ across society. The communicative power thereby generated can ‘only point the use
of administrative power in specific directions’ (ibid.).
As a coda to this incomplete account of Habermas' theory of law and democracy, I want to note two
points: the first pits Habermas against

Page 182
Foucault; and the second Habermas against himself. The first point is that for Habermas there is an
intimate and necessary relation between democracy and the rule of law. The principle of democracy is
the principle of legitimate lawmaking. In a postscript to Between Facts and Norms, he puts it this way:
The argument … essentially aims to demonstrate that there is a conceptual or internal relation, and not
simply a historically contingent association between the rule of law and democracy…this relation is also
evident in the dialectic between legal and factual equality, a dialectic that first called forth the social-
welfare paradigm in response to the liberal understanding of law and that today recommends a
proceduralist self-understanding of constitutional democracy. (Habermas, 1996a: 449–50)
In so far as we might call the model of deliberative politics that occurs within such a democracy ‘liberal’
we might say that Habermas presupposes, contra Foucault, a necessary relation between the rule of
law, democracy and liberalism. Law is necessarily tied to democracy because law can only gain its
legitimacy from the assent of citizens, from what Habermas calls ‘discursive rationalisation’. It is tied to
the liberal framework of sovereignty because this must all occur within a legally constituted set of
deliberative procedures. The very statement of the democratic principle contains the necessary
connection between law, democracy and liberal constitutionalism: ‘only those statutes may claim
legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that has in
turn been legally constituted’ (Habermas, 1996a: 110).
Finally, let me mention at least one sense in which Habermas is contra Habermas, and indeed admits it.
In the 1980s Habermas tended to oppose the ‘peripheral’ processes of communication in civil society
manifested by social movements to the system-steering mechanisms of the state bureaucracy and the
economy (1987b, 1996b). In more recent work, as we have seen, he tries to link the process of opinion
formation by citizens in diverse public spheres with the institutions of parliament, the judiciary, and
administration by a conception of law as the transformation of communicative into administrative power.
This shift is encapsulated in a shift from a ‘siege’ metaphor of the relation between communicative
action and administrative power into a ‘sluice-gate’ model entailing a more comprehensive process of
democratisation in which an element of democratic will formation has to enter administration
(Carleheden and Gabriëls, 1996x: 3–4). Perhaps Habermas' more recent work marks the point where
critical theory has finally shed the last vestiges of Marxist critique and become liberal. It also marks the
point at which we might start to work through the relationship between these two thinkers.

Page 183
IV
Both Foucault and Habermas are interested in analysing the workings of liberalism, democracy and the
rule of law by means of an analysis of history. But this is just about where the similarities end. Foucault
undertakes a genealogy of the rationalities and technologies of government and attempts to locate
actual forms of democracy in the emergence of forms of power such as discipline, sovereignty and
biopower. He seeks to understand liberalism as a rationality of normative government, a critique of ‘too
much government’ that gives rise to a notion of an outside of government, one found in conceptions of
society, population, community and so forth. Moreover, his analysis shows that liberalism seeks a
multiform instrumentation of government that is capable of producing subjects who can bear the
capacities and obligations of democratic citizenship in a responsible and disciplined manner. Genealogy
approaches universals – such as rights, justice, liberty – in the diverse forms of their specific operation,
in the way they are produced in rhetorical practices and in the manner in which they are attached to
and provide rationales for governmental practices, and in terms of the way in which they are being
played out in any particular present. In doing so, it avoids the blackmail of the Enlightenment, of being
for or against democracy as a system of values, not so much because it wants to claim an agnosticism
in relation to values but because it tries to analyse how these values are constituted and connected to
various practices and techniques in the achievement of definite goals. Above all, Foucault's genealogy is
a form of historical analysis that can be used as a kind of philosophical exercise in which we can
problematise taken-for-granted values, including those associated with democracy and especially those
we hold most dear.
Habermas, by contrast, at least at the beginning of the 1980s, approached history as meta-history, as a
story of the problems generated by two different forms or aspects of rationalisation (e.g. 1987b). One
side of this narrative concerns the rationalisation of worldviews through opening up their contents to
discursive argumentation; the other, the colonisation of the lifeworld by the system-steering mechanisms
of money and power. This meta-history discovers an incompletion at the heart of not only modernity but
also democracy and forces the critical theorist to derive – in a fallibilistic way – a normativity that is
found in the conditions of communication, democracy and modernity (Habermas, 1985). Deriving the
universal conditions of rational argumentation from what he understands as the actual conditions of
communicative action, Habermas seeks to follow these universals into the normative conditions of
democracy. From such a standpoint intellectual formations such as liberalism and civic republicanism are
approached not primarily as different rationalities of democratic government but as failed – in the

Page 184
sense of partial – attempts at providing the normative grounds for democracy and the rule of law.
There are, of course, relatively minor differences between the two thinkers. In their analysis of particular
political rationalities, Habermas and Foucault seem at odds. We have already noted that Habermas
seeks to establish that there are necessary links between democracy, legitimate lawmaking and ‘liberal’
deliberative procedures, while Foucault starts from the assumption of the historical contingency of the
assemblage of these elements. Similarly, Habermas' characterisation of liberalism as state-centred in
that it seeks a principle of limitation of the state sits oddly with Foucault's account of liberalism as a
critique of state reason that is founded upon the dynamic processes found outside the state in the
economy, civil society and the population. However, there are far more fundamental differences.
Habermas had suggested that Foucault's ‘fortunate positivism’ had led him to an ‘unholy subjectivism’
(1987a: 276). One can imagine that his response to a broadly Foucauldian approach to law and
democracy would be to accuse it of a ‘legal positivism’ in which the ‘validity of legal regulations is
measured solely by the observance of legally stipulated procedures of law-making’ (1996a: 202) or of
viewing that legitimacy as arising from the merely formal characteristics of law in the manner of Max
Weber (Habermas, 1988). In other words, Foucault would be accused of expunging the question of the
legitimacy of legally enacted norms from his analysis. However, if the object of Foucault's analysis of
democracy and the rule of law is not to state the normative conditions for legitimate lawmaking and
administrative implementation in a democratic society but to analyse the specific relation of liberal-
democratic practices to discipline, biopower and government, then such a criticism would seem largely
beside the point.
Furthermore, if a charge of legal positivism was taken to mean that Foucault has severed his analysis of
democracy from all ethical considerations, then we could draw upon the existing commentaries on
Foucault's ‘normative grounds’ and outline three lines of reply. First, following Kelly (1994b), the analysis
of law would be part of analyses of regimes of practices and truth (e.g. of discipline, of medicine, of
sexuality) and of institutions (the prison, the family) which Foucault presents as a ‘local critique’
conducted in relation to issues raised by particular political and social struggles. Secondly, following
Patton (1994: 68; Owen, 1996: 134–5), it could be argued that the transformation of law in any given
instance could be judged according to whether it allows rather than inhibits the ‘self-directed use and
development of capacities’. Finally, after Owen (1996: 135), we should also need to consider how far
this analysis of law was undertaken as a practice of critical reflection that grounds its own
recommendations of a self-legislated existence in its exemplification of such an ethics. It is not the place
to repeat these arguments here.

Page 185
More stubborn difficulties, I contend, lie on the other side. I want to mention two major ones: the status
of Habermas' meta-history of rationalisation, and his ontology of reason.
Habermas' meta-historical account allows us to clarify certain features of the task he sets himself in his
work on law and democracy. In his earlier work Habermas viewed rationalisation as having both
emancipatory and colonising dimensions corresponding to the two-level model of ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’.
Rationalisation was emancipatory in that more and more issues were torn away from their
embeddedness in metaphysical and religious worldviews and subjected to discursive inspection. Values
and norms, in other words, increasingly had to be justified through communicative action. From this
perspective social integration, socialisation and cultural reproduction would occur through processes of
communication rather than as a result of habit or traditional values derived from religious or
metaphysical worldviews. On the other hand, rationalisation also led to the splitting off of certain
spheres from the lifeworld and the development of subsystems (of the economy and state) with their
own imperatives (money and power) that forced a closure on the discursive redemption of validity
claims. From this perspective the communicatively generated values and norms of the lifeworld would be
a kind of David facing the pathological form of social integration forced through the imperatives of the
system Goliath.
The problem for Habermas during this phase of his thought was not Foucault's problem of the dangers
associated with the emergence and proliferation of normalising powers but that there was no longer a
source of norms and values that was strong enough to prevent the steering mechanisms of money and
power forcing their own forms of integration and bypassing the communicative processes of social
integration entirely. Two things should be noted about this problem. First, by positing this dual-level
view of modernity as lifeworld and system, Habermas fails to analyse how what he regards as the
subsystems of economy and state are composed from a multiplicity of practices and forms of knowledge
– many of which may be described as normalising practices. Secondly, in this earlier account, law stands
on the side of the system rather than lifeworld and the manner in which issues raised by social
movements and citizens' initiatives are dealt with by law is called ‘juridification’ (Habermas, 1987b: 356–
7). Juridification refers to the tendency towards an increase in formal law that takes the form of an
expansion into new domains and an increasing density of regulation of existing domains. The modern
form of juridification, instanced by the welfare state, results from attempts to address ‘the pathological
consequences’ involved in the transposition of the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld on to its
systematic integration.
In Between Facts and Norms (1996a) law ceases to be a symptom of social pathology. Law becomes
more a bridge between lifeworld and systems. Over it runs the process by which the communicative
power

Page 186
generated in diverse public spheres, and secured by certain deliberative structures, gains coercively
binding authority. Law, to put it baldly, has switched, or at least has the possibility of being switched,
from one side of the old dichotomy of system and lifeworld to the other. This is not, however, the most
interesting or salient feature of this difference. That honour goes to the way in which the procedural
theory of law and democracy can be understood as a response to the theoretical deficit of the theory of
communicative action. Because Habermas had earlier relegated the economy and state to the side of
system, and thereby ignored the norm- and value-generating as well as normalising dimension of
economic and legal and administrative practices, and because his account of modernity is predicated on
the emergence of post-metaphysical forms of thought and post-conventional types of identity, he can
provide no account of the generation of norms that can match the effects of the steering mechanisms of
money and power. He is left, in other words, with a lifeworld bravely trying to reproduce itself through
communicative action in the face of overwhelming colonisation by the state and economy through the
steering mechanisms of power and money.
From this perspective, Between Facts and Norms is a response to the fatalism implicit in the architecture
of his earlier thought that is bleakly reminiscent of the darkest cultural prognostications of the earlier
Frankfurt School, in particular Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. As a response, in
this sense, to his own failure to overcome the problems he self-avowedly set out to overcome (such as
to give a fuller account of the dialects of rationalisation: e.g. 1986), Habermas seeks to construct a
rather baroque creature, a grand machine for the generation of norms and values and a set of
procedures through which such norms can be made binding.
A second set of problems concerns the question of the ontology of reason in communication. While
Habermas would clearly recognise his own theory of law and democracy as a historically specific,
context-dependent one, he also claims it reveals that there are universal normative principles in the
actual conditions of democratic and legal practice, even if these can only be stated in terms that are
open to revision. Such a position depends, as Kelly (1994b: 388–90) has argued, on the positing of a
‘context-transcending’ aspect of critical reflection in the face of the historicity of reason that in turn
depends on the acceptance of Habermas' claim about the ontology of reason in communicative action. If
the latter cannot be justified, then it can only be accepted as a particular ontology and the context-
transcending powers of reason become a matter of faith. As for that ontology, there seems to be at
least one point at which Habermas is caught in what he would call a ‘performative contradiction’
(Chambers, 1996: 234).7 Habermas admits that his notion of an ideal speech situation can only operate
as a regulative counterfactual. How, we might ask, is it possible to discover what this situation would be
like

Page 187
and thereby to derive the discourse ethics that are said to be manifest it? One answer is that it is
necessary to imagine the conditions under which all participants would mutually recognise each other in
a situation of communicative freedom. Yet, the necessity of imagining the ideal speech situation would
appear to lead back to a monological posture in which one needs to perform an act upon oneself in
order to state the conditions of rational discourse. Habermas would presumably reject such an answer
on these grounds and insist that discourse must be undertaken by real social agents. The effect of this
insistence, however, as Chambers notes, is that the conditions of the ideal speech situation are never
met and we can never achieve fully justified universalisable norms.
If it is not possible to derive universal norms from the conditions of communication in a way which
avoids such a problem, then what are we to make of an attempt to ground democracy in such norms?
The answer would appear to be that normative procedural conditions of democracy for Habermas are
grounded in a particular interpretation of universal norms. This should not worry those who adopted a
perspective derived from Foucault's ontology of reason in which there can only ever be particular
versions of universal principles. The danger in Habermas' account emerges when we realise that he not
only wants to claim a weak transcendental status for this interpretation of universal norms but that
these norms are to be the basis of legitimate lawmaking, i.e. they are to receive coercive authorisation
in law. At this point, the question of the historical conditions of his account becomes vital. What
conditions of Habermas' intellectual practice are not available to its practitioners? What are the historical
conditions of this kind of theory?
Here Foucault and Ewald appear to be extremely illuminating. When Habermas tries to discover the
basis of legitimate lawmaking in the norms implicit in communicative action, from the perspective of
Foucault and Ewald he is doing nothing more than working on the episteme or, better, the political
rationality, of biopower – he is seeking to introduce the principle of normalisation into the juridical
system of law and sovereignty.
At first sight, such a claim might be easily dispensed with by Habermas, who indeed cites Ewald when
raising the problem of tension in the welfare state between a citizenship based on the extension of
private and public autonomy and ‘a ‘‘normalization”, in Foucault's sense, that fosters the passive
enjoyment of paternalistically dispensed rights’ (Habermas, 1996a: 76). It is true that Foucault (1981:
239) does consider that the ‘demonic nature’ of modern states grows out of tensions between what
might be loosely thought of as active citizenship – the city–citizen game – and what he calls ‘pastoral
power’ – the shepherd–flock game. At a pinch, Foucault's notion of pastoral power might be thought to
be akin to the shop-worn criticisms of the paternalistic exercise of expertise. Yet his historical account of
biopower and the transformation of law by the action of norms would suggest that it is Habermas'
conception of

Page 188
normalisation that appears to be lacking. Normalisation is not simply the imposition of scientifically
derived or expert norms on a citizenry rendered as a passive population, as we have seen. Rather it
concerns both the identification of norms, and the establishment of procedures for their identification.
Moreover, at least in some cases, what is normalised are not objects but language. This normalisation of
language allows the reaching of mutual understanding (say between different groups of engineers or
technicians) about norms and standards. In Ewald's words, ‘normalization produces not objects but
procedures that will lead to some general consensus regarding the choice of norms and standards’
(Ewald, 1990: 148).
The recent history of the contestation of medical knowledge provides an excellent example. I would
suggest that medicine is no less normalising when norms of health are derived from discursive
contestation and the testing of existing medical models by citizens, social movements and other health
professionals, than when they are simply imposed by medical experts alone. We might prefer one
regime to another and even be able to elaborate grounds for that preference. But we don't need to fool
ourselves that because we can raise questions about the validity of medical norms and force medical
expertise to become discursive (in Habermas' normative sense of the word), we have escaped the power
of the norm. Notions of accountability, transparency, democratic contestability, dialogue and so on are
internal to the contemporary transformation of expertise, not to its overcoming.
Now to say that Habermas is engaged in a project of normalisation might be regarded as simply a
rather negative way of putting what is at worst a liberatory defence and extension of democratic
practices. After all, it might be asked, didn't social scientists in the nineteenth century discover the
existence and indeed necessity in all societies of socially valid norms? Furthermore, didn't the moral,
juridical and political sciences re-establish themselves, particularly in Germany at the end of the
nineteenth century as ‘normative sciences’? The social and cultural sciences (the Geisteswissenschaften),
of which Habermas is so obviously an heir, must study norms and cannot help but make normative
statements. In response, we might want to note that there is a fundamental affinity between Habermas
and the positivist alternative to these normative sciences, as illustrated by the case of Auguste Comte.
Comte argued that the principle that pathological phenomena differ from normal ones only in terms of
intensity and not in kind was one that could be extended from medicine and biology to moral and
sociological phenomena (quoted in Canguilhem, 1991: 49–50). As Canguilhem puts it (1991: 64):
By stating in a general way that diseases do not change vital phenomena, Comte is justified in stating
that the cure for political crises consists in bringing societies back to their essential and permanent
structure, and tolerating

Page 189
progress only within limits of variation of the natural order defined by social statics.
Now, while Habermas might abhor this comparison, his project could well be redescribed as the use of
the normativity contained within all societies to indicate what is pathological in our existing political
structures and thus to point us towards a more healthy political state, even if it is one we have not
previously reached. The difference between Comte and Habermas is not the application of the medical
model to societies and their institutions but that health for one refers to existing norms and for the
other to ideal norms. This project of identifying norms of social development for Comte acts as a means
of prescribing the cure for political crises; for Habermas the ideal norms of discourse act less as a cure
and more as a kind of prophylaxis against those infections within thought and action in the twentieth
century that have reduced our immunity to its greatest catastrophes.
It is clear that what is being undertaken by Habermas is not mere clarification and description of the
normative order underlying democracy but the establishment of a normalising project in which the
statement of the conditions of democracy is a means to generate a critique of existing abnormal or
pathological forms – of democratic procedures, of thought, of action. One need not look very far into
Habermas' own role as a public intellectual in the Bundesrepublik and through the process of unification
to find discussions of ‘normative deficits’ (Pensky, 1995: 84–5). One might also wish to consider the
types of judgement Habermas applies to those who are exponents of the philosophical discourse of
modernity (1987a). They are not so much regarded as significant others and hence recognised as
interlocutors in a dialogical relation as those who display a wide variety of pathological phenomena: from
insufficiently elaborated normative grounds, and problems of formal logic to, above all, political
dangerousness (Strong and Sposito, 1995: 279–80).
The ideal communication community then is not simply a weak transcendental but (1) the identification
of a norm by a description of the conditions that are held to exist within the population to which the
norm will be applied, i.e. the population of communicating actors; and (2) a means for the production of
new norms. Like all normative orders, the principles of moral argumentation and discourse ethics make
possible an equalisation of all participants to discourse. More significantly, perhaps, these principles
allow an individualisation and differentiation of the participants in discourse but only within the limits
established by the norm. As a consequence, participants to discourse share attributes such as the
capacity to generate and receive speech acts and to give reasons for claims they make. They also share
the capacity and willingness to participate in a discourse. The ideal speech community can only allow so
much difference.

Page 190
We can now see that one reason why Foucault does not seek to provide universal normative grounds for
his form of critical analysis is that this analysis is concerned with the historical conditions under which
the human, i.e. normative, sciences emerged and the specific ways by which the practices and
rationalities associated with biopower produce and identify norms and apply them to the government of
individuals and populations. He understands biopower as both the emergence of the norm as a central
form and instrument of power and the transformation of law in terms of the norm. Habermas identifies
norms (in communicative and democratic practices), elaborates the techniques for their production
(rational argumentation and deliberative processes) and then applies them to the understanding and
criticism of pathological forms of communication, thought and democracy – the parasitic form of a
manipulative use of language, the postmodern dissidents, and the normative deficits of particular
decision-making processes, for example that concerning the unification of Germany. Moreover,
Habermas appears quite unreflectively to replicate the effects of biopower in his account of law by
seeking to ground the coercive and binding authority of law – what Foucault called the ‘juridical system
of law – in the norms associated with the optimisation of the processes of deliberation and will and
opinion formation. In short, Habermas' project of a reconstructive theory of law and democracy places
him within the contemporary ‘goldfish bowl’ of biopower from which he cannot see out. Foucault's task is
to describe the conditions of emergence and existence of such forms of power and knowledge, and at
least to provide glimpses of an exterior view of the goldfish bowl.
Habermas' main defence against the claim that he is seeking to advocate a kind of normalisation of
democracy would be that he is not paternalistically imposing a set of norms drawn up by an intellectual
but that he is identifying norms already existing, if somewhat latently, in our communicative acts and in
our democratic and legal practices. This is certainly his self-understanding. If we take the approach
sketched by Georges Canguilhem in the epigraph to this chapter, the normal concerns the identification
of the norm and its application. ‘It increases the rule at the same time as it points it out’, as he said.
Habermas cannot simply point out norms – he must extend them to the evaluation of ideas, practices
and processes, and in doing so must call attention to all that does not meet the requirement of the
norm.
I would prefer to leave open the implications of my argument here. The capacity of Habermas' theory of
law and democracy to pathologise – however weakly – much of what is regarded as political in
contemporary liberal democracies preserves the ethical comportment of the intellectual as one who has
worked on himself to mark a position that can mediate between the universal and the particular. The
intellectual is maintained as a bearer of a principled form of reason from which each existing empirical
occurrence can be judged. It is clear that this is consistent with

Page 191
the Kantian form of philosophical ascesis, as Hunter (1994) has pointed out. Secondly, there is a certain
consistency in Habermas' failure to identify positively the features of ethical existence that are particular
to specific spheres of existence, especially in regard to state bureaucracy and administration. As a
component of the system, and as a feature in the implementation of communictive power, the state is
approached as fundamentally technical and without ethical salience. Thus, although Habermas
recognises that deliberative procedures can only point administration in particular directions,
administration itself is regarded as the implementation of decisions made by the political subsystem,
itself sensitive to the communicative structures of public spheres across society. When such an analysis
takes into account the existence of institutions and forms of ethical life that do not readily answer to a
communicative ethic, it can only do so as modifications of the foundational ethics derived from
communicative action. It cannot, for example, regard the bureaucratic ‘ethos of office’ as anything more
than a modification of the values inherent in the communicative ethic under the pressure of the technical
requirements of administrative action oriented to the implementation of goals derived from
communicative power. In this sense it cannot seriously address such ethical attributes and
comportments as impartiality, respect for merit, confidentiality, concern for public interest, and
administrative discretion (Minson, 1998). Normalising democracy means replacing an analysis of the way
specific institutional spheres may answer to quite different and diverse ethical regimes with one in which
deliberative structures become the sole source of value and norm production and means of orienting
political and administrative systems.
This inability to analyse the formation of diverse ethical regimes and the reduction of administration to
the technical implementation of communicatively generated decisions is, however, merely symptomatic
of a more fundamental problem. Habermas' model of deliberative politics presupposes specific kinds of
communicating subjects replete with certain individual capacities, e.g. to make and to accept speech
acts, to make validity claims and provide good reasons, to take up yes or no positions in relation to
validity claims, and to orient themselves towards mutual understanding. It also presupposes political
attributes of members of democratic polities such as the will to participate and to reach agreement over
basic issues. The implications of this focus on deliberative politics is that we should create possibilities
for participation, enfranchise those who have previously been excluded from discourse, open up access
to the media, decentralise decision making, empower those without a voice, and more broadly mobilise
and enrol the communicative agency of the citizenry in democratic processes (cf. Chambers, 1996: 247).
On Foucault's reading of liberalism, the imperative towards the active participation of the governed in
their own government is not, however, particularly new. Indeed proponents of his ‘governmentality’
approach

Page 192
have repeatedly noted that the individual and communal participation of free subjects in their own
government is a feature of contemporary liberal styles of rule (e.g. Rose, 1996). What Foucault's
account of the normalising practices of biopower or of government can do, which Habermas cannot, is
provide an analysis of those forms of reason and practices that attempt to address the question of how
to make subjects act discursively. In other words, Habermas' thought cannot account for the very
normalising powers that are necessary to the construction of the diverse deliberative public spheres that
will both legitimise the exercise of power and be capable of correcting pathological forms of political
thought and practice. All it can do is create a kind of abstract intellectual technology that can act as a
norm and generate further norms in a rationalised world drained of value and threatened by the
imperatives of economy and state.
Notes
An earlier version of this chapter was presented in the Department of Political Science, Research School
of Social Sciences, Australian National University in September 1997 where I was fortunate enough to be
a Visiting Fellow. I should like to thank the participants of that seminar for their questions and
comments and Samantha Ashenden and Susan Hekman for their written responses to earlier drafts.
Informal discussion on the topic of the chapter with Carol Johnson, Barry Hindess and Jim Tully has
immeasurably enriched whatever might be judged to be worthwhile in it and prevented me from
committing even more errors. I trust the reader will make her own adjustments for those errors.
1 This refusal is found in Foucault's article ‘What is enlightenment?’ (1986: 42). Commentators who
have taken this phrase as emblematic of Foucault's position from various stances include Schmidt and
Wartenberg (1994: 284–5, 308, n.8), Bernstein (1994: 215–17) and the present author (Dean, 1994:
54).
2 Perhaps the best example of Foucault's concept of freedom that ties together the first two of these is
found in the interview, ‘The ethic of the care of the self as a practice of freedom’ (Foucault, 1988).
3 See Critical and Effective Histories (Dean, 1994: ch. 7).
4 I have suggested elsewhere that Foucault's deliberations on power and government in the 1970s need
to be understood as part of ongoing dialogue with Marxist and particularly structural Marxist theories of
the state (Dean, 1994). More significantly, there are problems with Foucault's account of law and
democratic sovereignty here that stem from his maintenance until 1976 of the view that in order to
escape the juridical theory of sovereignty one had to have recourse to the language of war and struggle
(cf. Pasquino, 1992). His work is still fundamentally affected by the opposition between law, free
association and consent, on the one hand, and domination, coercion and power, on the other.
5 See note 4.
6 The exposition in this paragraph draws upon that of Owen (1996: 121–5).

Page 193
7 According to Habermas a performative contradiction ‘occurs when a constative speech act “kp” rests
on noncontingent presuppositions whose propositional content contradicts the asserted proposition “p”’
(1990: 77).
References
Baynes, K. (1995) ‘Democracy and the Rechstaat: Habermas' Faktizität und Geltung’, in White (1995).
pp. 201–32.
Bernstein, R. (1994) ‘Foucault's critique as a philosophical ethos’, in Kelly (1994a). pp. 211–42.
Canguilhem, G. (1991) The Normal and the Pathological. New York: Zone Books.
Carleheden, M. and Gabriëls, R. (1996) ‘An interview with Jürgen Habermas’, Theory Culture and
Society, 13 (3): 1–17.
Chambers, S. (1996) Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Dean, M. (1994) Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology. London:
Routledge.
Ewald, F. (1990) ‘Norms, discipline and the law’, Representations, 30: 138–61.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. London: Allen
Lane.
Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality, Volume One: an Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. London:
Allen Lane.
Foucault, M. (1980a) ‘On popular justice: a discussion with Maoists’, in C. Gordon (ed.),
Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. pp. 1–36.
Foucault, M. (1980b) ‘Two lectures’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester
Wheatsheaf. pp. 78–108.
Foucault, M. (1981) ‘Omnes et singulatim: towards a criticism of “Political Reason”’, in S. McMurrin (ed.),
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. II. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. pp. 223–54.
Foucault, M. (1986) ‘What is enlightenment?’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader.
Foucault, M. (1988) ‘The ethic of the care of the self as a practice of freedom’, in J. Rasmussen and D.
Bernauer (eds), The Final Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Foucault, M. (1997) ‘The birth of biopolitics’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Essential Works 1954–1984, Vol.
One: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press. pp. 73–9.
Foucault, M. (1996) ‘What is critique?’ in J. Schmidt (1996). pp. 382–98.
Habermas, J. (1985) ‘Modernity – an incomplete project’, in H. Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture.
London: Pluto. pp. 3–15.
Habermas, J. (1986) ‘The dialectics of rationalization’, in P. Dews (ed.), Autonomy and Solidarity.
London: Verso. pp. 93–130.
Habermas, J. (1987a) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Habermas, J. (1987b) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2. Lifeworld and System: a Critique of
Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1988) ‘Law and morality’, in S. McMurrin (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values,
VIII. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. pp. 217–79.

Page 194
Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Habermas, J. (1990) ‘Discourse ethics: notes on a philosophical justification’, in S. Benhabib and F.
Dallmayr (eds), The Communicative Ethics Controversy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 60–110.
Habermas, J. (1994a) The Past as Future, interview by M. Haller, trans. M. Pensky. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Habermas, J. (1994b) ‘Three normative models of democracy’, Constellations, 1 (1): 1–11.
Habermas, J. (1996a) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy, trans. W. Rehg. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Habermas, J. (1996b) ‘Popular sovereignty as procedure’, in Habermas (1996a). pp. 463–90.
Hunter, I. (1994) ‘Metaphysics as a way of life’, Economy and Society, 23 (1): 93–117.
Kelly, M. (ed.) (1994a) Critique and Power. Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Kelly, M. (1994b) ‘Foucault, Habermas and the self-referentiality of critique’, in Kelly (1994a). pp. 365–
400.
McCarthy, T. (1989) ‘Introduction’ in Habermas (1989). pp. xi–xiv.
Minson, J.P. (1998) ‘The ethos of office’, in M. Dean and B. Hindess (eds), Governing Australia.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 47–69.
Owen, D. (1996) ‘Foucault, Habermas and the claims of reason’, History of the Human Sciences, 9 (2):
119–38.
Pasquino, P. (1992) ‘Political theory of war and peace: Foucault and the history of modern political
theory’, Economy and Society, 21 (1): 77–89.
Pensky, M. (1995) ‘Universalism and the situated critic’, in White (1995). pp. 67–94.
Rose, N. (1996) ‘Governing ‘‘advanced” liberal democracies’, in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds),
Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Schmidt, J. (ed.) (1996) What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century
Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schmidt, J. and Wartenberg, T. (1994) ‘Foucault's Enlightenment: critique, revolution and the fashioning
of the self’, in Kelly (1994a). pp. 282–314.
Strong, T.B. and Sposito, F.A. (1995) ‘Habermas's significant other’, in White (1995). pp. 263–88.
White, S.K. (ed.) (1995) The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Page 195
7
THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

Foucault, Habermas and the
Problem of Recognition
Simon Thompson
Roberto Unger's observation that ‘[w]e present to one another both an unlimited need and an unlimited
threat’ (1984: 20) encapsulates a dilemma that is central to human experience. We need each other in
order to become human and to sustain our lives as viable projects. Our identities are initially formed by
processes of intersubjective recognition, and they are then sustained by practices and institutions which
protect that intersubjectivity. But we also threaten one another's existence: we may neglect or isolate
others, dominate or assimilate them. In short, we are involved in struggles for recognition – caught up
in relations of power in which each individual struggles for supremacy over others.1 In light of this
dilemma, it is vital that we find a way of relating to others without either isolating or dominating them.
How can we be with others while maintaining a suitable distance from them? How can we get what we
need from others without endangering ourselves by our proximity to them? The model of an ideal
relationship that seeks to balance these tensions can be found in a number of different contexts. For
example, the psychoanalytic theorist Jessica Benjamin suggests that in well-functioning relationships
there is a ‘necessary tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition’ (1988: 12). Certain
phenomenologists endorse a very similar ideal, arguing that in ‘genuine dialogue’ there must be ‘a
synthesis of communion and distance’ (Gardiner, 1996: 140). Shifting to an ethico-political level, the
problem becomes one of finding a way to synthesise equality and difference. For example, Albrecht
Wellmer, from the perspective of critical theory, offers the ‘model of a dialogical relationship between
individuals, who recognize each other in their individuality, as equals and as absolute others both at the
same time’ (1983: 94).2

Page 196
The premise from which this chapter begins is that, given the dilemma that Unger identifies, it is
necessary to determine how it is possible to establish relationships of intersubjective recognition which
balance both communion and distance, and equality and difference. This is, to be sure, an ideal whose
general terms are familiar enough to anyone acquainted with contemporary social and political theory.
The particular claim I make here is that Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault have distinctive – and
indeed sometimes complementary – contributions to make to such an account. At first glance, given
that these thinkers are often presented as opposites, this claim may seem highly implausible. Thus
Habermas' postmodernist critics argue that his discourse ethics threatens alterity: since he is concerned
with the recognition of individuals only in so far as they possess certain universal communicative
competences, he neglects differences between subjects. For Habermas, ‘[o]nly communicative
interaction in which subjects accept common procedures of argumentation enables them to recognize
each other as equals because they are the same’ (Simons, 1995: 114). In contrast, Foucault's modernist
critics contend that, since he regards the experience of others as one of sublime alterity, he lacks any
account of intersubjectivity. Furthermore, his romanticisation of alterity undermines the sort of
coordinated political action that the defence of alterity would require. One could say that where
Habermas fails on the distance and difference side of the equation, Foucault falls short on the
communion and equality side. On the idea of recognition itself, Habermas would seem to be much more
amenable to my aims than Foucault. As I show later, an account of reciprocal recognition between
subjects underpins Habermas' account of communicative action. But it is easy to see Foucault as a
thinker hostile to such a way of thinking. His observation that ‘[n]othing in man – not even his body – is
sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men’ (1984: 87–8)
seems to rule out any constructive account of recognition. Against this impression, I will argue that
Foucault needs an account of recognition, and that the germ of such an account is present in his work.
Pursuing these themes, my aim in this chapter will be to show that Foucault and Habermas develop
accounts of relations between subjects which can help provide a solution to Unger's dilemma.
Sometimes this will involve utilising familiar parts of both their theories; at other times it will mean
developing interpretations of these thinkers which are at variance with more usual readings; at yet other
times it will necessitate abandoning aspects of their theories altogether and replacing them with entirely
new components. On the negative side, Habermas lacks a viable account of radical difference, and
Foucault has a scarcely developed account of intersubjectivity. But on the positive side, Foucault's
account of agonism is a valuable attempt to deal with the fact of conflict between subjects, and
Habermas supplies useful parts of an account of normative relations of intersubjectivity. More
specifically, while Foucault helps to

Page 197
show how it is possible to recognise others as different (although not as absolute others), Habermas
assists with an account of the recognition of others as equals (but not simply as the same). In this way,
I believe, it is possible to draw on, but then modify and synthesise, Foucault's and Habermas' work in
order to produce an account of reciprocal recognition of others as related yet separate, and equal yet
different.
Truth, Power and the Subject
In a late interview, Foucault remarked that his work revolved around three axes – truth, power and the
subject – and that in different periods he had focused on each axis in turn (1984: 351–2). In these
terms, it could be said that his project is to uncover the history of the subject in discourses of truth and
regimes of power in order to go beyond the limits of the subject as it is presently known and
constituted. In order to see how Foucault's account of the relation of subject and other fares when.
judged against the ideal just sketched, let us see how intersubjective relations appear in each phase of
his work, and consider what criticisms have been made of each of these phases. Although this account
will be considerably simplified, it will serve to get us on our way.
Foucault's early works, such as The Order of Things (1973), focus on regimes or games of truth. Since
such regimes generate the truths which we know about the subject, and govern the structures in which
it is located, it could be said that this subject disappears into the interstices of these structures; hence
his remark that ‘man has “come to an end” ’ (1973: 383). The encounter with the other in this phase of
Foucault's work is an experience of sublime alterity since it is necessarily outside all regimes of truth; for
example, he refers to madness as a ‘moment of silence’, as ‘nothing’, as the ‘paradoxical manifestation
of non-being’ (quoted in McNay, 1994: 38). Here Jacques Derrida (1978) famously objects that, on
Foucault's terms, it is impossible to write a history of madness as the other of reason without
reproducing the same exclusion of madness which that history aims to describe.
Works of Foucault's middle period, such as Discipline and Punish (1977), centre on analyses of the
systems of disciplinary power through which the subject is created. In this period, the relation of subject
to other can be seen as the effect of a bisecting power. Here Foucault talks of the ‘dividing practices’
that separate normal from deviant, trustworthy from criminal, and so on: ‘The subject is either divided
inside himself or divided from others’ (1982: 208). Thus the shaping of the subject by such practices
simultaneously creates its others; these can be seen as the ‘underside’ of the operations of power. On
this account, to be sure, the other is no longer outside the structures in which the subject is located.
But now critics contend that this is a highly reductive account of subject and other that overstates the
significance of power and understates the

Page 198
ability of subjects to develop ‘reflexive self-determination’ (Kögler, 1996: 29, original emphasis).
In light of these remarks, the reappearance of the subject in Foucault's final work, above all in The Use
of Pleasure (1985) and The Care of the Self (1986), seems rather dramatic. In his late ethics, Foucault is
concerned to elaborate what he calls an ‘aesthetics of existence’, a form of ethics ‘understood as the
elaboration of a form of relation to self that enables an individual to fashion himself into a subject of
ethical conduct’ (1985: 251). Here the subject which comes to take centre stage appears to be capable
of self-knowledge and self-constitution. It has been argued that there is very little trace of the other to
be found in this ethics: since Foucault focuses exclusively on the relation of the subject to itself, he
omits any account of intersubjectivity. For example, he remarks that ‘the care of the self is ethically prior
[to “care for others”] in that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior’ – presumably to the
relationship with others (1989b: 437). From this it has been inferred that, for Foucault, subjectivity is
ontologically prior to intersubjectivity.3
Although this account of the subject and other does counter the charge of reductionism by emphasising
the importance of self-creation, a number of criticisms have nevertheless been made of it. First, an
ethics that refuses to deal with intersubjectivity is in various ways an impossibility: aesthetic self-
creation cannot be achieved in isolation from other subjects. By neglecting the self's relations to others
(or by reducing those others to objects), Foucault's project is self-defeating (White, 1986: 428).
Secondly, if the other does make an appearance, it is only as a vehicle for the realisation of the
subject's purposes. According to Sheldon Wolin, Foucault's aestheticism praises actions which are
‘manipulatory – predatory vis-à-vis other persons’ (1986: 84). That is, the subject regards all others
merely as objects, to be used in whatever way is necessary to achieve its own ends. Thirdly, since, on
Foucault's analysis, the subject ignores or objectifies the other, this analysis overlooks those aspects of
social life in which subject and other peacefully coexist (McNay, 1994: 152). On the basis of these
criticisms, Lois McNay reaches the general conclusion that ‘Foucault's conception of the self remains
within the fundamental dynamic of the philosophy of the subject which posits an active self acting on an
objectified world and interacting with other subjects who are defined as objects or narcissistic extensions
of the primary subject’ (1994: 153).
‘The Subject is an Agonism’
These criticisms suggest that Foucault conceives of intersubjective relations in a number of different but
equally unsatisfactory ways: either the subject is defined by systems of power/knowledge which make
the other a sublime outsider, or both subject and other are reduced to effects

Page 199
of a diremptive power, or the other becomes the object of the subject's project of self-creation. I now
argue, against many – but not all4 – critics, that elements of a defensible account of the relations of the
subject and other can be found in Foucault's late work (although, as we will see later, it will need
supplementing with certain elements from Habermas' work). To be specific, on my account of Foucault's
ethics, the relation of subject and other takes the form of a reciprocity adapted, in light of the
universality of power, into a form of ‘agonism’. Here we will stick closely to Foucault's own texts.
It is necessary, first of all, to counter the critics' claim that Foucault's late work has nothing to say about
the relationship of subject to other. Foucault's ethics is concerned with the power of governmentality
that the subject has over itself in its articulation with relations to others.5 For Foucault, the power that
inevitably exists between the subject and others is ‘a question of government’ – where this is
characterised broadly as ‘the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed’
(1982: 221). This analysis of power is linked to Foucault's ethics since he argues that ‘the basis’ for
governmentality ‘is freedom, the relationship of the self to itself and the relationship to the other’. He
then remarks that ‘the concept of governmentality makes it possible to bring out the freedom of the
subject and its relationship to others – which constitute the very stuff of ethics’ (1989b: 448). This point
is worth emphasising: a central concern of Foucault's ethics is the free subject and its relationship to
others; and this concern can be made explicit by focusing on the idea of governmentality in which this
relationship is analysed in terms of power.
Given this account of the form of his late ethics, how does Foucault fill in the content? How does he
believe that subject and other should be related? Many critics argue that, according to Foucault, a
subject can use another as an object in order to fulfil its own solipsistic purposes. But in this case, what
sense could be made of the following sorts of remarks, drawn from different phases of Foucault's work?
In Madness and Civilization he argues that ‘[t]he proximity instituted by the asylum … does not allow
reciprocity…. The science of mental disease, as it would develop in the asylum, would always be only of
the order of observation and classification. It would not be a dialogue’ (1989a: 250). Or in Discipline and
Punish he refers to ‘an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework’ that masked the
bourgeoisie's rise to power in the eighteenth century. Foucault then speaks of the ‘other, dark side of
these processes’, namely the development of ‘all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-
egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines’ (1977: 222). Why would he say ‘dark’ if not to
condemn? In the late ethics the same concern with asymmetry and non-reciprocity continues. Thus,
referring to the way in which ‘the Greek ethics of pleasure is linked to dissymmetry, exclusion of the
other’, Foucault comments: ‘All that is quite disgusting!’ (1984: 346). In a similar

Page 200
vein, he describes Greek sexual ethics as a ‘very harsh’ system of inequalities and constraints –
especially for women and boys (1985: 253). Again, I would ask, why say ‘harsh’ if not to condemn?6
So far I have argued that Foucault is concerned with relations between subjects, and he uses value-
terms like symmetry and reciprocity to judge the quality of such relations. Bringing these two claims
together, one could say that his ethics is concerned with the specification of the conditions of possibility
of reciprocal relations between subjects. But, for Foucault, it is impossible to conceptualise such relations
simply in terms of mutual affirmation and support since for him this would mean simply wishing away
the brute fact of power: ‘A society without power relations can only be an abstraction’ (1982: 222–3).
Power-free relations of equality are impossible since power is always present; furthermore, stable
relations of equal power (in which the power exercised by each subject reliably and permanently cancels
the other's out) are also impossible since power is always disruptive. In this case, Foucault has to show
how relations between subject and other, given that they are always marked by power, can be
symmetrical and reciprocal rather than coercive and violent.
His argument begins with the claim that power is always relational: ‘the exercise of power’ is ‘a mode of
action upon the actions of others’ in which each subject tries to direct the other's conduct (1982: 221).
For such a relation of power to be possible, each subject must be capable of action: ‘ “the other” (the
one over whom power is exercised)’ must be ‘thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as
a person who acts’ (1982: 220); or, in other words, both subject and other must be free (1989b: 441).
This means that one possibility that subjects always have – one option within their field of action – is
resistance: ‘as soon as there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance’ (1988: 123). Foucault
then argues that, if each subject can resist the other's strategies of power, the relation between them is
reversible. He characterises this sort of power relation as an ‘agonism’: ‘a relationship which is at the
same time reciprocal incitation and struggle … a permanent provocation’ (1982: 222). For example, in
sexual and amorous relations, one wields power over the other in ‘open-ended strategic games’ where
‘the situation may be reversed’ (1989b: 447).
Now consider how this analysis of intersubjective power is linked back to the ideal of symmetry.
Foucault equates the reversibility of agonistic relations with reciprocity: he contrasts ‘mobile, reversible
and unstable’ power relations with ‘states of domination’ in which ‘power relations are fixed in such a
way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and allow an extremely limited margin of freedom’ (1989b:
441). Since ‘reversible’ is used here as an antonym for ‘asymmetrical’,7 it can be inferred that, for
Foucault, reversible relations are symmetrical relations. In light of this somewhat compressed argument,
I conclude that Foucault's objective is not the elimination of power, or the establishment of a stable
balance of equal power, but the achievement of mobile power relations in

Page 201
which one subject's superiority over the other can never be guaranteed. A sufficient balance of power
and resistance between two subjects ensures the reversibility of their situation. And, given the fact of
power, reversible relations are as close as it is possible to get to relations of symmetry. An evaluation of
this account of Foucault's ethics will follow an initial look at Habermas.
The Incomplete Project of Modernity
Against the postmodern spirit of the times, Habermas has characterised his work as an attempt to justify
and complete the ‘project of modernity’. In particular, he seeks to defend an Enlightenment conception
of reason which is capable of providing a secure foundation for truth and morality. To carry out this
task, Habermas has developed a theory of communicative action, according to which reason is
embedded in universal and unavoidable structures of human language use. This theory seeks to identify
a set of communicative competencies and normative commitments which are inescapable for anyone
wishing to participate in communicative action. Thus: ‘the conditions of symmetry and the expectations
of reciprocity’ are ‘present in the form of universal and pragmatic presuppositions of communicative
action’ (1990: 245).8 As this remark suggests, Habermas' theory places subject and other in a particular
type of relationship. Let us briefly examine a number of elements of this account in order to determine
how well it stands up to the ideal of an egalitarian relation between individuals that preserves their
differences.
In Habermas' theory, communicative action is contrasted to strategic action in which individuals are
oriented to success: they try to influence, manipulate or coerce others in order to get what they want.
In communicative action, by contrast, individuals are oriented towards reaching mutual understanding.
Hence this is a reason-giving practice: subjects offer reasons to others and assess the reasons others
offer them. To be specific, actors make claims to validity, and the warranty that they offer to redeem
these claims (if challenged) creates the possibility of the peaceful coordination of social action (1984:
302). This implies that communicative action depends on the possibility of discourse. When, for
whatever reason, everyday communicative action breaks down, speakers must be able to resort to
discourse in order to challenge and try to redeem the validity claims that underlie their ordinary
communication. For this to be possible, it is essential that in discourse the only force present is that of
the better argument: ‘each time we want to speak what is true’ we ‘necessarily anticipate’ ‘a life
together in communication that is free from coercion’ (1983: 108–9; word order changed). Hence
Habermas argues that here we approach the ideal of an ‘unlimited community of communication’.

Page 202
An account of recognition plays an essential part in Habermas' theory: as he remarks, ‘the conditions of
symmetry and reciprocal recognition’ are ‘the unavoidable presuppositions of communicative action’
(1992b: 201). One part of this account focuses on what one could call ‘primary’ recognition. Habermas
claims that ‘a person has been socialized and has formed his or her identity’ in ‘intersubjectively shared
experiences and life contexts’ (1994: 129). The subject's identity is first formed in the processes of
recognition which are undertaken by significant others acting as primary caretakers. Subsequently,
subjects receive recognition from the other members of their particular lifeworld. The rationalisation of
the lifeworld (which forms the context of communicative action) sees the emergence of what could be
called ‘secondary’ recognition. Habermas maintains that the subject, moulded by primary recognition in
the life-world, develops further by detaching itself from the pre-defined roles that it has acquired there.
Thus ‘[i]dentity is produced through socialization, that is, through the fact that the growing child first of
all integrates itself into a specific social system by appropriating symbolic generalities; it is later secured
and developed through individuation; that is, precisely through a growing independence in relation to
social systems’ (1979: 74, original emphasis). Here the subject's post-conventional identity is secured by
its anticipation of reciprocal recognition by generalised others in an ‘unlimited communication
community’ (1992b: 186, 188).
It may seem likely that Habermas' theory – with its accounts of linguistic reciprocity and intersubjective
recognition – would stand up well against the ideal with which I began this chapter. But in fact these
various aspects of his theory have been subjected to considerable criticism. First, on Habermas'
commitment to the theoretical ideal of power-free communication, Foucault himself has commented that
‘[t]he idea that there could exist a state of communication that would allow games of truth to circulate
freely, without any constraints or coercive effects, seems utopian to me’ (1989b: 446). Foucault's
exhaustive investigations into the intimate interrelationship of power and knowledge could be invoked
here in support of this claim. Developing this point, it has also been argued that Habermas idealises the
lifeworld. Since he correlates strategic action and systems, on the one hand, and communicative action
and the lifeworld, on the other (e.g. Bernstein, 1985: 22), he is blind to the ‘power-practices’ that occur
in the latter sphere (Kögler, 1996: 27).
Turning to Habermas' account of recognition, critics contend, first, that Habermas is naïve to see
primary recognition as an unproblematic matter of mutual affirmation. For example, Johanna Meehan
(1994) argues that he lacks an account of the struggles for power that can occur both within a circle of
significant others (generally the family) and within a circle of fellow lifeworlders. She concludes that,
since relations of unequal power can distort processes of primary recognition, Habermas is wrong to
separate the formation of ego identity from the processes of cognitive and moral development. Secondly,
it has been argued that

Page 203
secondary recognition represents a threat to difference, to the distinctiveness of the other. To use an
argument deployed by Seyla Benhabib against Kantian theorists such as John Rawls, such recognition,
since it is of and by the ‘generalised other’, leaves no space for the ‘concrete other’. That is, in the ideal
communication community, subjects receive recognition only for what they have in common with all
other subjects (certain communicative competencies), and not for what marks them out as distinct
individuals. Thus difference is endangered since ‘the other as different from the self disappears’ (1992:
161, original emphasis).9
Strategic Action and the Concrete Other
According to the critics, Habermas overlooks the ubiquity of power, and his account of recognition
endangers difference. I will defend at least part of Habermas' position by developing the following two
principal lines of argument. First, important criticisms of his analysis of power can be deflected by
bringing this analysis closer to that of Foucault. Secondly, by showing how primary and secondary
recognition can exist side by side, I argue that they are able to provide valuable elements of an account
of normative relations of intersubjectivity.
Concerning the charge that Habermas idealises the unlimited community of communication, it should be
pointed out that he explicitly denies that power-free communication could form the basis of an actual
social system: ‘I do not regard the fully transparent – … or indeed a homogenized and unified – society
as an ideal’ (1992a: 171).10 Habermas contends that the notion of a community of power-free
communication is a necessary but always to some degree counterfactual presupposition of everyday
communication (1993: 164). This disclaimer certainly counters the least nuanced criticisms of this idea.
More sophisticated criticisms would have to take on Habermas' universal pragmatics since it is here that
he grounds his claim about the status of this ideal community.11 Habermas' disclaimer does, however,
create problems for his account of recognition. As we have seen, he believes that individuals stabilise
their fragile identities in a web of relations of mutual recognition (1990: 243–4), and that without such
relations ‘the identity of each individual would disintegrate’ (1992a: 252). The living presence of
significant others and co-lifeworlders is essential to the stability of an individual's identity. But when
discussing the further individuation of identity, Habermas believes that this can only be achieved in a
process of secondary recognition by generalised others: ‘postconventional ego-identity can only be
secured by the anticipation of symmetrical relations of unforced reciprocal recognition’ (1992b: 188). The
idea of such a set of relations is an ‘idealizing supposition’ (1992b: 186) since it cannot be fully realised
in practice. But it seems implausible to argue that post-conventional identity can be

Page 204
stabilised simply by anticipating a form of recognition which does not and cannot exist.
What of the criticism that Habermas idealises the lifeworld as a power-free zone? In fact he is entirely
aware that communicative and strategic action are entangled together in the lifeworld (Cooke, 1994a:
20, 133). Neither form of action can bypass consciousness; thus when an agent acts strategically,
seeking to manipulate or coerce others into serving its purposes, it does so in full awareness of the
character of its actions. But although Habermas accepts that it is only possible to make an analytical
distinction between these two types of action, the idea of pure communicative action nevertheless
serves as a critical standard. That is, cases of coercion, manipulation and deceit that occur in the
lifeworld can be judged against the regulative idea of action motivated solely by reasons. Once this is
understood, it becomes apparent that within a Habermasian framework it is entirely possible to analyse
intersubjective relations that take the form of what Foucault calls ‘strategies of power’. Consider, then,
Meehan's criticism that Habermas is not aware of the possibility that power can be exercised in
processes of primary recognition. It should now be clear that an analysis of strategic action can be
included in an account of such processes. In this way, it is possible to answer this criticism by showing
how Habermas can handle the possibility that the formation of identity is affected by the abuse of power
by significant others. It is unfortunate that Habermas himself has not given attention to this type of
analysis for a long time, when it came under the concept of ‘systematically distorted communication’
(1975).12
The second charge made against Habermas' theory of recognition is that, by shifting recognition from
the concrete other to the generalised other, it neglects difference. This charge is inappropriate: there is
no point at which Habermas implies that the latter form of recognition entirely supersedes the former.
The subject does not escape its lifeworld in order to gain recognition in an unlimited community of
communication, and hence primary recognition is not completely replaced by secondary recognition.
Rather these two forms of recognition can and should exist side by side: the subject can be recognised
as a concrete other (in its particular lifeworld) and a generalised other (in idealised discourse) at one
and the same time. Maeve Cooke describes these two forms of recognition as follows: first, ‘the post-
conventional self gains autonomy to the extent that her judgements and actions would be accepted as
valid [i.e. recognised] for everyone by all participants in a moral discourse’ (1994b: 90); and, secondly,
‘[t]he self, in her project of self-realization, seeks recognition of the rightness of her actions and
judgements in the context of her own life-history; this recognition, in modern pluralist societies, can be
accorded only by those who share her strong evaluative assumptions’ (1994b: 96). So it is possible for
subjects to recognise others as equal and as different at the same time: they are regarded as equal
since they possess the same powers of rationality and

Page 205
autonomy as their fellow subjects, and they are acknowledged to be different in virtue of their singular
identities. It is clear that this solution to Unger's dilemma is rather different from that found in
Foucault's agonism. Let us consider further the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two rival
solutions.
Towards a Synthesis
I will now draw out further implications of my comparative analysis of Foucault and Habermas by
considering how best to combine their ideas under two double headings: equality and reciprocity, and
difference and otherness.
Equality and Reciprocity
One half of an adequate theory of intersubjective recognition must consist of an account of reciprocity;
in other words, it must show how subjects can acknowledge each other as equals. At one point
Habermas remarks that ‘the conviction that a humane collective life depends on the vulnerable forms of
innovation-bearing, reciprocal and unforcedly egalitarian everyday communication’ is ‘alien’ to Foucault
(1992a: 155–6). I have argued that in fact Foucault employs notions of symmetry, dialogue and
inclusion, and even egalitarianism and equality, as terms of critical evaluation in his studies of various
social practices and institutions. He is, furthermore, strongly committed to an ideal of reciprocity
between subjects, although he believes that this can only be achieved in relationships in which there is
a reversibility of power. Against Habermas, there is no possibility of communication without any trace of
force. However, there is a problem connecting these two aspects of Foucault's analysis. While his
accounts of agonistic relations are always what rational choice theorists would call ‘two player games’,
his use of general evaluative terms implies a much broader framework in which a social system
minimises inequality and domination. It is not clear how agonism can work at the level of a full set of
social relationships. In part this is because Foucault lacks an account of the social or intersubjective self:
there is a gap between his analysis of systems of disciplinary power through which subjects are
produced and his account of how the subjects so produced engage in self-creation – albeit with the aid
of one other subject, whether mentor or lover.
It would be fair to say that the idea of reciprocity is grounded more deeply in Habermas' theory. Unlike
Foucault, he is a committed intersubjectivist whose theory depends significantly on the idea that our
identities are first formed and then sustained by our relations to others. For Habermas, reciprocity is
linked to the reversibility of perspectives. This begins when children are asked to imagine how it would
feel if they were on the receiving end of their own actions. It ends, one could say,

Page 206
with the notion of ideal role-taking: ‘Given the communicative presuppositions of an inclusive and
noncoercive discourse among free and equal partners, the principle of universalization requires each
participant to project himself into the perspective of all’ (1983: 52). That is, in moral discourse the
subject attempts to specify universally justifiable norms by imagining itself in all others' positions.
This idea of reciprocity as reversibility has been sharply criticised. Iris Young contends that it presents a
direct threat to difference: as she says, ‘identifying moral respect and reciprocity with symmetry and
reversibility of perspectives tends to close off … differentiation among subjects’ (1997: 343). In
particular, the subject's attempt at reversibility with the other is likely to result in assimilation of the
other, a failure to respect its difference. This is because the subject unwittingly carries its own beliefs
and values into what it believes to be the other's perspective. For this reason Young defends a notion of
what she calls ‘asymmetrical reciprocity’ according to which the subject accepts the asymmetry of
condition between itself and the other and consequently seeks to achieve a relationship of reciprocity
with the other without trying to put itself in the other's shoes. In order to assess the strength of this
argument, it will be useful first of all to consider the theme of difference.
Difference and Otherness
The other half of a defensible theory of intersubjective recognition must be an account of otherness,
one that can show how interrelated subjects can preserve the differences between them. The early
Foucault saw our encounter with the other as a sublime experience that could only take place outside of
all systems of knowledge. In his later work Foucault draws the other into the system in which the
subject itself is located – at the other end of a relation of power. But although connected to the subject
in this way, there is a sense in which the other, for Foucault, remains radically other since we only
recognise it as one who acts (Foucault, 1982: 220). We are never asked to put ourselves empathetically
in the other's position in order to imagine how it feels. Therefore, beyond the fact that it is able to resist
our strategies of power, we know nothing about it – it remains a blank to us.
Habermas' account of the relation of subject and other is very different. One element has already been
touched on: within the confines of a particular lifeworld, we esteem the other's ‘unique and
irreplaceable’ identity. Here the subject values (concrete) others for realising qualities that they both
endorse since they both belong to the same ‘intersubjectively shared value-horizon’ (Honneth, 1995:
121). In addition, Habermas occasionally refers to a way in which we relate to the other through a more
radical act of imaginative identification. Here he claims that the ideal role-taking that is characteristic of
relations between subjects in discourse leads to an appreciation of difference: here a

Page 207
‘generalized sympathy’ ‘opens our eyes to ‘‘difference” – in other words to the individuality and
autonomous significance of the other who remains in his or her otherness’ (1992a: 269–70). Here
Habermas seems to be more sensitive to difference than many of his postmodernist critics give him
credit for.
In light of these remarks, what are we to make of Young's critique of reciprocity as reversibility? With
regard to Habermas, it could be argued that, if recognition takes place within a single horizon of
evaluation, then the other is pulled into the subject's own horizon, and judged by the standards to be
found there. It has no opportunity to challenge the values of that horizon or to offer alternative values
of its own. But this is not a problem for Habermas, given that the object of recognition here is a
particular concrete other. Since this other shares the subject's own value-horizon, it does not matter –
indeed it is only appropriate – that it is judged according to the set of values that it shares with the
subject. But Habermas is more vulnerable to Young's criticism when he describes an act of recognition
as imaginative identification with others outside of one's value-horizon. Here it may be that the subject
is guilty of what Young calls ‘falsifying projection’ (1997: 349), taking its own values with it when it tries
to occupy the other's perspective. Since his remarks on empathy with otherness stand out isolated from
his account of solidarity with others who are like us, Habermas does not develop a convincing account
of how our imaginative identification with the other will avoid carrying our own values over into that
other's place.
This criticism does not apply to Foucault since he is much more aware of these dangers of recognition
than Habermas. For example, he argues that the other is too fluid and complex to serve as the object of
recognition. In this case, to try to recognise it would be to freeze it into one form, to prevent its further
potential change. Or, if the other – like all subjects – is not self-identical (1989a: 440), then recognition
of a particular other can only acknowledge one aspect of its identity to the neglect of all the rest. It may
be that it is partly in light of these concerns that, on Foucault's account, the other remains significantly
other. In this way, he meets Young's demand for an account of reciprocity without reversibility of
perspectives.
To sum up, Habermas offers a useful account of ‘collective concrete others’ (Benhabib, 1992: 12) – the
co-lifeworlders with whom the subject shares a horizon of strong evaluation – in terms of the relations of
mutual esteem that characterise such a horizon. But his account of the particular or concrete other
leaves more to be desired. As it stands, it is vulnerable to the criticism that recognition assimilates this
other since empathy takes place in the subject's own terms. More work needs to be done here on the
conditions in which this is likely to happen and on ways in which it might be prevented. Foucault, by
contrast, is aware of the importance of the radically other; hence his characterisation of this other as a
blank resisting force. But he lacks an account of the ‘collective concrete other’.

Page 208
Although at one point he mentions the way in which the ethical subject draws on local conceptual
resources (1989b: 440–1), his theory lacks any version of the idea of a horizon of strong evaluation in
which such a concrete other could be located.
Conclusion
My aim in this chapter has been to explore the extent to which Foucault's and Habermas' work can be
of help in establishing the foundations of an account of intersubjective relations in which the subject
recognises the other as both equal and different. Although I believe that the accounts of their work that
I have offered here are at least in the spirit of the original arguments, I must admit that they have
necessitated a considerable amount of recovery and reconstruction, addition and modification. Thus,
against many other accounts, I have offered a reading of Foucault's ethics according to which it
attempts to secure reciprocity between subject and other by ensuring a reversibility of power. The
prominence of the theme of reciprocity should be raised in Foucault's theory, even at the risk of
compromising the distinctiveness that it gains by emphasising aesthetic self-creation. In particular, his
acknowledgement that ‘relations with others … always entail relations with oneself, and vice versa’
(1984: 48) needs to be taken seriously. As far as Habermas is concerned, I have argued that an
account of reciprocal recognition lies at the heart of his theory of communicative action. But I believe
that a defensible version of this account must make possible the simultaneous recognition of generalised
and concrete others. It must also place increased emphasis on strategic action if it is to be able to deal
with phenomena of micropower.
In light of these reflections, the outlines of a tenable synthesis of these two accounts should now be
clear. So far as relations between subject and other are concerned, Habermas would contribute an
account of the generalised other, one deserving of our respect since equal in powers of autonomy; and
an account of the particular concrete other, one deserving of our esteem since showing excellence in
qualities valued by both parties. But this would need to be supplemented by Foucault's account of the
radical other, the one who remains different by effectively resisting assimilation to the subject. The
success of such a synthesis will depend in part on an account of the relationship between intersubjective
communication and power. Here I believe that Habermas could contribute an account of communicative
action that can account for the possibility of concordant relations between subjects. But to this must be
added Foucault's account of the strategies of power that subjects deploy against other subjects. If, as I
have suggested, the scope of strategic action in Habermas' work is extended and its significance
increased, then it would come closer to this account of agonism. The task is to combine Foucault's

Page 209
analysis of agonistic power between radical others with Habermas' account of normative relations of
intersubjectivity between generalised and concrete others.
Notes
Thanks to Samantha Ashenden and Kate Nash for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
1 Hegel's dialectic of master and bondsman is, of course, the locus classicus here. See O'Neill (1996) for
Hegel's original text and a series of valuable commentaries.
2 These two pairs of concepts are closely interrelated: for example, a condition of equality encourages
communion since subjects do not feel endangered by their fellows; and respect for differences between
subjects is possible where psychological distance is maintained.
3 It should be noted, however, that, in the text just quoted, Foucault is reporting on Greek thinking.
That he does not always endorse such thinking will become apparent later on.
4 See, for example, Coles (1992), Owen (1994), Simons (1995).
5 According to Arnold Davidson, Foucault says that ‘governmentality’ concerns ‘the government of the
self by the self in its articulation with relations to others’ (1994: 119). But I cannot find this quotation in
the English translation of the French text to which Davidson refers – Foucault's 1980–81 lecture on
‘Subjectivity and truth’ (1993).
6 Kelly argues that Foucault uses such normative terms since he is a contextualist who merely employs
‘criteria in local critique’ which are ‘internal to the historical framework of modernity’ (1994: 386). This
fails to explain Foucault's first-person statements concerning the harshness or disgusting nature of
particular practices.
7 And ‘mobile’ and ‘unstable’ are antonyms for ‘fixed’ and ‘perpetual’.
8 Benhabib provides a useful elaboration of these notions which she defines as a principle of ‘universal
moral respect’ and a principle of ‘egalitarian reciprocity’ (1992: 29, original emphasis; and see 159).
9 It should be noted that Benhabib herself believes that a modified version of Habermas' discourse
ethics would not be vulnerable to this objection.
10 In an attempt to correct this misinterpretation, he has now abandoned the term ‘ideal speech
situation’ as a summary of the ‘idealizing suppositions’ of communication since this formula ‘is too
concretistic’ (1992a: 260). It is not clear to me, however, why the new term – the ‘unlimited community
of communication’ – is any less likely to cause the same problem of misinterpretation.
11 This is not an issue that I can attempt to deal with within the confines of this chapter.
12 See also his reference to family pathology in Habermas (1992a: 246).
References
Benhabib, S. (1992) Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics.
Cambridge: Polity.

Page 210
Benjamin, J. (1988) The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New
York: Pantheon.
Bernstein, R. (1985) ‘Introduction’, in R. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Coles, R. (1992) ‘Communicative action and dialogical ethics: Habermas and Foucault’, Polity, 25 (1):
71–94.
Cooke, M. (1994a) Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas' Pragmatics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cooke, M. (1994b) ‘Realizing the po st-conventional self’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 20 (1/2): 87–
101.
Davidson, A. (1994) ‘Ethics as aesthetics: Foucault, the history of ethics, and ancient thought’, in Gutting
(1994), pp. 115–40.
Derrida, J. (1978) ‘Cogito and the history of madness’, in Writing and Difference. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Foucault, M. (1973) The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1982) ‘Afterword: the subject and power’, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michael
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester.
Foucault, M. (1984) The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1985) The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1986) The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1988) Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. London:
Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1989a) Madness and Civilization. London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1989b) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984. New York: Semiotext(e).
Foucault, M. (1993) ‘About the beginnings of the hermeneutics of the self: two lectures at Dartmouth’,
Political Theory, 21 (2): 198–227.
Gardiner, M. (1996) ‘Alterity and ethics: a dialogical perspective’, Theory, Culture and Society, 13 (2):
121–43.
Press.
Habermas, J. (1975) Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1979) Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1983) Philosophical-Political Profiles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (1984) Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of
Society. Cambridge: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1990) ‘Justice and solidarity: on the discussion concerning stage 6’, in T.E. Wren (ed.),
The Moral Domain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (1992a) Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, revised edn. London:
Verso.
Habermas, J. (1992b) Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Polity.

Page 211
Habermas, J. (1993) Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Cambridge: Polity.
Habermas, J. (1994) ‘Struggles of recognition in the democratic constitutional state’, in A. Gutmann
(ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge:
Polity.
Kelly, M. (1994) ‘Foucault, Habermas, and the self-referentiality of critique’, in M. Kelly (ed.), Critique
and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kögler, H. (1996) ‘The self-empowered subject: Habermas, Foucault and hermeneutic reflexivity’,
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 22 (4): 13–44.
McNay, L. (1994) Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity.
Meehan, J. (1994) ‘Autonomy, recognition and respect’, Constellations, 1 (2): 270–85.
O'Neill, J. (ed.) (1996) Hegel's Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts and Commentary. New York:
State University of New York Press.
Owen, D. (1994) Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason.
London: Routledge.
Simons, J. (1995) Foucault and the Political. London: Routledge.
Unger, R. (1984) ‘The critical legal studies movement’, Harvard Law Review, 96: 561–75.
Wellmer, A. (1983) ‘Reason, utopia and the dialectic of enlightenment’, Praxis International, 1: 83–107.
White, S. (1986) ‘Foucault's challenge to critical theory’, American Political Science Review, 80 (2): 419–
32.
Wolin, S. (1986) ‘Foucault's aesthetic decisionism’, Telos, 67: 71–86.
Young, I. (1997) ‘Asymmetrical reciprocity: on moral respect, wonder, and enlarged thought’,
Constellations, 3 (3): 340–63.

Page 212
INDEX
adaptation, 71
aesthetic morality, 48–9, 50
aesthetics of existence, 46–9, 74, 198
agonism, 35, 37, 135, 198–201, 205
agreement, 3, 4, 123, 125, 138
anarchism, Foucault and, 76, 77
antiquity, Foucault and, 46, 47, 49
Apel, K-O., 105
Arato, A., 146, 160n
archaeology, 69
argumentation, 101–4, 112, 137–8, 189
presuppositions of, 118–19
rules of, 26–7, 29, 39, 41, 102
asymmetry, 21, 37–42
see also symmetry
bargaining see negotiation
Baynes, K., 179
Benhabib, S., 111–12, 115, 208n
Benjamin, J., 195
Bernauer, J., 68
biopolitics, 151–2
biopower, 11, 48, 65, 73, 168, 190
Black, A., 146, 161n
‘blackmail of the Enlightenment’, Foucault and, 30–1, 69, 70, 121–2, 167
Blaug, R., 114, 115–16
Canguilhem, G., 188, 190
care of the self, 76
Chambers, S., 111–12, 115, 178, 187
citizenship, 98, 152–3, 156, 171
civil society, 143–7, 158–62
Foucault and, 151–4, 157, 158
Habermas and, 146, 147–51, 157 158–9, 181,
and the welfare state, 154–8
Cohen, J., 115, 146, 160n
Collingwood, R. G., 119
colonisation of the lifeworld see lifeworld, colonisation of
communication, 75, 86, 177, 187–9
relations of, 95, 135–6
communication community, 29, 100, 189, 201, 203
communicative action, 4–5, 14, 100–3, 148, 176–7, 208
and communicative power, 179, 185–6, 191
and rationality, 25–6, 148, 201, 202
communicative freedom, 24, 27–8, 29
communicative power, 179, 185–6, 191
communicative rationality, 4–5, 66, 101–2, 150, 159–60
genealogy and, 79–85
Comte, A., 188–9
concrete other, 203–5, 207
confession, 128
confrontation, relations of, 135
Connerton, P., 162n
consensus, 3, 4, 102–3, 138
Cooke, M., 103, 204
critical engagement relation, 108
critical ethos, Enlightenment as, 31, 32, 36
critique, 38
Foucault and, 32–3, 38–9, 68, 158
genealogy and, 16, 17, 21–43
Habermas and, 24–30, 92, 158, 159, 161–2n
and orientation of thinking, 22–30
cryptonormativity, 76–7, 78, 83–5
cultural impoverishment, 27
Davidson, A., 209n
decentred subject, 101, 109–11, 114, 117
genealogy of, 124–30
universality of, 111–13
decentred worldview, 106, 109, 111–12, 123–4

Page 213
Deleuze, G., 50
deliberative politics, 180–1, 182, 191
democracy
Foucault and, 167, 169–75, 183, 184, 191–2
Habermas and, 166–7, 168–9, 176–82, 186–7, 191
demonstration, 52
see also revolution
Derrida, J., 197
dialogue, ethics of, 42
Foucault and, 40–1, 42
Habermas and, 41, 42, 103–4
difference, and otherness, 206–8
discipline, 127, 170
discourse, 159, 177–8, 180, 201
discourse ethics, 6, 26, 104, 110, 115, 178–9, 189, 196
discussion see argumentation
domination, 10, 35, 65, 72, 73–4, 87–8n
resistance to see resistance to domination
Dover, K., 49
Dreyfus, H., 11, 65, 87n, 88n
egalitarian reciprocity principle, 5, 103
Enlightenment, 63, 68
Foucault and, 7–11, 30–1, 50–1, 69, 70, 91–2
Habermas and, 3–7, 27, 29
Kant and, 3–7, 23, 24
in Scotland, 144–5
enlightenment attitude, 120–1, 129
equality, reciprocity and, 205–6
ethics, 11, 33, 64–7, 95, 198, 199–200
genealogy and, 36
power and, 9–10
see also dialogue, ethics of; discourse ethics; morality
Ewald, F., 171–2, 187, 188
Ferguson, Adam, 145
Flynn, T., 88n
form of the subject, 92–3, 94, 96–7, 98
see also decentred subject
formal-pragmatic analysis, 24–5
Foucault, Michel, 1, 90–1, 94–9, 107, 196–201
and genealogy, 30–7, 63
and Habermas, 12–16
Habermas' treatment of, 60–89, 90
and Kant, 2, 3, 50–1, 96, 108
objections to Habermas' work, 91, 109–40
and politics, 45–58
as the wayward twin, 62–3, 76
works of
Discipline and Punish, 9, 96, 99, 127, 128, 151, 170, 199
History of Sexuality, The, 9, 74–5, 108, 127–8, 151, 171
Madness and Civilization, 199
Order of Things, The, 9, 77
‘Subject and Power, The’, 96, 133, 136
Use of Pleasure, The, 46, 198
‘What is critique?’, 108, 116, 134
‘What is enlightenment?’, 7, 69, 92
Fraser, N., 2, 157
freedom, 6, 7, 65, 93, 95, 128–9, 159
communicative, 24, 27–8
genealogy and, 36
power and, 76, 134–5, 138
games of truth, 120, 197, 202
rules to, 120–1
genealogy, 30–7, 39, 69, 81–2, 99, 168, 183
and critique, 16, 17, 21–43
Habermas' criticism of, 28, 37–8, 41–2, 62, 63, 75–85
and resistance, 69–70, 71, 73
of the subject, 124–30
Gilligan, C., 106, 114
government, Foucault and, 53, 134, 152–3, 173–4, 183, 191–2, 199
Habermas, Jürgen, 1, 56–7, 100–7, 108, 201–5
contra Foucault, 12–16
criticism of genealogy, 28, 37–8, 41–2, 62, 63, 75–85
Foucault's objections to work of, 91, 109–40
and Kant, 2
treatment of Foucault, 60–89, 90
works of
Between Facts and Norms, 154–5, 176, 182, 185–6
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, The, 41, 60, 61–3, 75–80
Theory of Communicative Action, The, 148–50
Hadot, P., 56
Hegel, G. F. H., 145
Hindess, B., 29, 130, 161n
historical pragmatics, 7, 82, 118–19
history
Foucault and, 13, 94, 99
Habermas and, 183

Page 214
human subject, 92–3, 202
Foucault and, 8–9, 14–15, 34, 197, 201
see also decentred subject; subjectivity
humanism, 61, 77, 78, 93–4, 117
Hunter, I., 191
ideal speech situation, 5, 186–7, 209n
idealizing presuppositions, 25–6, 102, 103
identity, 202–5
individualism, 146
individuation, 202
Ingram, D., 93
intellectual, 98, 116–17, 190
intersubjectivity, 100–1, 109
Foucault and, 196, 198–9, 205
genealogy and, 81, 82, 84
Iran, Foucault and, 51–3
juridical subject, 124–7
juridical systems, 170–1
juridification see law
justice, 57, 104
justification, 6, 14
for resistance, 69–70, 72–3, 76, 78
Kant, Immanuel, 2–3, 57, 92
and Enlightenment, 23, 31–2, 92
Foucault's discussion of, 50–1, 96, 108
and reason, 22–4
Keane, J., 146, 160n
Kelly, M., 1, 14, 88n, 184, 186
knowledge
Foucault and, 9, 10, 33, 55, 95, 96, 97
Habermas and, 3
and power, 132–3, 152
Kohlberg, L., 106
language, 3–4, 176–7, 188
law, 149–50, 153, 155, 156
Foucault and, 170-1, 173, 184, 192n
Habermas and, 176, 178–9, 180, 182, 185–6
norms and, 171, 172
legitimation, 156–7, 177, 181
liberalism, 153, 161n
Foucault and, 173–5, 183, 184
Habermas and, 180–1, 183, 184
libertinism, 23–4
liberty see freedom
lifeworld, 202, 204
colonisation of, 27, 149
rationalisation of, 202
system and, 148–9, 151, 156–7, 158–9, 185–6
limits, 7–8, 92–4, 96–7, 98
Foucault and, 32–4, 36–7
Habermas and, 100, 108
logic-of-development arguments, 106–7
logical-semantic rules, 26, 102
McCarthy, T., 24, 87n, 176, 178
McNay, L., 198
Maoism, Foucault and, 169
Marx, Karl, 145
Meehan, J., 202, 204
modernity, 9, 10
critical ethos of, 31, 32, 36
Foucault and, 7–8, 15
Habermas and, 27–8, 110, 185, 201–3
see also decentred worldview
Moon, J., 5
moral anxiety, 29
moral code, Foucault and, 46–7
morality, 23
aesthetic, 48–9, 50
Habermas and, 5–6, 26, 104, 178–9
law and, 178–9
universal, 5–6, 104–5
see also ethics
Muslim religion, 52, 53
mutual respect, 42
negotiation, 137, 138–9, 179
NGOS, Foucault and, 54
Nietzsche, F., 81, 102
non-coercion principle, 5, 103
normalisation, 155, 156, 169, 172, 187–9, 190
normative rightness, 4, 5, 26
norms, 14–15, 169, 171–2, 188
Habermas and, 177, 180, 187, 190
liberalism and, 174–5
valid, 5–6
obedience, 125–6
occidental reason, theoretical problematic of, 9, 10
ontology of reason, 186–9
orientation in thinking, 40–2
critique and, 22–30
other, 133, 198, 199
concrete, 203–5, 207
Foucault and, 206, 207, 208
Habermas and, 206–7, 208
Owen, D., 137, 184
Oz-Salzberger, F., 145
parrhesia, 78, 88n
partisanship, 82–3
Patton, P., 8, 14–15, 34, 35, 184

Page 215
performative contradiction, 41, 80, 105–6, 111–12
perlocutionary effects, 4, 176
permanent provocation, 135
philosophy, 94
Foucault and, 90–1, 113, 115
Piaget, J., 106
Pocock, J., 117, 126
Poland, Foucault and, 54
polemics, 40–1
political activism, 55–6
political theory, 18
politics
Foucault and, 45–58
Habermas and, 180–1, 182, 191
see also democracy
population, 153–4
power, 11, 33, 38, 45–6, 62, 197–8
and ethics, 9–10, 11, 96
freedom and, 76, 134–5, 138
knowledge and, 132–3, 152
reason and, 68
resistance to see resistance to domination
and sovereignty and, 152, 169–70
subject and, 34–5, 64, 95, 197–8
versus utopia, 130–9
see also biopower
power relations, 10, 34–5, 65, 69, 129, 131–2, 134, 200–1
communication and, 135–6
practical systems, 12, 33, 94–6, 133
practices of the self, 96, 97
pragmatics, 7, 118–19
universal, 3, 24, 75, 82, 100
presentism, 12, 114
presuppositions
idealizing, 25–6, 102, 103
transcendental, 22–3, 24, 25–6
prisons, Foucault and, 99
problematisation, 96–7, 114
procedural rules, 26
processual rules, 26
public sphere, Habermas and, 147, 180–1
Quetelet, A., 171
Rabinow, P., 11, 65, 87n, 88n
Rasmussen, D., 68
rationalisation, 148–9, 183, 185–6
rationality, 95, 114, 121–2
communicative action and, 25–6, 148, 201, 202
political, 152–3
universal, 110–12
see also reason
Rawls, J., 102, 114, 122–3, 126
reason, 5, 121–2
agonic use of, 30, 37
criticism and, 22–4
Foucault and, 66, 68–70
Habermas and, 14, 25, 122–3, 201
lawless use of, 23–4, 28, 29
see also rationality
reciprocal elucidation, 90–1
reciprocal obligation, 101
reciprocity, 75, 205–6, 207
Foucault and, 199, 200, 205, 208
Habermas and, 201, 202, 205–6
recognition, 195, 196, 202–5, 207, 208
relativism, 13
repressive hypothesis, 64–5, 67
republicanism, 180, 181, 183
resistance to domination, 15, 35, 77, 200
civil society and, 146, 151, 156–7, 159
justification of, 69–70, 72–3, 76, 78
possibility of, 67–75
reversibility, 104
reciprocity as, 205–6, 207
revolution, Foucault and, 51–3
rights, 53–4, 171, 179–80
Rorty, R., 107
Ruane, J., 115
rule of law, 173, 180, 182
Scottish Enlightenment, civil society and, 144–5
second-order concepts, 111
self-awareness, 35, 47, 79
self-criticism, 62, 64
self-government, 35, 36, 37, 48–9
Seligman, A., 144
Seneca, 117
Simons, J., 196
Skinner, Q., 117, 126
Smith, Adam, 144–5
socialization, 202
society, 143–5, 174–5, 180
solidarity, 53–4, 181
sovereignty, 125–6, 153, 169–70
speech acts, Habermas and, 3–4, 25, 101, 119–20, 176
standard situations, 14
state, 143–5, 191
Foucault and, 153, 156
Habermas and, 147–8, 156–7, 160, 180–1
strategic action, 101, 204, 208
strategic games of freedom, 95
Strawson, P., 113

< previous page page_216
Page 216
subjectivisation, 93, 110, 112, 126–9
subjectivity, 33–4, 35–6, 64–8, 74, 87n, 94–6, 97, 113
see also human subject
symmetry, 199, 200, 201, 205
Taylor, C., 102, 114, 126
theory testing, 115–16
thinking, orientation of, 22–42
Todd, J., 115
Toulmin, S., 119
transcendental-pragmatic argument, 3–6, 105–6, 119
transcendental presuppositions, 22–3, 24, 25–6
transformation, 56
transgression, 98
truth, 4, 5, 47
Foucault and, 9–10, 120–1, 197, 202
Tuck, R., 126
Tully, J., 14, 34
unconditionality, 13, 103
understanding, 100, 101, 179
see also agreement
Unger, R., 195
universal moral respect principle, 5, 103
universal pragmatics, 3, 24, 75, 82, 100
universal rationality, 110–12
universalisability, 5–6, 26, 104, 178–9
utopia, 69, 130–9
validity claims, 4–5, 25, 101–2, 103, 177–8, 201
values, 183, 185
Warnke, G., 14
welfare state, 147, 150, 152, 153, 154–8
Wellmer, A., 195
Wittgenstein, L., 106, 119
Wolin, S., 198
work on oneself, 31, 33, 36, 65, 74
Young, I. M., 139, 206, 207
< previous page page_216

Cover: Title: Author: Publisher: Isbn10 - Asin: Print Isbn13: Ebook Isbn13: Language: Subject

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cover: Title: Author: Publisher: Isbn10 - Asin: Print Isbn13: Ebook Isbn13: Language: Subject

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

cover next page >

title: Foucault Contra Habermas : Recasting the Dialogue

cover next page >

< previous page page_i next page >

< previous page page_ii next page >

< previous page page_iii next page >

SAGE Publications Ltd

< previous page page_iv next page >

< previous page page_v next page >

< previous page page_vi next page >

Preface and Acknowledgements viii

< previous page page_vii next page >

< previous page page_viii next page >

< previous page page_1 next page >

< previous page page_2 next page >

< previous page page_3 next page >

< previous page page_4 next page >

< previous page page_5 next page >

< previous page page_6 next page >

< previous page page_7 next page >

< previous page page_8 next page >

< previous page page_9 next page >

< previous page page_10 next page >

< previous page page_11 next page >

< previous page page_12 next page >

< previous page page_13 next page >

< previous page page_14 next page >

< previous page page_15 next page >

< previous page page_16 next page >

< previous page page_17 next page >

< previous page page_18 next page >

< previous page page_19 next page >

< previous page page_20 next page >

ORIENTATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT

< previous page page_21 next page >

< previous page page_22 next page >

< previous page page_23 next page >

< previous page page_24 next page >

< previous page page_25 next page >

< previous page page_26 next page >

< previous page page_27 next page >

< previous page page_28 next page >

< previous page page_29 next page >

< previous page page_30 next page >

< previous page page_31 next page >

< previous page page_32 next page >

< previous page page_33 next page >

< previous page page_34 next page >

< previous page page_35 next page >

< previous page page_36 next page >

< previous page page_37 next page >

< previous page page_38 next page >

< previous page page_39 next page >

< previous page page_40 next page >

< previous page page_41 next page >

< previous page page_42 next page >

< previous page page_43 next page >

< previous page page_44 next page >

< previous page page_45 next page >

< previous page page_46 next page >

< previous page page_47 next page >

< previous page page_48 next page >

< previous page page_49 next page >