I admit that I had long understood Michel Foucault as a “universal intellectual” — a thinker who conveys an original and general stance to the public, the nation, or the masses, serving as their conscience. If this intellectual is radically critical of the status quo, and his audience is the whole public, then the implication is: Revolution! Examples of revolutionary universal intellectuals include Rousseau, Marx, and Sartre.

Placed in that tradition, Foucault can be frustrating. He held a distinctive and original (albeit evolving) stance, he participated in radical politics in Tunisia and France, and he reached a global audience, yet he eschewed recommendations and explicit moral judgments. He seemed to conceal his own views, to the extent that he held them.

My take on Foucault has been changed (and my appraisal has been much improved) by reading three interviews conducted between 1976 and 1981 that are included in Rabinow’s and Rose’s The Essential Foucault anthology. These conversations have also revised my understanding of his major works.

In the 1976 interview, Foucault describes “universal intellectuals” as I did at the start of this post, but he says that “some years have passed since the intellectual has been called upon to play this role” (1976, 312). A universal intellectual works alone and addresses everyone. In contrast, a “specific intellectual”–a type that emerges after World War II (1976, 313)–works within an institution where knowledge and power come together. Examples include nuclear physicists, psychiatrists, social workers, magistrates, administrators, planners, and educators. They possess genuine knowledge that gives them influence. Since the failed revolution of 1968, it has become clear that beneficial social change depends on them, not on revolutionaries who fight the state (1976, 305). Specific intellectuals are becoming politically conscious and connected across disciplines and national borders (1976, 313).

And Foucault works with them. He doesn’t go into much detail about his own activities in these interviews, but we know that psychiatrists have read his works about mental illness and sexuality, prison administrators have read his book on prisons, and people who train professionals have assigned his texts; and he acknowledges their influence on him. Thus his audience is not “the people,” and his contribution is not a philosophy. Instead, he is a professional historian who contributes information and insights to various conversations that are also informed by the behavioral and social sciences and law.

In a 1981 interview, Didier Erihon suggests that “criticism carried about by intellectuals doesn’t lead to anything” (1981, 171). This is meant as a challenge to Foucault, whom Erihon assumes is an intellectual.

Foucault first notes that the previous twenty years have seen substantial changes–beneficial ones, I presume–in views of mental illness, imprisonment, and gender relations, issues on which he had worked intensively.

Next, he observes that progress does not result from political decisions alone; any policy requires implementation, and its impact depends on the people who implement it. At any rate, that is how I would gloss these words:

Furthermore, there are no reforms in themselves. Reforms do not come about in empty space, independently of those who make them. One cannot avoid considering those who will have to administer this transformation (1981, 171).

It follows that to influence the “assumptions” and “familiar notions” of practitioners is “utterly indispensable for any transformation” (172). (Compare my recent post on institutions).

Foucault concludes his response by criticizing the ways that universal intellectuals (whether famous or aspiring to fame) typically criticize society. He says, “A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. …. Criticism consists in uncovering [everyday] thought and trying to change it” (1981, 172).

The key point, for me, is that “trying to change” something requires a strategy, and Foucault wants to abandon the strategy of changing everything all at once by telling The People that society is bad and should be different. His alternative strategy is to engage well-placed practitioners.

In the 1980 interview, Foucault elaborates his doubts about criticism that takes the form of denouncing existing things, ideas, or people:

It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgment is being passed everywhere, all the time. Perhaps its one of the simplest things mankind has been given to do. And you know very well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table and begin the trial of the individual responsible (1980, 176).

Foucault diagnoses Parisian intellectuals’ love of denouncing each other as a result of their “deep-seated anxiety that one will not be heard or read.” This anxiety motivates the “need to wage an ‘ideological struggle’ or to root out ‘dangerous thoughts'” (1980, 177).

The interviewer counters, “But don’t you think our period is really lacking in great writers and minds capable of dealing with its problems?” (1980, 177). Later, the same interviewer asks, “If everything is going badly, how do we make a start?” (1980, 178).

Foucault resists both pessimistic premises. “But everything isn’t going badly,” he exclaims (1980, 178). He describes a “plethora,” an “overabundance” of interesting ideas and people who have pent-up curiosity. The task, he proposes, is to “multiply the channels, the bridges, the means of information” so that more people with “thirst for knowledge” can learn from more other people (1980, 177).

In a passage that reminds me of Dewey’s The Public and its Problems (1924), Foucault describes his “dream of a new age of curiosity” (1980, 178). He says, “I like the word [curiosity]. It evokes ‘care’; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist.” (1980, 177). In the age of curiosity that he envisions, “people must be constantly able to plug into culture in as many ways as possible” (178-9).

Given Foucault’s understanding of his own role as a “specific intellectual,” he must have been at least somewhat concerned about his reputation. He was not only a historical specialist who helped fellow practitioners to become conscious of shared prejudices and to discover alternatives. He was also (and mainly) a world-famous French philosopher, a purported representative of movements like post-structuralism and postmodernism, whose public lectures on general subjects in venues like the Collège de France and UC-Berkeley were packed with aspiring philosophers, and whose interviews about the condition of the world were published in Le Monde and Libération.

I am not sure how he navigated this tension, not having read the biographies. But it’s clear that it worried him. In the 1980 interview, part of a series on major intellectuals in Le Monde, Foucault asks not to be named. The interview (still archived on Le Monde’s website), is headlined, “The Masked Philosopher.” It begins:

Here is a French writer of some renown. Author of several books whose success has been affirmed well beyond our borders, he is an independent thinker: he is not linked to any fashion, to any party. However, he only agreed to grant us an interview about the status of the intellectual and the place of culture and philosophy in society on one explicit condition: to remain anonymous. Why this discretion? Out of modesty, calculation or fear? The question deserved to be asked–even if, by the end of this conversation, the mystery will undoubtedly have dissipated for the most perceptive of our readers…

Foucault explains that he would like to try being anonymous “out of nostalgia for a time when, since I was quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard” (my translation). In other words, we cannot hear Foucault well unless we shake the model of a famous thinker who offers big ideas. He wants us, instead, to ask whether the claims about specific phenomena that we find in his works ring true or false and whether they are useful or not for our purposes.

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Sources: Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” (1976), “The Masked Philosopher” (1980), and “So is it Important to Think?” (1981), all in Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, The Essential Foucault (The New Press, 2003), but I retranslated the 1980 interview myself because of a misplaced modifier in the anthology. See also: Vincent Colapietro, “Foucault’s Pragmatism and Dewey’s Genealogies: Mapping Our Historical Situations and Locating Our Philosophical Maps,” Cognitio, 13/2 (2012), p. 187-218; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; and Civically Engaged Research in Political Science