Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom
By (author) Thomas L. Dumm Amherst College, author o
Publication date:
09 April 2002Length of book:
200 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
231x159mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780742521384
What is freedom? In this study, Thomas Dumm challenges the conventions that have governed discussions and debates concerning modern freedom by bringing the work of Michel Foucault into dialogue with contemporary liberal thought. While Foucault has been widely understood to have characterized the modern era as being opposed to the realization of freedom, Dumm shows how this characterization conflates Foucault’s genealogy of discipline with his overall view of the practices of being free. Dumm demonstrates how Foucault’s critical genealogy does not shrink from understanding the ways in which modern subjects are constrained and shaped by forces greater than themselves, but how it instead works through these constraints to provide, not simply a vision of liberation, but a joyous wisdom concerned with showing us, in his words, that we “are much freer than we feel.” Both as an introduction to Foucault and as an intervention in liberal theory, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom is bound to change how we think about the limits and possibilities of freedom in late modernity.
Among the hundreds of books and articles on Foucault, only a handful make for genuinely rewarding reading. Thomas L. Dumm's Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom is a welcome addition to that handful, for it treats Foucault with the subtlety his thought deserves and demands, but almost never receives. As Dumm shows, appreciating Foucault's accomplishments as a political theorist requires sustained attention to the difficult balancing act to which he devoted himself: on the one hand, Foucault's analyses, cool and impassioned at once, of the macabre inventiveness of power in our era; on the other, his likewise passionate and realistic imagination and appraisal of the resources our era offers for freedom, emancipation, liberation. Most interpretations of Foucault suffer from emphasizing one of these twinned concerns at the expense of the other; Dumm, by masterfully giving each its due, takes the measure of Foucault's original, provocative, unforgettable understanding of power and freedom. . . . This is a book that will enlighten those coming to Foucault for the first time, and provoke many who think they know his work well to read it again.