Hayek and Foucault: Beyond the Mere Use of Others

Twitter asked me to write about F. A. Hayek this month, and here I’ll oblige. But yet another introduction would be timid, and I didn’t start this project to be timid. Instead, I’m going to put some of Hayek’s main ideas into conversation with those of Michel Foucault, whom I wrote about last month. (Was Foucault a liberal? Clearly not. But it would be an illiberal liberalism that had a taboo against invoking ideas from elsewhere.) Hayek and Foucault can be understood to reinforce and complement each other in many ways. You may do best to read last month’s essay first, but I’ll try to make this one stand alone as well.

In last month’s essay, we saw how Foucault’s life work traced how people have tended to be cruel to one another, that is, how people have tended to use one another merely as a means to an end. That’s obviously a Kantian concern, and while Foucault wasn’t a liberal, Kant certainly was, and he certainly influenced Foucault. The Austrian school of economics has been even more markedly Kantian, a fact that shows the clearest in Ludwig von Mises’s work, but is certainly present in Hayek as well, as we’ll discuss below. There’s at least a distant philosophical kinship here.1

Despite its often Kantian commitments, Foucault’s work amounts to an utterly non-polemical and amoral (but still insightful) history of how compulsion tends to manifest, of how it is organized, of how it is licensed legally or intellectually, and toward which aims it tends to be oriented. It’s understandable to be unnerved by that. He wasn’t writing manifestos, and still less was he writing history as a story of progress. He didn’t believe in such a thing. But nor was he writing the opposite, a declension narrative, though one might be forgiven for thinking so. Rather, throughout his career, he simply described the use of power—and he described as well the structures of knowledge that are symbiotic with it, tending to excuse and justify it. These appear almost as quasi-autonomous agents operating on human institutions, practices, and lives. Power tends toward aims that are unpredictable and that don’t really square with liberal notions of right and wrong. We even sometimes take part in it unwittingly, thinking that we aim merely at impartial knowledge. For Foucault, knowledge is never impartial.

There’s nonetheless a broad, complex progression in his work—a narrative despite his skepticism of narratives. It runs from ancient forms of power, which usually concerned the exercise of the right of life and death by one individual over another, toward forms of power concerned with the extraction of resources—like colonialism, or like early modern European workhouses—and finally toward biopower, which is Foucault’s term for the ability to minutely manage individual human beings and populations with the help of biometrics and social statistics. Biopower includes things like eugenics and, troublingly, modern medicine in general. Under biopower, people’s very bodies and behaviors are the subjects of compulsory scientific measurement, control, and the optimization of quantified metrics. Biopower is the province of the modern state, which couldn’t be modern without it. (Do you mean to tell me that there’s nothing here to interest the Austrian econ-libertarian continuum? Please.)

Now, with that out of the way: these stocks and flows of—shall we say—human resources, managed with ever greater exactness over the course of history: where do they come from? What makes the objects on which power can act? It’s a great error in the social sciences to treat wealth as a given; before it can be distributed, it must be produced. That’s also true here. How is production happening, and in particular, what’s the relationship between economic production and biopower?

One answer that Foucauldians like to offer is that economic production is also a manifestation of power relations. Resources are elicited by power, conditioned by power, and directed at the aims that power dictates. And that’s often enough not wrong. Power relations do act on, and compete with, other power relations, and they can and do compel economic production. As Foucault said, everything is dangerous.

The problem with that answer is that it opens the Foucauldian position to the charge of tautology: If social phenomena are always about power, all the way down, and in all instances, then one hasn’t said anything especially interesting. Good theories distinguish. Bad ones reach for a false universalism. If we’re going to say that it’s power all the way down, we’d might as well say that all social phenomena are argle-bargle. And while there might be nothing that isn’t contaminated by power, that raises the question: If it’s just a contamination, what’s the rest of it like?

In what follows, I’m going to bring Hayek in, and I’m going to suggest that Austrian economics more generally opens a vantage point from which life can be about more than mere power relations. If Foucauldians object that I’m denying power its due, I’ll just remind them that if they argue too forcefully in that direction, they’ll argue themselves into a tautology. Some things need to be about something else for their claims to be interesting.

Of course there are more things to life than power. To put it in Kantian terms, there exist means to our ends beyond the mere use of others. Of all social theorists, it may be Hayek who explained them the best.

Orders beyond Ordering

If the recurring theme of Foucault’s work is the genealogy of power, then the recurring theme of Hayek’s work is surely the pervasiveness of spontaneous order. Like Foucault, Hayek can be cagey at times about what this big idea of his really means. One way of putting it, though, is that there exist regularities in social conduct that have the appearance of design, but that lack any specific designing agent or intentionality. These regularities have grown and developed over time. They were the product of human action, but not of human design, and they represent a set of survivals from a long process of trial and error. 

This process of trial and error is similar to, but in some ways quite different from, biological evolution, in ways that would take us much too far from our subject to discuss at the moment. Spontaneous orders are open to improvisation within limits—that’s how they can both endure over time and also change. They need to have both to have any chance at continuity across the ups and downs of history. And the overall order having both some continuity and some possibility of change means that individual agents within it will have meaningful choices—neither predetermined nor trivial. 

Some form of spontaneous coordination appears all but necessarily to govern much human action. As Hayek observed, “Most of the rules of conduct which govern our actions, and most of the institutions which arise out of this regularity, are adaptations to the impossibility of anyone taking conscious account of all of the particular facts which enter into the order of society.”2 While the field of action so described may seem like a fertile one for the workings of impersonal social forces—and it is—we shouldn’t imagine that these forces either act with infallible effect or that they’re purely the products of some other conscious designer having imposed their will on us. Hayek has in view here the panoply of manners, social conventions, and habits by which we govern our daily lives, and while many of these are acquired more or less unconsciously, we should still take seriously the complaints of moralists throughout history that this domain of human life is insufficiently under their control. Our choices matter, and they’re ours to make, and that bugs them.

Manners, conventions, and habits are a field open to improvisation, either by single individuals or by groups acting in concert. It’s even tempting to liken this improvisation to that which can happen in music—but that’s imprecise. At least when we’re talking about forms of music apart from recordings or rote performances, music isn’t a metaphor for spontaneous order. Music is an example of spontaneous order. It’s significantly conventional, and yet it’s not entirely rule-bound. There are meaningful choices, and some are better than others. There are chances for the free play of tastes and values within it.

Spontaneous social ordering lets individuals satisfy perceived needs, whether aesthetic or physical, by forming cogent inferences about the world around them both in its social aspects—for such orders allow and condition interpersonal sociability—and in its natural aspects—because, as has often been argued, the institutions and practices of knowledge dissemination can themselves be a type of spontaneous order. Yes, we can characterize a lot of scientific knowledge as the more sinister, Foucauldian knowledge/power over others. But it’s also possible to describe much of science, and possibly most of it, as a product of human action, but not human design, grown up gradually through a long process of trial and error, and undertaken for the most part sincerely and without ulterior motive. The case is strong, then, that science has aspects of spontaneous order to it, and that we can’t give a full picture of this complex area of human life without describing at least occasionally, and perhaps quite often, a genuine search for truth.

What are the fundamental building blocks of all human spontaneous orders? There is what I personally believe that I know, irrespective of the judgments of the authorities around me—that is, my local knowledge. There’s my ability to give things to you, whether tangible or not, and whether that giving is known or unknown to others—and whether it’s permitted, tolerated, or even forbidden by authority. There are my wants and needs, which I can perceive, at least on the phenomenological level, much more immediately and reliably than any other person or institution. And then there are your wants and needs, which hold a corresponding epistemological position for you; just as mine are inaccessible to you, yours are inaccessible to me; just as mine are phenomenologically immediate to me, yours are likewise to you. And from this list of simple, irreducible facts, a set of orders grows up, one that is simultaneously the source of human sustenance and, often, the subject of power’s ministrations. It is from these very basic, almost irreducible facts of human life that all spontaneous orders are built.

The ability to form at least somewhat reliable inferences about interpersonal phenomena allows many different individuals to pursue even quite disparate plans with at least some hope of success. The social regularities that are to be found in spontaneous orders do not exist for any specific or overarching purpose; they’re the means to no particular end. Rather, by their very existence, they allow the achievement of many smaller purposes with something that approaches mutual harmony. It’s exactly because spontaneous orders answer perfectly to no one individual purpose that we may act freely within them and not always fear that we’re using others as a mere means to our own ends. And that’s why, quite possibly, it’s through spontaneous orders that we may hope to reconcile freedom and sociability.

Examples of spontaneous social orders abound. Let’s look at two of them now, language and the use of money; in both, at the very moment when individuals participate in the production and maintenance of the order at hand, they are also potentially engaged in an act of resistance against a totalizing knowledge-power in ways that are basically impossible to stamp out.

Language: Symbolic communication is among the most important and readily accessible examples of spontaneous order; indeed, Hayek called it “the most important instance of an undesigned growth, of a set of rules which govern our lives but of which we can say neither why they are what they are nor what they do to us.”3 That might sound menacing, but such rules aren’t to be shunned, he insisted:

Language couldn’t be used at all if, before we used any word, we needed its exact definition, a comprehensive historical etymology, or a permit from an expert allowing us to use the word in such and such a way. On the contrary, we enter into language mostly by guessing and being corrected, and this lets everyone learn more, and much faster, than they otherwise could. It also opens the door to a huge amount of unintended but sometimes very fortunate improvisation. Even those with no interest whatsoever in historical etymology or precise definition can still speak—less precisely, perhaps, but with better  economy of thought, and they can get their needs met a lot faster that way. And sometimes they’ll use a word in a whole new way or just make one up from different bits and pieces they’d heard—and if the rest of us find it handy, then the whole language is that much better off.

Language is also a great starting point to a Foucault-Hayek synthesis for several other reasons: First, language is right in front of us, right now, both as I’m writing and as you’re reading. The sheer fact that we’re doing this, and that some propositional content has made its way from my mind to yours, is a phenomenon that we can both experience and study together. Language also isn’t trivial; it’s commonly described as one of the things that makes humans truly human, both different from other animals and bound for better things. Unlike with some other spontaneous orders—like the common law and the use of markets—there aren’t many notable anti-language ideologies or even anti-language arguments. Language is the most obvious, capacious, and well-accepted spontaneous order of them all.

Despite its ease of use and its immediate familiarity, language has never not been contested—which of course is the province of Foucauldian analysis, notably in The Order of Things. Professions and professional associations, above all those entangled with the state, form a cornerstone in the edifice of biopower, and language is one of the key ways that they assert their authority. For Foucault, the disturbed utterances of the madman are how madness is recognized—and the controlling utterances of the doctor are how it’s described. And ascribed. And fought. 

Yet language is also constantly subject to creative redeployment by literally anyone, and its most incisive inventions are often not those of the professional language wardens, but rather those of ordinary people confronting them. There is even some evidence of varying levels of cultural openness to this and other types of spontaneous ordering.5 Such a correlation suggests that there may be cultural formations or processes that conduce to a greater or lesser openness to spontaneous ordering; it may behoove the proponents of spontaneous order to discover and champion them, even if they are not in themselves examples of spontaneous order.

To return to language, even words initially deployed in the pursuit of control over others are subject to redeployment in the service of resistance, and one who wanted consciously to reject biopower might encourage and applaud such practices. One of Foucault’s most famous utterances is that before 1870, the homosexual did not exist; it was at that moment that the medical profession took notice of a possible set of enduring dispositions and gave it a name. But it wasn’t long afterward that many new names were added alongside it, and that people who saw this identity in themselves started talking about it as a basis for a community and a sociability. Some of them even took another idea, itself barely a couple of centuries old, and started asking about putting the two of them together: If there’s such thing as human rights, what are they to the homosexual? This permutation wasn’t always what the clinicians had in mind—but to their credit, sometimes it was.

Money: The widespread use of money as a medium of exchange plays a crucially important role in subverting any centralized control over stocks and flows of resources, above all when that money is of limited traceability. Such money is at war with biopower because at every turn it offers opportunities to deviate from the scale of values that the wielders of biopower would impose on the rest of us. That opportunity is as close as your wallet.

Consider that one of the Austrian School’s great opponents, Otto Neurath, proposed that there should be, in his future socialist state, a “central office for management in kind”; this office would manage the economy, and once it was working, money would be unnecessary.6 Were this setup viable, it would be the apogee of biopower, directing the lives and resources of an entire society and managing them through scientific measurement. But when exchanges are conducted through money, there exists, at least in principle, the prospect that buyer and seller will reach an exchange price for a good that’s not at all what the central planners desire, and that shifts the distribution of resources away from what they’d prefer. When authority can’t control resources, it can’t control people, either.

This problem is distinct from the one found in the socialist calculation debate. Ludwig von Mises correctly disputed Neurath’s claim that production management could be undertaken using in-kind calculations by noting that production goods would not be the subject of market valuation, and when those goods were unpriced, rational substitutions among them couldn’t occur. But the issue here may concern merely consumption goods and their differential valuations among consumers in secondary markets. All markets to some degree, and black markets to the highest degree, are spaces where biopower’s reach is limited. The direct and minute control of the allocations of physical resources would necessarily produce a direct and minute control over the lives and material conditions of all individuals, but such control turns out to be elusive, and the point of resistance is always at hand: There are my wants, which I perceive directly, and there are yours, for which you do likewise. And there is our ability to give things to one another. Spontaneous orders can always be sites of resistance.

Biopower doesn’t have or even need self-conscious partisans; to go by Foucault’s account, it’s a development that seems to have arisen through a perverse but spontaneous process. He might even be right about that. But if biopower did have partisans, they would have to be frustrated at the unworkability of central economic planning.

In our middling world, where no principle or ideal type holds full sway for long, trade is subject to regulation, taxation, and prohibition. Trade gives rise to flows of resources that biopower can treat as its subjects of administration, even if it can never do so perfectly. Yet there’s a strong resonance, if not to say an analogy, between Foucault’s historical sequence—running from the power to kill, to the power of extraction, to biopower—and Hayek’s observation that, of the various forms of state intervention, the most severe is a direct command to act; a command to forebear is less severe; a payment in kind, still less onerous than that; and that finally, taxation in money is, of the various bad alternatives, the least bad of them all, because at least taxation lets the individual choose the means of earning payment, which is the same as their choice of livelihood, and it also leaves them their choice of which goods to forego in order to pay the tax. As Hayek put it: 

In the progression away from command and toward managing a population by making them pay money, biopower yields somewhat to the cash nexus, which grants a degree of freedom even at the very moment when individuals must surrender some of their resources to the state. (As I said: Not exactly a story of progress, but not a declension narrative either.) Employment apart from the state is also crucial; Hayek writes:  “That the freedom of the employed depends upon the existence of a great number and variety of employers is clear when we consider the situation that would exist if there were only one employer—namely, the state—and if taking employment were the only permitted means of livelihood.”8 

A society with only a single employer, and with no possibility of self-employment, describes socialism in Hayek’s correct and explicit term. Implicitly, such a state would also and necessarily wield a good deal of biopower, in its capacity as the only employer in town. The ability to choose employers certainly doesn’t free us from all of our employers’ possible biopower, but it does let us bargain to escape some of it. Continuing to push along that margin, and to foster social conditions in which employers are numerous and competition among them for labor is fierce, will presumably do much to curb such power in the future. 

Toward Synthesis

The point of knowledge/power in Foucault’s work certainly isn’t that it’s inventing “true” statements of whole cloth, and still less is he claiming that it makes false things true, or that there’s no external world. We don’t need to make any of these unevidenced and ultimately metaphysical claims. The point, rather, is that it doesn’t matter. With power on your side, you may announce as truth whatever you find most convenient to power’s own maintenance, which is your own livelihood as well, and that’s all that matters. With power, pretty soon others will start humoring you—and they’ll start acting to instantiate further demonstrations of your knowledge, using the lives of others as their raw materials. And at any rate, nobody will stop you until it’s much too late to do anything about it. 

But this, though, is all too similar to Hayek’s notion of constructivist rationalism, and at many points in Hayek’s work, his critiques might as well have been leveled at knowledge-power:

The authority that diagnoses, judges, institutionalizes, and purports to cure supposed social deviance often isn’t confronting deviance at all, but only an organic social development, one which he has imperfectly understood. Consider the coercive treatment of LGBT people. To the eyes of the coercing authority, such people are deviants, and yet the ways in which LGBT identities have manifested historically are nothing if not creative, spontaneous, and fundamentally sound responses to the societies in which such people have found themselves.

Often enough, such organic developments—which are in reality living, breathing human beings, with needs, values, dignity, and rationality of their own—can’t be considered morally wrong. They have harmed no one else, apart from a bruised moral sensibility, which is no proper harm at all; and if they harm themselves, that’s only one part of the liberty that a free society should allow to anyone. 

Or take the poor of seventeenth-century Paris, who were for the first time confined en masse to workhouses: True, they didn’t conform to the workhouse wardens’ ideas of what normality should be, and for that reason they suffered against their wills. The wielders of knowledge/power understood them to have had a moral deficiency, but the true failure was a deficient social insight: There were plenty of reasons why so many people in seventeenth-century Paris should have been poor, and the reasons began (and nearly ended) with the rapacious, warlike, protectionist, favoritist, privilege-granting French state. And even allowing that state the right to exist, which I wouldn’t, why should the poor be confined? By whose scale of values does it benefit them? Certainly not their own, or they’d have reported to the workhouses voluntarily.

In this same context, Hayek’s search for the proper limits to reason may appear more cogent than ever:

The reason that confronts constructivist rationalism: isn’t it also reason? And if we must choose between reason and reason, that’s not to forsake reason at all. It’s still possible to choose the reason that accords with freedom, and that’s what Hayek proposes to do. If reason and capitalism are often cast as the enemies in Foucault, we should at least pause to note that these are usually state reason and state capitalism: They are, respectively, the “reason” that justifies mass confinement, and the “capitalism” that prefers the image of the orderly and minutely controlled workshop over profit itself. They are the instrumental rationalities, which treat others as mere means to an end, and against them, we must offer the reason that treats individuals as ends in themselves.

As I mentioned in my previous essay, it was often the case that the state-run workhouses of early modern Europe were unprofitable, a fact whose implications Foucault examines as to the moral significance of the workhouse, but not very effectively as to its economic logic: To his analysis we should add that market discipline was absent from the workhouses given their state subsidy. And their real aim wasn’t consumer satisfaction—which also could have disciplined the workhouses’ operators—but only the confinement and bodily control of the inmates for their purported moral betterment. Do note: The signal characteristic of a free market is that it doesn’t have any inmates. Whenever you start finding inmates, that’s not a free market anymore.

The Foucauldian knowledge-power that instituted the Great Confinement was ultimately a pretense of knowledge: the pretense of knowledge that said that such and such conduct on the part of the inmates was virtuous, and that it should therefore be undertaken in preference to any other. The Parisians who preferred not to toil uselessly in the workhouses, or even the small tradesmen who preferred to fail honestly in the market—these were in a sense animated by local knowledge, namely the immediate and phenomenological knowledge of their own preferences, which they pursued in opposition to knowledge-power until they day they were swallowed up by the system. Did they fail? Sure, but it wasn’t a moral failing. 

Yet the spontaneous orders of human action and the continuous efforts to regulate them through biopower are entangled. They only rarely appear in so stark a conflict. What’s more, they’re in dialectical tension. Each of them conditions but cannot completely determine the other. The processes of the catallaxy, including most importantly those things that emerge everywhere in human life, things like language, trade, law, friendships, and spontaneous human associations: these are the raw materials on which biopower operates, from which it extracts, and over which it seeks to exercise a fully controlling authority—one that’s forever outside the realm of possibility, as we’ve discussed above. Spontaneous orders commonly take the forms and occur in the contexts that biopower allows them, again and again pushing against the limits in which they’re contained.

Catallaxy’s aims, though, are only such as the participants dictate; markets don’t exist for any one reason, Hayek often reminds us; they exist to make many different reasons achievable. One might object here that even individuals’ aims are conditioned, and indeed they are; we’re nowhere completely free from outside influence. But there is a reflexive conditioning process at work; while the ideas that present themselves to us spontaneously have a history, or an archaeology as Foucault would insist, they also have a set of future prospects that are not fully within the controlling purview of their genealogy. The knowledge that power requires is perfect in theory but flawed in practice, and the individual may still make creative use of the flaws.

Biopower conditions—but does not and cannot wholly determine—the private phenomenological judgments about which experiences I would prefer to have, and the priorities that I give to them. In turn, my acting on those judgments and priorities conditions—but does not and cannot wholly determine—the field of human endeavor called the market, with its stocks and flows of resources, on which the state and the subordinate institutions of biopower can seek to operate. 

It should be emphasized that these are conflicting processes. They aren’t people or groups of people. They aren’t the emblems of any social class. Catallaxy and biopower are strategies and nothing more. Theorists from Karl Marx to Franz Oppenheimer to (improbably enough) Mitt Romney have sometimes declared the existence of a kind of class conflict that seems a lot like what I’m describing here, but that similarity should be rejected. Turning a conflict between two processes into a conflict of one class with another puts a fable where a set of careful and individual moral choices ought to go. 

Individuals can—but shouldn’t—add to the strength of biopower through their own choices, perhaps seemingly innocuous choices in their language, comportment, epistemological commitments, or even their senses of humor. Biopower draws strength from these: Are you making a joke about gays sexualizing children? Or about how silly it is to call someone by their preferred pronouns? And do the people around you just need to lighten up already? (Would you make a joke about Jews eating babies? Is that something we’ll need to lighten up about too?) Jokes spread knowledge/power, and they’re only funny when you personally don’t need to worry about the consequences. And when, tacitly, you’re claiming that nobody you ever care about does either. You’re drawing the lines that others can fill in with systems of control.

Individuals After All

I write of the individual—with some irony, to be sure. Foucault often shows the individual robbed of agency, made docile or punished to the point of insensibility, and it’s for this reason, I think, that classical liberals have alway kept him at arms’ length. But we ought not to imagine that he cheers for this state of affairs. He just describes what’s so obviously and so often true that it should command the attention of anyone, regardless of their view of the nature of mankind. In the United States today, some two million people are incarcerated. Their meals, exercise, sleep, speech, reading, work, sanitation, and recreation are all minutely overseen by others, and most people accept that it’s to teach them how to live rightly on the outside. Whenever they disobey, they suffer. Quite often too, they suffer for no rational reason at all. 

It’s tempting but wrong to take the jailer’s view of this situation—the prisoner, says the jailer, is only being taught responsibility; prisoners need to learn that we all must bear the consequences for our actions before we’re ready for any sort of Hayekian freedom. The prison is the school for the world, you see.

When understood rightly, however, the jailer’s teaching method makes the strongest possible contrast to Hayek’s theory of responsibility as expressed in chapter five of The Constitution of Liberty. Though the jailer purports to reform the criminal, we know from both Foucault’s theories and from the horrific realities of recidivism that prison does not, in fact, reform. Prison makes a mockery of individual responsibility, and in its place, it substitutes the instrumental rationality of those whose incentives are to perpetuate power. For responsibility to count in the Hayekian sense, it must be freely and individually undertaken, encompassing projects only of the individual’s own conception, and never those imposed on him from the outside. The two aren’t the same, and the one can’t be a proper school for the other.

We confront a war of two quite disparate strategies for the management of an individual life, the shared word “responsibility” notwithstanding. In one, it’s a question of the individual’s responsibility for fulfilling only the plans set out by someone else; it’s not a school of self-government, but a school of other-government, that is, a school of tyranny. Foucault was right to emphasize that the end product of the prison was a docile subject—not a free one. The true antonym of the docile subject is not the raving madman or the hardened criminal, but the individual possessed of a higher reason than that which would pacify him.

Suppose now that we understand ourselves to be partisans in this struggle. It’s not a struggle conducted by means of rationality over the external phenomena of the world. It’s a struggle over the meaning of rationality itself. How do we fight, when rationality may be ours, but when rationality is also arrayed against us, and when the instrumental use of human beings can and does render them sufficiently docile that tyranny can flourish?

The answer is to consider which conditions conduce to the types of rationality that in turn conduce to freedom. We won’t be fighting precisely for freedom, but for the conditions that make freedom possible and meaningful; if we win, the rest will take care of itself. If we lose, we may never even notice, and we might even tell ourselves that we’re happy, and free. The conflict isn’t irrational; it’s meta-rational, and it concerns, and perhaps entails, a counter-bio-power that sets up the conditions for things much greater than itself. 

Foucault emphasized that madness and reason were constituted by one another; madness was recognized when reason of a certain type confronted it, and therapists sought to defeat madness with reasoned therapies—including but not limited to talk therapies—that would reestablish reason with the tools of reason itself. But we should look askance at this whole process, because we already know that there’s such a thing as the pretense of knowledge, and we know that the madman may not be so mad after all. It’s often the case that an action only appears to be madness because such an appearance—wielded as a weapon of knowledge/power—serves to make the individual into the subject of treatment, confined, measured, and unfree. To charge that another is mad in a sense denies the possibility that he might hold a local knowledge, one inaccessible to the dominant regime. But perhaps he holds such knowledge after all: The madman—or the entrepreneur—denies conventional wisdom on the basis of a knowledge accessible only to him. 

To be sure, that claim seems to do some unjustified lumping: does the man who invents a new industrial process really deserve to be lumped in with the man who believes he’s Christ reborn? Not necessarily—but maybe. There are plenty of mad scientists out there, and yet some of them will one day be vindicated. There are also plenty of people with highly eccentric religious ideas out there who yet comport themselves in socially acceptable ways, and who thus escape the very Foucauldian fate of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. Can’t we make it easier on both, at least a little? If we don’t always know how to draw the lines, between good science and bad, between good religion and madness, maybe we could back off a bit.

Accounting for either of these potentially disruptive processes is hard, though: Where do our ideas come from, anyway? Socrates resorted to metaphysics, saying a daimon, or a spirit, gave him all that set him so far apart from other Athenians. We don’t have that kind of excuse these days. Local knowledge nonetheless leads to lots of mad-looking people, especially when viewed through the lens of power. Maybe they aren’t mad, though. Maybe they’re just pursuing private projects of which outsiders know little enough that they appear mad. Foucault may have resisted normativity in favor of a relentlessly amoral description of such people and their tormentors. Hayek, though, might say to set them free.

But Why Though?

I don’t have many illusions. It might seem that way, but I don’t. I’m not about to set the world on fire with this stuff. I’m one of probably a small handful of people who have appreciatively read more than one book by both these authors, and among those, probably most aren’t going to care for a mashup. In some ways this essay is strictly about my own mental good order. Thinking is more disciplined when it’s done in writing, and the most flattering criticism I could imagine is that someone will say that Foucault and Hayek have been puppets for me. I haven’t properly written about either of them, but only about my own ideas. That might be flattering to hear, but I hope I haven’t done it. 

So here’s a better reason. I think we take too much as given in political theory: Foucault goes on the left. Hayek goes on the right. As such, they’ve got nothing constructive to say to each other. But why should we think that way? Ideological categories politicize political theory, and that’s exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. Isn’t the point of the whole discipline to find a place to stand, however briefly, outside politics? When a thinker becomes a totem, their ideas may last longer, but that’s because they’re frozen. Hayek is the guy Margaret Thatcher pounded the table with, and that’s pretty much all you need to know. Foucault was that egghead French weirdo who died of AIDS. If you see their face, you know what they’re about. What I think I’m suggesting here—and it’s not limited to Hayek and Foucault—is that we could be doing a lot more than we are. There are other combinations to be had, other ways of sorting and articulating. Let’s do more of those and less pounding on the table.

Note

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