Inquiry

An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy

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Foucault as a kind of realist: genealogical critique

and the debunking of the human sciences

Brian Leiter

To cite this article: Brian Leiter (2020): Foucault as a kind of realist: genealogical critique and the
debunking of the human sciences, Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2020.1712226

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Published online: 17 Jan 2020.

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INQUIRY
https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1712226

Foucault as a kind of realist: genealogical critique and

the debunking of the human sciences
Brian Leiter
Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

ABSTRACT
Foucault’s corpus is animated by an ethical or political impulse: to liberate
individuals from a kind of oppression, one which does not involve the familiar
tyranny of the totalitarian state but exploits instead values that the victim of
oppression herself accepts, and which then leads the oppressed agent to be
complicit in her own subjugation. Foucault’s critique also depends on a
skeptical thesis about the epistemological authority of the social sciences that
is supposed to be supported by his genealogies of those sciences. It is this
conjunction of claims – that individuals oppress themselves in virtue of
certain normative claims they accept because of their supposed epistemic
merits – that marks Foucault’s uniquely disturbing contribution to the
literature whose diagnostic aim is, with Weber, to understand the oppressive
character of modernity, and whose moral aim is, with the Frankfurt School,
human liberation. Foucault is also a kind of ‘realist’ in his approach: he does
not offer moral arguments to persuade people that they ought to behave
differently than they do, but instead shows people the actual history of the
institutions and norms to which they subjugate themselves. This essay
explains Foucault’s critical and realist project, and concludes with critical
reflections on its plausibility.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 10 May 2019; Accepted 2 January 2020

KEYWORDS Foucault; genealogy; political realism; Marx; Nietzsche

I. Foucault and realism

Any reader of Foucault’s corpus recognizes quickly that it is animated by
an ethical or political impulse, namely, to liberate individuals from a
kind of oppression from which they suffer. This oppression, however,
does not involve the familiar tyranny of the Leviathan or the totalitarian
state; it exploits instead values that the victim of oppression herself
accepts, and which then leads the oppressed agent to be complicit in
her own subjugation. Foucault’s critque also depends, crucially, on a

CONTACT Brian Leiter bleiter@uchicago.edu Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values,
University of Chicago, 1111 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 B. LEITER

skeptical thesis about the epistemological authority of the social sciences

that is supposed to be supported by his genealogies of those sciences. It is
this conjunction of claims – that individuals oppress themselves in virtue
of certain normative claims they accept because of their supposed episte-
mic merits – that marks Foucault’s uniquely disturbing contribution to the
literature whose diagnostic aim is, with Max Weber, to understand the
oppressive character of modernity, and whose moral aim is, with the
Frankfurt School, human liberation and human flourishing.
Foucault is also a kind of ‘realist’ in his approach to the project of eman-
cipation: he does not offer moral arguments to persuade people that they
ought to behave differently than they do, but instead shows people the
actual history of the institutions and norms to which they subjugate them-
selves. Realists, in my sense here, aim to diagnose, describe, and explain
human beings and institutions, to cut through the self-serving stories
people tell about their behavior, to reveal what is really going on. By con-
trast, moralists – the vast majority in the current academy – are fixated on
creating a theoretical framekwork for the moral justification and evalu-
ation of political institutions and individuals. Moralists especially like to
scold people and institutions about how they should behave, making
for an absurd spectacle, given that those to whom it is directed are,
almost without exception, wholly indifferent to it. Of course, many aca-
demic moralists also specialize in offering rationalizations for the existing
state of affairs, but when not performing that familiar ideological function,
they instead sit in judgment, wagging their finger at the failure of states,
institutions, leaders, and individuals to live up to the moralist’s preferred
theory of what is morally right and obligatory. Realism observes and diag-
noses, moralism sits in judgment and scolds, even when its scolding is
impotent, as it almost always is.1 Some realists ground their diagnosis in
claims about human nature (think of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Nietzsche
and Freud); Foucault is closer to Marx on this score, eschewing explanatory
invocations of human nature, in favor of broadly-speaking ‘material’ con-
siderations (although not simply economic ones) to diagnose our insti-
tutions and norms.
The analogy with Marx is instructive, since no thinker (philosophical
or otherwise) in the last 150 years has had a more profound
influence on the ‘real world’ than Marx, who was, of course no philoso-
phical moralist: he had no normative moral or political philosophy,
although he flirted with some normative theory in early unpublished

1
I hedge with ‘almost,’ but I can’t think of an exception.
 INQUIRY 3

work. But in his maturity, Marx’s emphasis was always on diagnosis: this
is how capitalism works, and this is what will happen to most people
given how it works. Marx took for granted that people would be motiv-
ated to act if they understood the causes of their misery and under-
stood that those causes also promised an alternative. Foucault has
been less influential, at least outside the academy, precisely because
his diagnostic method is so different: he does not show us how the
economy works, but how certain institutions (e.g. hospitals, including
mental hospitals, and prisons) to which we regularly defer arose from
dubious motives that should make us ‘skeptical’ of the norms they try
to impose. But Foucault shares with Marx the thought that a realistic
appraisal of what’s going on is important without a normative theory
explaining what one ‘ought’ to do.
Moralists, unsurprisingly, have the upper hand in capitalist academia
these days:2 Jurgen Habermas, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Peter
Singer, even (tragically) G. A. Cohen, among many other contemporary
and recent philosophers, are all moralists, while the realists can claim
few recent allies. There is a characteristically tepid version of realism
in writings by the late Bernard Williams,3 and a less tepid version in
the writings of Raymond Geuss, though one that is sometimes sopho-
moric, for example, in its polemics about Rawls.4 Enzo Rossi and Matt
Sleat, in their useful overview (Rossi and Sleat 2014) of what has
been called ‘realism’ in recent political theory, note that it has been dis-
engaged from the ‘classical realism’ of international relations (‘IR’) scho-
lars from earlier in the twentieth-century, thinkers like Hans

2
Moralists have had the advantage historically too, for reasons Thucydies and Marx well understood: the
ruling elites in every society have a vast appetite for justifications of their dominance. There are some
important historical figures who are harder to place, depending on how one understands ‘realism.’
Bentham is a case in point. As David Runciman notes it is tempting to see Bentham as ‘representative
of a naïve form of moralism [in Runciman’s slightly different sense], because he specified a single, pre-
political value (utility) as the basis for assessing politics’ (2017, 5). But Runciman says that this is a ‘car-
icature’ since, ‘Bentham’s writing exemplifies … the realist suspicion of the loose application of mora-
lised language to politics, and in particular talk about rights, which for Bentham was meaningless in
the absence of any underpinning in the terms of enforcement, or power’ (5). More importantly, he
thought this moralised nonsense was ‘dangerous because it serves as a smokescreen for those
engaged in the practice of politics’ (6). That is right as far as it goes – it shows that Bentham is not a
‘moralist’ in Runciman’s limited sense of someone who thinks politics is just applied moral philosophy.
In other ways, Bentham is a moralist, though one, like Mill after him, with a finer talent for rhetoric than
most contemporary moralists.
3
See Runciman (2017, 11) for a useful summary of Williams’s view. As two other scholars note, in a survey
piece on recent ‘realism’ in political theory, Williams ‘does not give up on some justificatory standards for
the exercise of political power,’ with the result that he is ‘too close to the mainstream approach he wants
to reject’ (Rossi and Sleat 2014, 692).
4
See, e.g., Geuss’s polemic against Rawls in Philosophy and Real Politics (2008). As Brian O’Connor points
out to me, if the point is to get students and scholars to read something else than ridicule might be a
sensible strategy – a point another realist, Nietzsche, well-understood.
4 B. LEITER

Morgenthau.5 Rossi and Sleat aptly describe those earlier IR writers as

showing

an appreciation of the political as a sphere of human activity that provides a

context of disagreement which cannot be reduced to morality, a skepticism
towards the power of reason and morality in political life and the difficulties
in judging political action. (2014, 697)

This is a useful characterization, but omits that the classical IR tradition, as

well as much of the historical tradition (e.g. Thucydides and Machiavelli)
was grounded in claims about what human beings are really like, i.e.
broadly speaking, about human nature. Foucault, like Marx, stands in an
ambivalent relation to that realist tradition, as mentioned earlier: both
are diagnosticians who eschew appeals to human nature, which they
treat as another artifact to be diagnosed. Yet Foucault, and Marx, also
differ from this recent ‘political realism’ in another respect: they are not
interested in normative theory, in justifying, from a moral or ‘political
realist’ perspective, what ought to be done, or in grounding their criticisms
in such a perspective (they have normative opinions, rather obviously, and
are critical of the status quo, but they invest no effort in constructing a
moral theory that would justify those opinions and criticsms). Foucault
and Marx, like realists such as Thucydides and Freud, abandon normative
critique in favor of realistic, empirically-informed account of what is hap-
pening and what has happened – without moralizing illusions. It is this
kind of realism that has become utterly foreign to most academic philos-
ophy in the capitalist countries in recent decades.

II. “Bio-power” and self-imposed oppression

For Foucault, the modern era is marked by the emergence of a new kind of
power – what he comes to call ‘bio-power’6 – that differs from the classical,
‘juridical’ models of power, captured so well by John Austin’s (early nine-
teenth-century) view of law (and, ergo, state power) as a command of the
sovereign backed by a threat of sanction. ‘We need to cut off the King’s
head’, says Foucault, adding that ‘in political theory that still has to be
5
Some international realists think the behavior of states is due entirely to human nature, for example, the
instinct for self-preservation or for power (Morgenthau was himself influenced by Nietzsche). The domi-
nant strand of IR realism links the motive for self-preservation to the anarchic character of the inter-
national system: the international arena is the Hobbesian state of nature, so only the most powerful
will survive. (Thanks to John Mearsheimer for discussing these issues with me.)
6
In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Foucault says he uses ‘bio-power’ to mark ‘an explosion
of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of popu-
lations’ which began in the 17th-century (1980a, 140).
 INQUIRY 5

done’.7 The agents of power and repression are no longer (or no longer
only) the agents of the ‘King’ or the state, and so the exclusive questions
of political theory should no longer concern the justifications for and
limits upon the exercise of centralized power by ‘the King’. Rather, in
the era of ‘bio-power’, repression and regulation operate far more insi-
diously, for now it is the individual himself who is the agent of his or
her own ‘oppression’ and discipline.
How are individuals co-opted for their own oppression? According to
Foucault, it is through the epistemic (and consequent practical) authority
that accrues to what I’ll call ‘judgments of normality’, namely, judgments
about what constitute not simply statistically normal ways of being
human, but what constitute the best ways, that contribute to flourishing
lives: how much one should eat, how one should care for the body,
what kind of sex one should have, how one should raise children, what
constitutes a ‘healthy’ marriage, and on and on. Any readers of The
New York Times will be familiar with instruction on all these topics,
backed by the latest research from the human sciences. Of course, it is
also true that all societies, ancient and modern, have been suffused with
‘judgments of normality’, even if the particular norms, and their particular
objects, have differed in various respects. Any student of Christianity or
Islam or Judaism knows, for example, that the ancient and modern com-
munities in each religious tradition are permeated to the core with ‘judg-
ments of normality’ of the kinds just noted.
So what distinguishes ‘judgments of normality’ in the putatively
‘modern’ era of bio-power? It cannot be the emphasis on the regulation
of the ‘body’ per se, since Foucault’s own work – especially in the later
volumes on The History of Sexuality8 – makes clear how far back these con-
cerns go.9 Rather, Foucault’s work suggests that what marks judgments of
normality in the modern era is that their authority derives from ‘the human
sciences’, that is, from claims about how one ought to be whose authority
is, in the first instance, epistemic rather than moral or religious.10
Even this, however, does not yet suffice to distinguish the era of bio-
power: for example, even orthodox religious traditions typically ground
their moral authority in a kind of epistemic authority (recall: ‘the truth

7
Foucault 1980b, 121.
8
See esp. The Uses of Pleasure (Foucault 1990) and The Care of the Self (Foucault 1988).
9
Foucault certainly thinks, to be sure, that the techniques for regulating and ‘disciplining’ bodies have
grown more sophisticated in the modern era. The classic study is, of course, his Discipline and Punish
(1977).
10
The best, and probably best-known, examples are Madness and Civilization (1965) and Discipline and
Punish (1977).
6 B. LEITER

will set you free’), such as knowledge of the divine will or transcendent
truths. What really distinguishes the claim of epistemic authority in the
era of bio-power is that the human sciences claim a distinctively
modern version of such authority: they present themselves as grounded
in claims about human beings that emerge from inquiries that adhere
to the epistemic strictures of the natural sciences, strictures that
emerged with the scientific revolution and triumphed (more or less)
with the Enlightenment. The epistemic authority of judgments of normal-
ity in the era of bio-power derives from their purportedly scientific status,
not, e.g. their religious status.
The difficulty, in Foucault’s view, is that the epistemic pretense of the
human sciences is just that: pretense. What Foucault says about ‘a science
as “dubious” as psychiatry’ is meant to apply more generally to the
human sciences with which he is concerned: ‘the epistemological profile
of psychiatry is a low one and psychiatric practice is linked with a whole
range of institutions, economic requirements, and political issues of social
regulation’.11 This remark is revealing about Foucault’s argumentative strat-
egy, namely, that he does not (as some writers have done12), engage in a
frontal attack on the epistemic standing of particular human sciences, but
rather reveals their history to expose the influence of economic, political
and, importantly, moral considerations on their development. This does
not, strictly speaking, show these sciences to make false claims; but it
aims to raise (hopefully) debilitating doubts about the warrant for those
claims.13 For we know from epistemology that beliefs caused the wrong
way are epistemically suspect, even though they can turn out to be true.
If I tell you the second law of thermodynamics, because it came to me in
a dream, you don’t have a good reason to believe it is true since its etiology
is not a reliable one. Those thinkers whom Ricoeur called members of the
‘school of suspicion’ – namely, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – all exploit
this simple idea, by adducing suspect etiologies of familiar beliefs about,
for example, morality and religion. And we should see Foucault as belong-
ing to this tradition when he tries to undermine our confidence in the

11
Foucault 1980b, 109.
12
See, e.g., Grünbaum 1984 and Murphy 2006.
13
See Leiter 2004, 103–105. Alas, Foucault is extremely unclear about the character and ultimate import of
his skepticism about the human sciences. Often his position echoes Rudolf Carnap’s on ‘external’ and
‘internal’ questions (in his famous paper on ‘Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’ [1952]), as when Fou-
cault says he is only interested in ‘seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses
which in themselves are neither true or false’ (1980b, 118). The ‘external’ question about whether, e.g.,
psychiatric claims about human beings are true or false is a misguided, indeed, unintelligible question.
Foucault’s willingness to exclude ‘non-dubious’ sciences like physics and chemistry from his critical
analysis belies what I suspect is a rather deep affinity with the ‘logical positivist’ view of the sciences.
 INQUIRY 7

epistemic status of claims in the human sciences by showing how the devel-
opment of those sciences was so often linked not to relevant ‘evidence’ but
to moral, political, and economic interests which are, prima facie, unreliable
ways of discovering truths about human beings.
How exactly does such debunking work?

III. Origins and epistemic status

I assume with most epistemologists that Edmund Gettier14 demonstrated
that the status of a belief as knowledge is not settled just because it is both
true and justified. On one influential understanding of the import of the
Gettier critique,15 either a ‘fourth’ condition is required for a belief to
count as knowledge or, alternatively, some additional condition is
needed for justification. Reliabilists propose that a true belief is only
justified if produced by a reliable process.16 In the famous Gettier cases,
by contrast, the belief is produced by an epistemically lucky process, not
a reliable one.
If reliabilism is correct, then the etiology of belief directly matters to jus-
tification. In particular, if a belief arises from an epistemically unreliable
process, then it is not justified. Recall our initial example: if the Second
Law of Thermodynamics comes to me (accurately!) in a dream, I am not
justified in believing it (although it turns out to be true), since dreaming
is not a reliable method for discovering the physical laws of nature. If, fol-
lowing Marx, people in capitalist societies believe that capitalism promotes
the well-being of everyone only because of propaganda by the ruling
class–in whose interest it is for everyone to believe this–then the people
who believe this lack justification for their belief: what serves the self-inter-
est of a dominant economic class is not, it might seem, a reliable process
for forming beliefs about what promotes everyone’s well-being. If, as
Nietzsche claims in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, the
oppressed classes in the Roman empire came to embrace Christian moral-
ity because of their ressentiment – their festering hatred of their oppres-
sors, whose power and riches they also envied – then those moral
beliefs are not justified, since there is no account of moral epistemology
on which festering hatred mixed with envy is deemed a reliable mechan-
ism for ascertaining moral truths (assuming there are any).17 Notice that
14
Gettier 1963.
15
See, e.g., Kitcher 1992, 59.
16
See Goldman 1986, 42–12.
17
See Sinhababu 2007.
8 B. LEITER

one need not be an externalist about justification for the simple skeptical
etiological argument to go through. An internalist could agree that if an
agent’s belief is produced by an unreliable mechanism and the agent is
aware of that, then the agent’s belief is not justified. All this internalist
will demand is awareness of the unreliable mechanism to defeat
justification.
Given the preceding, an etiologic critic like Marx, Nietzsche or Foucault
has a simple argument to establish the direct epistemic relevance of an
etiological account of beliefs to what I will call the Target Beliefs’ (i.e.
the beliefs whose epistemic status is the target of the critique). If the
Target Beliefs are produced by an unreliable process, then they are not
justified (although they might be true). The internalist etiological critic
will only endorse this argument if the agent is aware of the etiology; the
externalist etiological critic does not require that the agent be aware of
the facts about the etiology.

IV. Knowledge and action according to Foucault

What links the epistemic pretensions of the human sciences, and their ‘dis-
coveries’ about what ‘normal’ humans are like, to practical imperatives
about how one ought to live is never clearly articulated by Foucault, but
the structure of practical reasoning he (plausibly) supposes to be at
work seems to be this: first, agents want to maximize their flourishing
(call this the ‘principle of prudential reason’); second, the human sciences
illuminate how (normal) human beings flourish; consequently, and this is
the third claim, agents have prudential reasons to adjust their behavior to
comport with the results of the human sciences. ‘Flourish’ here should be
understood in a suitably broad sense to encompass many different senses
of ‘living well or happily’, while the normality at issue in the second claim
about what the human sciences reveal to us is not simply descriptive (e.g.
statistical normality), but fundamentally normative, meaning something
akin to ‘agents who flourish’: in other words, the human sciences illumi-
nate the ‘facts’ about what human beings do who ‘live well’. The structure
of practical reasoning just described captures, then, the truly pernicious
aspect of the modern era of ‘bio-power’: as long as the second proposition
(namely, that the human sciences reveal how normal human beings
flourish) is taken to be true, then the third proposition – the claim that
agents have reasons to adjust their behavior to comport with the results
of the human sciences–necessarily follows given the plausible (and uncon-
tested, at least by Foucault) assumption that the principle of prudential
 INQUIRY 9

reason operates. Thus, insofar as the human sciences are accorded episte-
mic authority, individuals will ‘police’ and regulate themselves to conform
to its findings and edicts.
Notice that centralized state power (the ‘juridical’ model of power noted
earlier) is hardly irrelevant on this story. As Foucault himself documents in
Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and
elsewhere, the state in the modern era is distinguished by its profound
and intimate interest in the character of the populations it rules – their
health, their reproductive patterns, their productivity, and on and on. As
Foucault writes in an essay on ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth
Century’, this period witnessed, ‘[T]he emergence of the health and phys-
ical well-being of the population in general as one of the essential objec-
tives of political power. [The question becomes] how to raise the level of
health of the social body as a whole’.18 In consequence, we see the state
undertaking,

demographic estimates, the calculation of the pyramid of ages, different life

expectations and levels of mortality, studies of the reciprocal growth of
wealth and growth of population, various measures of incitement to marriage
and procreation, the development of forms of education and professional train-
ing … . The biological traits of a population become relevant factors for econ-
omic management, and it becomes necessary to organize around them an
apparatus that will ensure not only their subjection but the constant increase
of their utility.19

Indeed, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault says he is exploring ‘the present

scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its
bases, justifications, and rules’,20 meaning that the state (as the force
directly behind the ‘legal’ part of the complex) remains a central actor in
this story of oppression in the era of bio-power.
Now while the power of the human sciences derives from a claim in the
first instance to epistemic (not moral) authority, moral or ethical norms are
implicated in three ways in Foucault’s picture of how persons become
agents of their own oppression. Most importantly, the claim to epistemic
authority becomes practically effective only in virtue of the scheme of
practical reasoning already described, a scheme which depends, funda-
mentally, upon an ethical imperative to treat the truth as practically deci-
sive in realizing the agent’s good; the purported truths of the human
sciences, in turn, simply provide the occasion for an instantiation of that
18
Foucault 1980c, 277.
19
Foucault 1980c, 278–279.
20
Foucault 1977, 23.
10 B. LEITER

imperative. This point is perhaps worth emphasizing, because Foucault is

often associated – indeed, he often associated himself – with Nietzsche,
yet on this important issue his posture is not at all Nietzschean. For
Nietzsche argued – perhaps most famously in the Third Essay of On the
Genealogy of Morality, but really throughout his corpus21–that the truth
is often ‘terrible’, and that the ‘overvaluation’ of truth is an expression of
asceticism (of life-denial), precisely because what is true is often hostile
to flourishing.22 To be sure, Nietzsche is thinking of very particular truths
like: human suffering is both inescapable and utterly meaningless; there
is no free will or meaningful control we exercise over the contours of
our lives; and ours is a world of wills in endless struggle for dominance
and mastery. But the conclusion Nietzsche draws from the nature of
these terrible truths is that we should not treat what is true as decisive
in practical reasoning precisely because it may be incompatible with
human flourishing: most of the time, illusions are essential for life. If Fou-
cault had been more of a Nietzschean, he might have argued not that the
human sciences lack epistemic authority, but instead that even epistemic
authorities sometimes do not deserve to play a decisive role in practical
reasoning! It is very striking that this is not Foucault’s argumentative strat-
egy, one of many respects in which he is unNietzschean.
Ethical norms are implicated in two additional, but closely related, ways
in Foucault’s story. First, the purported truths of the human sciences
(about how normal individuals ‘flourish’) are predicated on implicit and
explicit moral views about what constitute ‘normal’ ways of being. I take
it that at least part of Foucault’s aim is to raise doubts about these con-
ceptions of ‘normal flourishing’. Secondly, and relatedly, a consequence
of the epistemic authority accorded particular human sciences is that
their claims affect moral attitudes about their subject-matters and, in par-
ticular, tend to implicate a conception of the self, both its nature and its
(morally) proper governance.23
To sum up: Foucault wants to criticize and challenge each of these prac-
tical claims: he wants to argue against granting the claims of the human
sciences practical authority over our lives (though not because he rejects,
as Nietzsche does, the authority of truth, but because he rejects the idea
that the human sciences have the requisite access to the truth); he wants

21
See the discussion in my Leiter 2015, 213–214.
22
See Leiter 2018a, 151–158. And for a more popular treatment, an essay of the same name (but much
shorter) for the Times Literary Supplement’s ‘Footnotes to Plato’ series on the great philosophers
(Leiter 2018b): https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/friedrich-nietzsche-truth-terrible/.
23
These concerns are suggested, for example, by Foucault’s remarks in one of the last interviews he gave
before his death: ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations’ (1991, 386–387).
 INQUIRY 11

to challenge the implicitly and explicitly moralized views of normality and

normal flourishing; and he wants to call attention to and raise questions
about the moral attitudes, and the ethical conception of the self in particu-
lar, that emerges from the human sciences. The first challenge seems to me
the most inchoate in Foucault, though like the other two it depends cru-
cially on the challenge to the epistemic authority of the human sciences.
These concerns are perhaps most vividly illustrated in Madness and Civiliza-
tion and volume one of The History of Sexuality, but they permeate all
Foucault’s works that involve an historical analysis of institutions.24

V. Foucault’s critique illustrated

Let us take Madness and Civilization as illustrative of Foucault’s critical prac-
tice.25 He begins by describing the medieval houses in which lepers were
isolated, but his real point is that, ‘What doubtless remained longer than
leprosy, and would persist when the [leper] houses had been empty for
years, were the values and images attached to the figure of the leper, as
well as the meaning of his exclusion’.26 In other words, the pathological
category became an ethical and social one, marking a purported kind of
person, not just physiologically, but morally. So too with the ‘poor vaga-
bonds, criminals, and “deranged minds”’27 to whom Foucault soon
turns: they too have their own ‘values and images attached’ to them
and the ‘meaning’ of their exclusions must be decoded as well. As he
puts it later: ‘The asylum was substituted for the [leper] house, in the
geography of haunted places as in the landscape of the moral universe’.28
So one aim of Foucault’s work is to bring out the moral status of those con-
demned and excluded on grounds that were not always explicitly moral, or
that blurred the line between the ‘moral’ and ‘non-moral’ considerations.
For example, the Parisian ‘Hôpital Général’, which Foucault treats as
representative of ‘the great confinement’ of the 1660s (when one out of
every 100 Parisians was put away!),29 had at its official mission ‘preventing
“mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders”’,30 so that the
24
Foucault himself says that ‘the prison was linked from its beginning to a project for the transformation of
individuals,’ but in this respect it is no different from any of the other institutions to which he has turned
his attention: ‘The prison was meant to be an instrument, comparable with – and no less perfect than – the
school, the barracks, or the hospital, acting with precision upon its individual subjects’ (1980d, 39–40).
25
In assessing the success of Foucault’s critique, we will later examine The History of Sexuality (1980a).
26
Foucault 1965, 6.
27
Foucault 1965, 7.
28
Foucault 1965, 57.
29
Foucault 1965, 38 and 45.
30
Foucault 1965, 47.
12 B. LEITER

community, in effect, ‘acquired an ethical power of segregation, which

permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social useless-
ness’.31 Foucault continues:

[T]he relation between the practice of confinement and the insistence on work is
not defined by economic considerations; far from it. A moral perception sustains
and animates it … [T]he origin of poverty was [taken to be] neither scarcity nor
unemployment, but ‘the weakening of discipline and the relaxation of morals.’
The edict [creating the Hôpital] was full of moral denunciations … . Hence the
Hôpital does not have the appearance of a mere refuge for those whom age,
infirmity, or sickness keep from working; it will have not only the aspect of a
forced labor camp, but also that of a moral institution responsible for punishing,
for correcting a certain moral ‘abeyance’ … . The Hôpital Général has an ethical
status … .

[I]t is in this context that the obligation to work assumes its meaning as
both ethical exercise and moral guarantee … The prisoner who could and
who would work would be released, not so much because he was again
useful to society, but because he had again subscribed to the great
ethical pact of human existence … .[T]he very requirement of labor was
instituted as an exercise in moral reform and constraint, which reveals, if
not the ultimate meaning, at least the essential justification of the
confinement.

An important phenomenon, this invention of a site of constraint where morality

castigates by means of administrative enforcement … .[I]n this great confine-
ment of the classical age, the essential thing – and the new event – is that
men were confined in cities of pure morality … .32

The subtext of this historical account is that the underlying moral rationale
for confinement is, itself, of dubious merit, but what really matters for Fou-
cault is that this socio-historical phenomenon was merely a prelude to the
modern era of ‘scientific’ psychiatry. In other words, this spectacle of moral
policing under the guise of a hospital (or medical care) was not a
peculiarity of this earlier era alone. Even purportedly great ‘medical’ refor-
mers of the treatment of mental illness in the late eighteenth-century like
Pinel of France were still writing: ‘How necessary it is, in order to forestall
hypochondria, melancholia, or mania, to follow the immutable laws of
morality!’33 As Foucault explains, ‘[T]he asylum becomes, in Pinel’s
hands, an instrument of moral uniformity and of social denunciation’, in

31
Foucault 1965, 58.
32
Foucault 1965, 58–60.
33
Foucault 1965, 197.
 INQUIRY 13

which to ‘guarantee bourgeois morality a universality of fact and permit it

to be imposed as a law upon all forms of insanity’.34 Foucault continues:

[W]hile Pinel … strongly asserted that his moral action was not necessarily linked
to any scientific competence [unlike later practitioners of psychiatry], it was
thought, and by the patient first of all, that it was in the esotericism of knowl-
edge, that the doctor had found the power to unravel insanity; and increasingly
the patient … would alienate himself in the physician, accepting entirely and in
advance all his prestige, submitting from the very first to a will he experienced as
magic, and to a science he regarded as prescience and divination … If we
wanted to analyze the profound structures of objectivity in the knowledge
and practice of nineteenth-century psychiatry from Pinel to Freud, we should
have to show in fact that such objectivity was from the start a reification of a
magical nature, which could only be accomplished with the complicity of the
patient himself, and beginning from a transparent and clear moral practice,
gradually forgotten as positivism imposed its myths of scientific objectivity; a
practice forgotten in its origins and its meaning, but always used and always
present. What we call psychiatric practice is a certain moral tactic contemporary
with the end of the eighteenth century, preserved in the rites of asylum life, and
overlaid by the myths of positivism.35

Only here, towards the end of Foucault’s brilliantly evocative history and
polemic, do we now see what Foucault has exposed: namely, that moral
considerations have driven practices of confinement and regulation
throughout the modern era, and they have done so right into the
present, but under the guise of an epistemic (more precisely, scientistic
[what Foucault means, I take it, by ‘positivism’]) authority they have not
really earned. The implicit invitation Foucault presents to the reader is
to rethink and resist the conceptions of normality (of sanity and
madness, of sexual normalcy and perversion, of criminality and law-abind-
ingness, and so on) that permeate these systems of control.
I began by suggesting that Foucault’s work is motivated by its own
ethical or political impulse, namely, to liberate modern individuals from
a kind of self-imposed subjugation. At the same time, as we have seen,
Foucault wants to indict other ethical norms that he sees playing a
role in this subjugation. But the idea of subjugation or oppression is
itself a normative one, presupposing that we have a handle on what con-
stitutes wrongful treatment of the individual in virtue of distorting or
blocking his flourishing. The conception of flourishing that Foucault
values, the kind of flourishing that presumably grounds his indignation

34
Foucault 1965, 259.
35
Foucault 1965, 275–276.
14 B. LEITER

at the practical authority underwritten by such dubious epistemic creden-

tials, remains, alas, a bit vague. As Michael Walzer, in a highly critical
essay, put it many years ago: Foucault aims not ‘for revolution but for
local resistance’,36 i.e. resistance to the conception of ‘normalcy’ put
forward by particular human sciences. It is a characterization Foucault
effectively endorses:
The role for theory today seems to me to be just this: not to formulate the global
systematic theory which holds everything in place, but to analyse the specificity
of mechanisms of power, to locate the connections and extensions, to build little
by little strategic knowledge.37

‘Strategic knowledge’ is, in context, clearly knowledge that facilitates ‘local

resistance’: against prisons, psychiatric establishments, the purveyors of
sexual norms and stereotypes – precisely all those whom Foucault, in
his actual political practice, resisted. What ‘global systematic theory’
explains how these all hang together remains somewhat elusive.
Perhaps as a kind of realist, Foucault didn’t think one was necessary.
While Foucault lays emphasis on the fact that individuals are complicit in
their own oppression by accepting as practically decisive the purported
truths of the human sciences, he certainly does not–despite the rhetoric
noted earlier about ‘cutting off the King’s head’ in political theory–
absolve centralized state power. For insofar as the judgments of normality
that emerge from the human sciences are given practical authority over
people through institutions – through courts and administrative bodies
that deem people mentally unfit, through psychiatrists that testify in
court, and the like – individuals can be oppressed by those judgments of
normality whether or not they, as individuals, accept the epistemic auth-
ority of the human sciences. Despite, then, his skepticism about juridical
and centralized models of power (that he so often associates with
Marxism), Foucault shares with Marxist critics the idea that the flourishing
of individuals can be hostage to ideas and institutions beyond their control.

VI. Doubts about Foucault’s critique: are Pedophiles really

Harmless?
How seriously should we take Foucault’s critique? Foucault himself, it
should be recalled, exempts from his critical gaze non-‘dubious’ sciences
like physics and chemistry, focusing instead on those human sciences
36
Walzer 1986, 55.
37
Foucault 1980e, 145.
 INQUIRY 15

whose ‘epistemological profile’ is ‘a low one’.38 But even with respect to

the latter, he does not actually argue, as some have done, for the
‘lowness’ of the epistemological profile, instead calling attention to the
influence of economic, political, and moral considerations on their devel-
opment. Yet it is now surely a familiar point in post-Kuhnian philosophy of
science that the influence of social and historical factors might be compa-
tible with the epistemically special standing of the sciences as long as we
can show that epistemically reliable factors are still central to explaining
the claims of those sciences.39 And that possibility is potentially fatal to
Foucault’s critique.
For recall that central to Foucault’s critique is the role that the epistemic
pretensions of the sciences play in a structure of practical reasoning which
leads agents concerned with their flourishing to become the agents of
their own oppression. And the crucial bit of ‘pretense’ is, as we noted
earlier, that the human sciences illuminate the truth about how (normal)
human beings flourish in virtue of adhering to the epistemic strictures
and methodologies of the natural sciences. Recall also that Foucault,
unlike Nietzsche, does not contest the practical authority of truth (i.e.
that truth is the highest value and determines what ought to be done);
he rather denies that the claims in question are true or have the epistemic
warrant that we would expect true claims to have. So the entire Foucaul-
dian project of liberation turns on the epistemic status of the claims of the
human sciences. And on this central point, Foucault has, surprisingly,
almost nothing to say beyond raising ‘suspicion’. Perhaps contemporary
medicine and contemporary psychiatry have identified natural kinds, i.e.
real clusters of interconnected pathogenic properties of persons. In that
case, Foucault’s story is the story of bogus science of the past enlisted
on behalf of moral and political objectives, a story whose general outlines
have long been familiar, even if Foucault tells striking new aspects of it. On
the epistemic standing of the current human sciences, all Foucault leaves
us with is a suspicion, rather than an argument. Suspicion is, as we have
already argued, epistemically important, but it needs to be supplemented
with a critique of the truth of the claims at issue.
Even the suspicion is, however, undercut unfortunately by Foucault’s
sometimes cavalier attitude towards the phenomena in question. Consider
the following remarkable passage from The History of Sexuality about
which Foucault’s devoted followers rarely comment:

38
Foucault 1980b, 109.
39
A classic articulation of this idea is Kitcher 1993, esp. Ch. 5.
16 B. LEITER

One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat
simple-minded, employed here then there, depending on the season, living
hand-to-mouth … was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he
had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and
seen done by the village urchins round about him … So he was pointed out
by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the
gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned
him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts … . What is the significant
thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occur-
rence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures,
could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance
but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and
an entire theoretical elaboration.40

The same underlying events might, of course, be described rather differ-

ently: namely, that up until the time of this incident, pedophilia and child
sexual abuse had been routinely tolerated – treated as an ‘inconsequential
bucolic pleasure[]’ in Foucault’s startling phrase – but gradually people came
to realize that ‘simple-minded’ men being masturbated by young girls was
not such a good thing (not so ‘inconsequential’), and thus the modern scien-
tific study of pedophilia, and its harms, commenced. Why we should prefer
Foucault’s version to the alternative is utterly unclear. Why not say, instead,
that in the nineteenth-century a certain psychological type was discovered,
namely, the pedophile (the kind of person who can only, or primarily,
achieve sexual arousal with children), and that the harms of pedophilia
were also discovered, even if the nineteenth-century versions of these dis-
coveries have been superseded by a century of investigation? Absent
answers to questions like this, Foucault’s critical project is in danger.
To be sure, even if Foucault does not himself supply the arguments, the
reasons for being skeptical about the epistemic claims of many of the con-
temporary human sciences have been well-articulated by others.41 Those
who want Foucault’s critique to be taken seriously must – perhaps drawing
on extant direct rather than genealogical critiques of the human sciences–
put forward a systematic critique of the truth of the conceptions of
‘normality’ at work in the contemporary human sciences, from psychiatry
to criminology. Foucault’s kinds of genealogies are not irrelevant to this
purpose: if the understanding of the ‘homosexual’ or the ‘sociopath’ has
been tainted with moral views that have no epistemic relevance, that is
worth knowing. But epistemically irrelevant factors can sometimes

40
Foucault 1980a, 31.
41
See, i.e. the critiques of economics offered by Rosenberg 1992 and Hausman 1997, and the critique of
psychology offered by Murphy 2006.
 INQUIRY 17

produce true beliefs, and what is ultimately needed is a frontal attack on

the truth of the claims in the human sciences.42

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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This essay expands greatly on some rough ideas I first broached more than a decade ago in Leiter 2008. I
42

am grateful to an audience at a conference on ‘How Do We Keep Knowing?’ at the Glassock Humanities

Research Center at Texas A&M University for helpful discussion of an earlier draft. Finally, I am indebted
to Joshua Fox for research assistance and to an anonymous referee for helpful corrections and feedback.
18 B. LEITER

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