Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons Elaborating Foucault’s Pragmatism (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy)

This book argues that the received view of the distinction between freedom and power must be rejected because it rests on an untenable account of the discursive cognition that endows individuals with the capacity for autonomy and self-governed rationality. In liberal and Kantian approaches alike, the autonomous subject is a self-standing starting point whose freedom is constrained by relations of power only contingently because they are external to the subject's constitution. Thus, the received view defines the distinction between freedom and power as a dichotomy. Michel Foucault is arguably the most important critic of that dichotomy. However, it is widely agreed that Foucault falls short of justifying the alternative view he develops, where power and freedom are essentially entangled instead. The book fills out the gap by investigating the social preconditions of discursive cognition. Drawing on pragmatist-inferentialist resources from the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), it presents a new interpretation of Foucault's philosophy that is unified by his overlooked idea of "the archaeology of knowledge." As a result, the book not only explains why and how power and freedom must be entangled but also what it means ethically to pursue and gain autonomy with respect to one's own understanding. Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, critical theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and the history of 20th-century philosophy. Cover Endorsements Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction 1. Structural heteronomy 1.1. Autonomy as the ethical ideal 1.2. The regress of rules: From representational to dispositional understanding 1.3. I-thou, I-we, you-we sociality 1.4. From training to pattern-governed behavior 1.5. Semantic self-consciousness 1.6. Structural heteronomy 2. Replacing the Sovereign Subject with savoir 2.1. Foucault’s rejection of the Sovereign Subject 2.2. Foucault’s inferentialism 2.3. An external history of truth 2.4. Archaeology and genealogy of savoir 2.5. The charge of lost autonomy 3. Keeping it implicit: A defense of the archaeology of knowledge 3.1. The charge of “regularities which regulate themselves” 3.2. Foucault’s pragmatist turn 3.3. The charge of “a structuralist move” 3.4. Foucault’s Kantian pragmatism 3.5. Archaeology as a diagnosis of the present 4. Against power? 4.1. The analytic of power against power 4.2. Who’s afraid of the habitual? 4.3. Systems of thought: The scope of savoir 4.4. Implicitness of great anonymous strategies 4.5. Two paths for critique in the context of “politics of truth” 5. Overcoming the present limits of the necessary 5.1. Obviousness 5.2. Present limits of the necessary 5.3. Foucault’s commitment to the ideal of autonomy 5.4. The critical attitude as virtue 5.5. Critique of concepts: Constitution and ideology Epilogue Acknowledgments References Index