Smith notes that conservatives “are adding to their long-held distrust of the state a new suspicion about the power of managerial and therapeutic experts over everyday life.” In light of these concerns, he writes, “Foucault’s work [offers] theoretical support to conservative critiques of the ‘new class’ of experts”—ironically, again, the class among which Foucault has been most widely celebrated.

For Foucault’s critics, the implication that there can exist no disinterested, apolitical pursuit of knowledge is scandalous. Conservatives, liberal defenders of science, and traditional humanists have all claimed that his work contributed to the politicization of universities in recent decades.

Perhaps Foucault’s most influential coinage is his related notion of “power-knowledge.” This must be distinguished from the better-known and less controversial dictum that “knowledge is power,” often attributed to Francis Bacon, which asserts that knowledge enables control of the world. For Foucault, in contrast, knowledge does not enable the exercise of power, but proceeds from it. This inversion comes about because power establishes the truth regimes that enable the production of knowledge. The resulting knowledge perpetuates and expands power—which produces more knowledge. In Foucault’s words, “‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it.”

Under the sway of this “postmodern” worldview, we are told, stu­dents learn to fault the West for the sins of racism, sexism, and colonialism, and to embrace both moral and epistemological relativism.

Over the following decades, a certain version of history has it, Strauss trained two generations of students in the United States as ‘philosophers’ capable of seeing through the weaknesses and falsehoods of American modernity, while transmitting to their own students a passionate attachment to their regime and their era, coupled with certain opinions and moral orientations that liberal democracy could not otherwise provide from within the matrix of its own premises. These latter students, who became political leaders rather than philosophers, acted in the horizon of the opinions their teachers had given them, bound to them by such noble lies as the infallibility of the Founding Fathers, the genius of Lincoln, or the sacredness of human rights. This project, celebrated in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, has perhaps now come to a miserable end. But something like it may be liberal democracy’s best hope for survival in the twenty-first century.

Instead, the modern philosopher tells citizens they can and must liberate themselves from conventions, but, as he exhorts them to exercize their freedom and critical faculties, reminds them that the ‘historical situation’ to which they belong has certain requirements, limitations, and paths towards the desired future. 

For Foucault as with Strauss, we learn how to read the author by seeing how he read others. Such a new reading of Foucault might allow us to understand him as moving, over the course of his career, towards a tactical accommodation with liberal democracy, the Enlightenment, and modernity — not because these are the best and truest structures, or even merely those we cannot in the present do without, but because they afford the modern philosopher possibilities for pursuing his private project of ‘ascesis’ while securing a minimally decent public order through the elaboration of a new ‘noble lie’. 

When the Enlightenment replaced the old cave of the city with the new cave of the historical situation, however, a new kind of philosopher appeared. Kant, Foucault argued, tried to bring about the unprecedented union of Diogenes and Plato, speaking truth to power in the public sphere while also covertly orienting political action. Of course, the enlightened public intellectual, who appears as the union of Diogenes’ shocking, iconoclastic rejection of contemporary pieties and Plato’s subtle, esoteric awakening of philosophical souls and education of the opinions of the holders of power, is Foucault himself. The modern philosopher seems to speak with heedless freedom, making bold critiques of our most cherished values and summoning to us overcome what Kant called our “self-imposed immaturity,” our childish dependence on traditional authority. Through this public parrhesia, however, the philosopher becomes an authority himself, shaping public opinion and guiding the decisions of elites. We might expect, in the spirit of Plato, that this philosopher will tell some noble lies.

Towards the end of his lecture series, Foucault claimed that all of Western philosophy has been structured by a tension between Diogenes and Plato. The former, living in his barrel, masturbating in front of passersby, mocking the great and good, performed “philosophy’s free speech… in the public sphere, in defiance, confrontation, derision and critique of the deeds of the Prince and of political action.” His was a philosophy free to speak truth to power because the philosopher that spoke it had no power himself, no respectable membership in the city. Plato, in contrast, went to the court of Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse as an advisor, and articulated models of ideal states in his Republic and Laws. Such a philosopher who aspires to influence (or, really, to wield) power cannot speak freely in public, but only in intimate settings, in the ear of the Prince or among initiates. If he teaches in public, or writes, it will be in an esoteric mode, concealing his purposes beneath apparently acceptable and conventional ideas.

But Foucault would rather have us ask how the modern philosopher should live — and how he should disguise himself. 

Here Foucault defended himself against accusations of being a ‘historicist’ and ‘nihilist’. He suggested that the point of historicism and nihilism is not to give us a true vision of the world, but to contribute to a “transformation of value systems.” We should be asking, therefore, not if Foucault was a historicist and nihilist, but what he was doing with his historicism and nihilism, what ground he is clearing for what new foundations. 

Kant saw the Enlightenment as an ‘exit’ from humanity’s dependence on traditional structures of authority such as the Church. But, Foucault observed, this apparent exit from the cave of prejudice creates a new kind of cave around itself, one defined in temporal rather than spatial terms.

Foucault, I have argued, shows us that liberal democracy is inherently vulnerable to the vicious struggles of ‘identity politics’ because its political-philosophical foundation rests on an uneasy compromise between what he called ‘historicist’ claims about particular national and ethnic groups, on the one hand, and, on the other, ‘philosophical’ claims about universal human rights. 

Throughout his intellectual career, the French philosopher Michel Foucault pursued two goals: a critique of the Enlightenment, and a ‘return’ to the Greeks.

Toward the end of their lives, both men turned to the theme of religion, arguing that it provided critical cultural and psychological resources necessary for individuals to become meaningfully autonomous. They moved toward an understanding that, in order to become the sort of independent selves on whom liberal democracy depends, we need what Foucault called “discipline” or “ascesis”—the ability to bind ourselves to other people who help us both to keep our commitments and to remake ourselves.

Foucault attributed their inspiration to Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979), in which Lasch had argued that anxious individuals, deprived of economic security and cultural bonds, were investing their self-image, and therapeutic projects of self-discovery, with unprecedented importance.