Was Michel Foucault a Leftist? The question seemed settled sixty years ago. When in 1966 “The Order of Things”, a highly scholarly, not easily readable study on the modern orders of knowledge, appeared, Jean-Paul Sartre thundered, “this new ideology” is “the last bulwark the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx”.
Foucault did not actually argue like a typical leftist. The notion that Marx’s critique of the “classic” economist David Ricardo had been merely a “storm in a teacup” seemed to negate the critical claim of Marxism entirely. And while the New Left had embraced Marx as the “humanist” of the 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Foucault claimed that “the” human being as the starting point, measure, and end of all knowledge was no more than a relatively recent invention—and precisely about to disappear again, like “a face in the sand” on the seashore.
How did he arrive at such a provocative thesis? It was clear that the vogue of contemporary structuralism—which he at best marginally aligned with—favored a form of thinking beyond the I, the subject, consciousness, authorship, etc. Quite likely, however, Foucault, starting from “a certain form of biologism” in Nietzsche and hinting at “some event, whose possibility we can at most anticipate, but whose form and promise we do not yet know,” thought of molecular genetics, which in the future could also blur the idea of the “human” as waves erasing a face in the sand.
On October 15, 2026, Michel Foucault would have turned 100 years old. On that occasion, the Culture section of the will publish, up to that date, a monthly article on an aspect of the work of this influential philosopher on the 15th of each month. The following texts have appeared so far:
Cord Riechelmann on Foucault’s intellectual program, which united theory and activism.
Philipp Sarasin on Foucault and the Left.
As a admirer of the French molecular biologists Jacques Monod and François Jacob, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1965, he did not defend his “antihumanism” solely with references to the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, but also insisted, with regard to biology and the genetic code; later he even explicitly compared it with his concept of discourse.
Corrupted Commodity of Humanism
This had indeed political implications. Was all of this not very “cold,” he was asked. Of course it was. For, so Foucault argued, the aim is to “free ourselves once and for all from humanism” to a political practice, “especially since all regimes in the East as in the West hawk their corrupted wares under the protective roof of humanism.”
In the 1970s, Foucault no longer referred to genetics in exactly the same way, but his contempt for the bigotry of the universally praised humanitarianism remained unchanged. And moreover, the events of ’68 and their consequences politicised him more than ever; he now saw himself—despite all intellectual reservations—as an unconventional Left.
He read with enthusiasm the writings of the US Black Panthers, which he considered “free from Marxist theories of society,” met during a speaking tour in the United States with socialist students and, in January 1969, took up the professorship in philosophy at the newly founded, explicitly left-wing experimental university Vincennes. In short, he now prominently belonged to the Parisian “post-May” left’s intelligentsia.
Foucault did not stop at panel discussions and public calls. Through his friend Daniel Defert he connected with the underground Maoist Gauche prolétarienne (GP) and began to advocate for their imprisoned comrades on hunger strikes. This gave rise to the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), the Prison Information Group, which aimed to give prisoners a voice about their situation in the French prisons known for their inhumane conditions via smuggled questionnaires. The prison would become his new topic—even though, just recently appointed as a professor at the Collège de France, he publicly renounced “book scribbling” and fully devoted himself to political practice.
Television Debate with Noam Chomsky
His politicization and radicalization in those years seemed most clearly expressed in the famous television debate with the American linguist Noam Chomsky in November 1971. Chomsky, a pure Humanist, emphasized that the proletariat’s struggle should be guided by “true concepts of justice, decency, love, kindness, and sympathy,” while Foucault, provocatively, argued that the proletariat fights not the ruling class “because it believes the struggle to be just,” but “because for the first time in history it itself wants to seize power,” and that if it “takes power, it will exercise a dictatorship and even bloody violence”—to nonchalantly add: “I do not see what argument one could raise against that.”
That sounded radically radical, shocked Chomsky deeply—and was nonetheless “a little Nietzschean theater.” Indeed, while Foucault was convinced, as Nietzsche had asserted, that the genealogical root of all political struggles and social conflicts ultimately amounts to nothing but the “bloody,” “never-ending” struggle between rulers and the ruled, this did not translate into a Marxist revolutionary scheme for him, and he was far from placing excessive hopes in the French industrial proletariat.
What interested him and whom he stood up for were very different people and groups. Shortly before the conversation with Chomsky, he—in the first instance with Jean-Paul Sartre—took to the streets for Algerian immigrants and founded a committee on the question of racism in France; shortly after the TV discussion, one saw him marching with relatives of prisoners. Later he campaigned for Soviet dissidents or for the Vietnamese boat people. In 1981, after the declaration of martial law in Poland, he organized for months a relief fund for Solidarność and transported medicines to Gdańsk; in March 1984, already seriously ill, he stood up for migrants from Mali and Senegal who had been displaced from their homes.
This political stance and practice corresponded to the 1975 published book on prisons, Discipline and Punish, which described—though in a rather dark way—the “panoptical” surveillance system of Jeremy Bentham as a model of a disciplinary machine for society as a whole. The workers came to Foucault last. Rather, he spoke of “the mad, the children, the students, the colonized,” and only then of those “who are bound to a production apparatus and controlled for life.”
Likewise in another passage, where, in this order, from “prisoners,” “the sick,” “the insane,” “the children,” and only at the end “the workers,” all disciplined within the panoptic machine, equipped with a “soul”—that is, a conscience—and compelled to productive labor.
It is not hard to see that Foucault, with his sharp critique of the exploitation function of the “disciplinary society,” remained faithful to Marx’s critique of capitalism—even if he decisively did not share his dialectical philosophy of history and rejected reducing consciousness to social being.
Experience as a Gay Man
But be that as it may: one can only understand Foucault’s continuous practical solidarity and theoretical attention for the sick, deviant, racialized, and marginalized if one takes his homosexuality into account. The experience of living as a gay man under the constant threat of French law, the persistent sense of his social non-acceptance, indeed queerness (he does not use the term) had, since “Madness and Civilization” (1961), made him a thinker of deviance and exclusion—far from all hopes of the New Left for the awakening of the “revolutionary subject” and the future “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
His famous, in the prison book first developed theory of power describes power not as state and/or class power moving from “top” to “bottom” (while not denying this possibility), but far more fundamentally as a plurality of “relations of power” in all areas of society, of which under the conditions of modernity many “norm” and “normalize” behavior.
From 1976 onward, Foucault also sharpened his critique of the New Left from this perspective: in the slim program book The Will to Knowledge, initially greeted by gays and feminists, he spoke with ironical scorn about the 68ers’ belief in the “liberation” of sexuality as a revolutionary act, while the fixation on sex since the late 18th century had been an instrument of bourgeois normalization powers. Power now did not aim at disciplining the body as in the prison book; it rather enticed the “sex drive” to enable control of both the individual and the population via this hinge between the individual and the populace.
Building on this concept of a “biopolitics,” Foucault also outlined a theory of racism that the Left had not yet produced and that remains influential to this day: Racism has nothing to do with bodily difference, but is the act of excluding an entire group to the point of death—it is, according to Foucault, “a means to introduce a break: the break between what can live and what must die.” Racism is racialization based on contingent markers, to make exclusion systematically and potentially deadly.
How Is Resistance to Be Thought?
With his insistence on deviance, queerness, and criticism of racism, Foucault became the theorist of a new kind of Left who, without dialectical illusions, sought to intensify resistances and moments of liberation within the complex weave of contemporary power relations. Yet his power theory increasingly got in the way. For how is resistance to be thought when subjects are fully controlled by the panoptic machine, indeed produced by it together with their “soul”?
In the summer of 1978, Foucault read Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, who, since the previous year, had died, and was fascinated by the thesis that religious-spiritual hopes for the future can drive revolutionary movements. In autumn he traveled twice to Iran, to see—through Bloch’s eyes—how the “Shiite spirituality” gave the protesters the strength to oppose the Shah regime, which had them shot, with their peaceful “No.” This spirit of nameless states, as he put it with Marx, appeared to him as a force of resistance that the Foucault of the Prison book could not have imagined—here he saw it a thousandfold.
This does not mean, however, that he was “deceived by Khomeini” or supported the rule of the mullahs. Against Islam critics who publicly accused him of that, he noted perceptively: “The problem of Islam as a political force is of central importance for our time and the coming years. Anyone who wants to deal intelligently with this question should by no means start by invoking hatred.”
Against this background, in 1979 he revised his earlier view that the genealogical root of all power was nothing but bloody violence. For the uprising in Iran “with bare hands” had taught him that power can unfold without violence—which, as opposed to a “relationship of force,” implies that the person on whom power is exercised must be recognized as an acting subject.
One can easily see how, at this point, Foucault’s simultaneous reading of liberal and neoliberal theorists led him to a surprisingly positive portrayal of liberalism: as a form of governance that must in principle allow subjects a certain degree of freedom—and accordingly curtail the power of the state. Was Foucault then ultimately a (neo) liberal? Hard to say. He would certainly be an example of how large the intersection between an unconventional Left and an unconventional Liberal can be.
