Michel Foucault: A "Young Conservative"?

In a recent (1981) discussion of postmodernism, Jurgen Habermas referred to Michel Foucault as a "Young Conservative." This epithet was an allusion to the "conservative revolutionaries" of interwar Weimar Germany, a group of radical, antimodernist intellectuals whose numbers included Martin Heidegger, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, and Hans Freyer. To call Foucault a "Young Conservative," then, was to accuse him of elaborating what Habermas calls a "total critique of modernity." Such a critique, according to Habermas, is both theoretically paradoxical and politically suspect. It is theoretically paradoxical because it cannot help but presuppose surreptitiously some of the very modern categories and attitudes it claims to have surpassed. And it is politically suspect because it aims less at a dialectical resolution of the problems of modern societies than at a radical rejection of modernity as such. In sum, it is Habermas's (1981, 1982) contention that, although Foucault's critique of contemporary culture and society purports to be postmodern, it is at best modern and at worst antimodern. As Habermas sees it, then, the issue between him and Foucault concerns their respective stances vis-a'-vis modernity. Habermas locates his own stance in the tradition of dialectical social criticism that runs from Marx to the Frankfurt School. This tradition analyzes modernization as a two-sided historical process and insists that, while dissolving premodern forms of domination and unfreedom, Enlightenment rationality gave rise to new and insidious forms of its own. The important thing about this tradition, from Habermas's point of view, and the thing that sets it apart from the rival tradition in which he locates Foucault, is that it does not reject in toto the modern ideals and aspirations whose two-sided actualization it criticizes. Instead it seeks to preserve and extend both the "emancipatory impulse" behind the Enlightenment and the latter's real success in overcoming premodern domination, even while criticizing the bad features of modern societies. This, however, claims Habermas, is not the stance of Foucault. Foucault belongs rather to a tradition of rejectionist criticism of modernity, one which includes Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the French poststructuralists.