Foucault, democracy and the ambivalence of rights

Abstract

In this review essay, I examine two recent books in critical theory as part of a reflection on the utility, as well as the possible risks and limitations, of liberal rights and citizenship in resisting contemporary forms of power. While Ben Golder’s book ‘Foucault and the Politics of Rights’ offers a compelling reconstruction of Foucault’s thought that calls attention to the ambivalent character of rights discourse, Wendy Brown’s book ‘Undoing the Demos’ applies a Foucaudlian mode of analysis to paint a dark vision of how neoliberalism is reconfiguring liberal-democratic institutions and norms according to economic imperatives. In this essay, I unpack the arguments of these two books, situating them within a broader context of critical thought and evaluating some of their central ideas and assumptions. I suggest that Golder is insufficiently critical of the central notion he presents of an anti-foundational ‘tactical’ conception of rights and propose that we instead see rights as political in the sense of being open, provisional and subject to on-going contestation. I examine the evolution of Brown’s thinking on rights in her work and call attention to some of the shortcomings in her analysis of power. Ultimately, I propose, both Foucault (in Golder’s reading) and Brown demonstrate that it is possible to maintain a productive scepticism towards rights and other humanistic social categories, while acknowledging their indispensable value in certain contexts.

Keywords:

• Rights
• citizenship
• liberalism
• democracy
• Foucault
• Wendy Brown

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Richard Bellamy and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this paper, which was written with support from the Irish Research Council.

Notes

1. Neoliberalism is of course a contested term and some have questioned its explanatory precision. It most commonly refers to a set of interconnected ideas and policies, based on free market economics, which gained ascendancy from the 1980’s onwards with the premiership of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the US. It entails above all privatisation, outsourcing, deregulation, cuts to public expenditure, the expansion of the financial sector and a reduction in the power of organised labour. See Springer, Birch, & MacLeavy, 2016.