Experts have taken over our lives. They rule us not so much through law as through constant, pervasive coercion, exercised through institutions outside the state. Setting themselves up as secular priests, they claim to possess both objective truth and moral authority. Taken in by their ruse, we grant these experts the power to tell us who we are and what we should do with our lives. They, in turn, attempt to soothe our anxieties with “scientific” answers to our problems.
These are the complaints of a growing number of American conservatives, who are adding to their long-held distrust of the state a new suspicion about the power of managerial and therapeutic experts over everyday life. They are also the concerns that animate the work of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who remains a reviled figure for many on the Right.
The recent publication Confessions of the Flesh, the English translation of a previously unavailable volume of Foucault’s four-part History of Sexuality, offers an opportunity to see his ideas afresh. From the vantage of this new book, Foucault’s work appears to offer not only theoretical support to conservative critiques of the “new class” of experts but also a sobering warning that the roots of expert power lie deep in Western culture. Our liberation depends not so much on eliminating expertise as on developing a new sort of relationship to it, one that might take inspiration from the history of Christianity.
From the beginning of his career in the 1950s until his death in 1984, Foucault sought to reveal the sources of our submission to experts and to recover alternative politics and practices by which people might regain power over their own lives. His studies of the history of insanity, prisons, and sexuality were attempts to understand, and resist, a kind of authority he believed was ubiquitous in the modern West. This form of domination, which Foucault came to call “governmentality,” is rooted in the idea that people can and should come to know themselves by revealing the most intimate parts of their lives to experts, thereby making themselves visible and manipulable.
Writing at a time when Freudian and Lacanian ideas were still dominant forces in French intellectual life, Foucault saw psychoanalysis as one of the most important and pernicious institutions that elicited such “confessions.” In the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1976), he attacked psychoanalytic theories that saw sexuality as something “repressed” by social norms and that advised patients to speak about their sexuality in order to experience relief. He questioned the notion that there was any such thing as a coherent “sexuality” to be revealed in therapy. Indeed, Foucault warned about the perils of “sexual liberation.” By encouraging people to “confess” their sexual “secrets,” he argued, the therapeutic vision of liberation made sexuality into an instrument by which elites could classify, track, and dominate ordinary people.
Over the next eight years, Foucault extended his research further back in Western history, tracing the antecedents of psychoanalysis, from Catholic practices of confession to the attempts of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers to “know themselves” through dialogue and introspection. As he traced confession back to older forms of religion and philosophy, however, Foucault came to see it as a more complex and ambivalent phenomenon — one that could lead to not only submission but emancipation.
Although Confessions of the Flesh is marketed as the fourth and last volume of the History of Sexuality series, it is actually the second book, written from 1981 to 1982, as Foucault was studying the techniques of self-knowledge and moral-therapeutic expertise used in the first centuries of the Catholic Church. As Foucault saw it, the fathers of the early church had borrowed a range of practices and ideals from the Stoic philosophers, encouraging believers to explore their innermost thoughts and desires in order to gain control of them — and to confess these secrets to religious experts tasked with the management of souls. Self-analysis and confession, which eventually became obligatory for Catholics, struck Foucault as both origin points for the coercive practices of psychoanalysis and also, potentially, as resources with which people might resist coercion.
Beginning in the late 1970s, in a turn to what he called “spirituality” that prefigured a similar shift in the thought of Christopher Lasch, one of Foucault’s greatest American admirers, Foucault began to consider that people can only exercise meaningful freedom to the extent that they have access to cultural resources that help them shape their characters and lives. Such practices of “discipline,” “ethics,” and “care of the self” are the subjects of his final writings, in which he tried to find methods for people not only to break free from the insidious pseudo-liberation offered by elites but also to commit themselves to projects of self-creation, which, he came to appreciate, are not possible without some degree of constraint.
Although often misunderstood as a thinker who cynically or despairingly saw power lurking everywhere, Foucault saw power as the vital energy of social relations, including one’s own relationship with oneself. It is futile, he believed, to hope to be free from power — to be free, that is, from being subject to some sort of external will. The best one can hope for is to use power constructively, to wield it over one’s own identity, pleasures, and activities in order to become the person one wants to be, in the process drawing on the help of teachers, priests, and other authority figures without becoming dependent on them.
People are increasingly subject to a variety of secular priests, from human resource managers to university administrators. The “flesh” that they are asked to “confess” is no longer a set of physical and psychological desires centered on sexuality, but blameworthy thoughts, feelings, and habits centered on race, or rather on “whiteness,” our contemporary substitute for medieval demonology. Those on the Right, and, indeed, in the center and on the Left, who are disturbed by this modern variant on the demand for confession might productively turn to Foucault’s critical history of Christianity, asking with him how we can reactivate elements of our “spiritual” tradition, not merely to denounce woke-ism as a degenerate religion, but to imagine new ways in which we can reclaim power over our lives.
Blake Smith, a Harper-Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago, is a historian of modern France and a literary translator.
