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The Glory of Nicocles: Foucault’s Greeks & the Inegalitarian Underside of the Professional-managerial Class

journal contribution
posted on 2022-09-29, 23:15 authored by Matthew Sharpe
Many progressive or new Left readers very readily pass over the darker passages in Foucault’s texts, all avowals of “hermeneutics of suspicion” aside. This is because the great majority of them, as credentialled members of the PMC, share a lived, ongoing experience of professionalized, hierarchized, and individualized labor, to which forms of solidary, as against paternalistic, actions in defense of egalitarian causes, are actually deeply distant and deeply foreign. Accordingly, PMC defenses of progressive non-economic causes (what Nancy Fraser calls “progressive neoliberalism”) conceal a deeply inegalitarian, meritocratic underside which also explains the progressive loss of the old link between nominally Leftist political parties (“New Labor”) and the working classes in the US, UK, Australasia, and elsewhere. Professional scholars can so largely “read
over” without concern the clearly inegalitarian positions in Foucault (and of course, in a far blunter thinker like Nietzsche), since egalitarianism is no longer a primary value for them. Instead, their ideological “common sense” is one in which the professional-managerial values of difference, creativity, singularity, becoming, expressivity, and a glorious excellence which Foucault locates in the classical elites predominate.

History

Journal

Continental thought & theory: A journal of intellectual freedom

Volume

3

Issue

4

Pagination

172 - 200

Publisher

University of Canterbury

Location

Christchurch, N.Z.

ISSN

2463-333X

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

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