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I didn't mean that The Foucault Effect said much in particular about Mises or Hayek -- that's supposed to be in the unpublished stuff -- but only that one can get some idea from The Foucault Effect of what Foucault's approach to them is. (See the references to Adam Smith also.)
Yes, please!
Or perhaps the proper bloggy/narcisstic thing to do is link to it! Yes, I'm sure that must be it.
Jason-
I wrote something on this theme back in the late 80s, and I'd be happy to send it to you FWIW. I'll be in the office again Thursday.
I just checked out and reread some of The Foucault Effect. Colin Gordon's introductory essay mentions Hayek only briefly, suggesting that Foucault did not find him convincing. So far as I can tell, it is the only mention of Hayek in the book; Mises does not appear.
It seems puzzling now, because Foucault's treatment of knowledge/power as relates to the state really did constitute a strong critique of socialism--and of government itself, not just economically, but culturally as well. Among historians, classical Marxists were among the first to point this out, and Foucault encountered strong opposition from them when he first started making the rounds in the academy. Linking him with the Austrians myself would be too much of a leap--but if Foucault himself made that jump, I would be very interested to see where he went with it.
Gordon's essay also mentions Robert Nozick, writing that "Foucault does seem to have been (at least) intrigued by the propoerties of liberalism as a form of knowledge calculated to limit power by persuading government of its own incapacity; by the notion of the rule of law as the architecture of a pluralist social space; and by the German neo-liberals' way of conceiving the social market as a game of freedom sustained by governmental artifice and invention." Broadly speaking, though, this is very close to Nozick's argument in Anarchy, State and Utopia.
In any event, I look forward to whatever unpublished material is out there.
Not necessarily. Some concepts are all-pervasive (e.g., "means and ends" for Austrians, "entity" for Randians, "energy" for physicistss) because they identify some very fundamental principle. Foucault doesn't just stop with "power"; he tries to identify the different kinds of power relations, the different ways they operate, their different effects, etc.
Okay, one more thing on Foucault. A libertarian may be inclined to ask "Does Foucault's distinction between mere power (OK) and domination (not OK) line up with the libertarian distinction between economic power (OK) and political power (not OK)?" And when told that the answer is no, the libertarian may be inclined to dismiss Foucault.
But the fact that Foucault's distinction doesn't line up with the libertarian one doesn't mean both distinctions can't be interesting and important. A good illusration of this is Rand's novel The Fountainhead. In that novel heroic architects like Henry Cameron and Howard Roark find their ability to pursue their chosen careers drastically constrained by malign social forces that are largely non-governmental -- the power of the press, big business, intellectuals, etc. (Roark eventually manages to overcome this pressure, but only by superhuman effort.) This power is not political in the usual libertarian sense, it's not rights-violating and so (Rand would say) should not be fought by violence, but it's the sort of domination that Foucault is complaining about. So both distinctions can be useful to social theorists.
As for Walzer's charge, although it's a great line I think it's rather unfair. First, Foucault is not really an ultra-pessimist. Although he sees power relations as all-pervading, he doesn't think all power relations are bad...I understand that Walzer's critique misses the mark. But the defense you rightly offer, and that Foucault himself clearly preferred, opens Foucault's thought to still another critique: What exactly does one gain by claiming that all relations are saturated in some sense by power? If "power" is everywhere, what intellectual work can it do for us? Doesn't it become something of a truism?
As for Walzer's charge, although it's a great line I think it's rather unfair. First, Foucault is not really an ultra-pessimist. Although he sees power relations as all-pervading, he doesn't think all power relations are bad; he draws a distinction between mere "power" and "domination"; the latter differs from other kinds of power by drastically narrowing the range of options of the dominated. That kind of power is bad, but power per se isn't necessarily so, though power always has the potential to develop into domination and that tendency has to be constantly guarded against. As he put it in an interview, his view is "not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous" -- hence the need for eternal vigilance.
As for offering no suggestions for how to live a good life within existing power relations, Walzer seems to have missed Foucault's books _The Uses of Pleasure_ and _Care of the Self_, which address precisely that question.
Foucault's discussion of Mises and Hayek hasn't been published yet -- I believe it's in one of the College de France series of courses that are slowly being published volume by volume -- but one can get some idea of what he said by looking at Peter Miller's anthology _The Foucault Effect_. Apparently he was impressed by the idea of an epistemological critique of state power. His analysis of "political reason" also bears comparison with Hayek's critique of constructivist rationalism.
I remember reading some interview with Foucault where he talks about Mises and Hayek, and the clueless editor added a footnote identifying Mises as Richard von Mises.
In another interview toward the end of his life Foucault said that France's social welfare programs were unsustainable. In still another interview he said he was "preparing a book against the socialists." Hopefully whatever material he'd written for the latter will be released among the various posthumous publications. (For a while his estate was interpreting a throwaway line in one of his letters as a directive not to issue ANY posthumous publications, but since the College de France series keeps coming out I assume they haven't stuck to that.)
Steven--
Thanks a lot for the pointer; I had no idea about Foucault's connections with the Austrians. My own education in Foucault came mostly from new-left intellectuals, who would understandably play down this sort of thing. They emphasized instead Foucault's break with classical Marxism, which clearly seemed the most important part of his thought to them.
Very nice piece Jason. It's a good one to send to Foucauldians who aren't classical liberals. One point to consider is that toward the end of his life, MF was recommending Mises and Hayek to his students. This is supposedly reported in Miller's (I think...) bio of Foucault and has been noted by a variety of libertarians interested in post-modernism. My guess, and it may be in Miller, is that the recommendation coincided with just the aspects of Foucault you have emphasized, namely the evolution of the state and the state's role in making those "iron bars."