Politics & Society
Göran Perssons ord från mitten av 1990-talet ekar fortfarande genom svensk politik. Varje politiskt förslag som kan höja statsskulden bemöts av varningar om hur Sverige på den tiden stod på ruinens brant. Perssons resa till New York, där han enligt egen utsago tvingades gå med mössan i hand till Wall Streets lånehajar och utlova nedskärningar, […]
As a young philosophy student in the United States in the early 1990s, I must admit that I was hoodwinked by this huckster and the system that promoted him … I devoured each book when it came out in the 1990s and early 21st century. I also followed on his heels by pursuing a […]
Ptolemy constructed an inordinately complex model of the universe in order to make all of the empirical data conform to a central, organizing false assumption, namely, that the earth was at the center. Michel Foucault, as we shall see, made a similar contribution to contemporary social science … Given Foucault’s general dismissal of anti-capitalist and […]
Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who after experiencing a sobbing antiwar epiphany on a bathroom floor made the momentous decision in 1971 to disclose a secret history of American lies and deceit in Vietnam, what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, died on Friday at his home in Kensington, Calif., in the Bay […]
Almost anyone can see what a reductive view this is of modern society, even without having read their Rousseau or Rawls. We must not be taken in by the fact that this is called “critical,” that it’s about race, and that it’s titled a “theory.” It is a fragile, performative ideology, one that goes beyond […]
It is not difficult to discern Foucault’s animosity toward the post-war left project. Obviously he was very hostile to Marxism … For Foucault in 1977, “the return of the revolution, that’s our problem (…) You know it very well: it’s the desire itself of the revolution that is a problem” … Foucault’s non-vote for Mitterrand […]
My problem with Michel Foucault, then, is not that he seeks to “move beyond” the welfare state, but that he actively contributed to its destruction, and that he did so in a way that was entirely in step with the neoliberal critiques of the moment. His objective was not to move towards “socialism,” but to be […]
Although somewhat critical of its reductive elements, Foucault found certain attractive features in the ideal or programmatic form imagined by American neoliberalism, namely, that it envisages a kind of regulation outside sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical forms, that it regulates without the fabrication of subjectivities and in a manner that optimizes difference and tolerates minority groups […]