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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 SharpeMany 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.
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.