The following papers represent a selection of academic articles that I have published over the last 25 years. The themes I have chosen to guide my selection include Michel Foucault, Marxism, neoliberalism, complexity theory, social democracy, and political theory. All of these themes are related and indeed are highly interconnected in my own mind to the intellectual project I embarked upon and which I improvised and altered over the course of my academic career. Essentially, I have followed Michel Foucault in his opposition to Marxism and Hegelianism, in his pluralistic endorsement of democracy and freedom, and in the need to rethink much of the project of Western liberalism in relation to its views on philosophy, science, reason, history, the subject, and democracy.
Foucault’s work has guided my thinking specifically in relation to all of these themes. When I was in my first academic position, at Otago University in New Zealand, I initially started lecturing on what was termed by my department, the “social foundations of education”. I lectured on Plato, John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michael Foucault. I also taught a course in the sociology of education, where I dealt with what in those times were called “the new sociology of education”, which included debates over the nature of knowledge and what counts as knowledge by academics such as Michael Young, Basil Bernstein, Michael Apple, Stephen Ball, Henry Giroux, and many others. The discovery of Foucault came as a bombshell in the sense that here was a thinker intent on sidestepping the traditional problematic of Marxism, concerned as it was with the perennial issue of base and superstructure and the interminable difficulty of how to present a model of the social structure which explained how all the elements of the superstructure—cultural, political, ideological, scientific—could both reflect and yet maintain independence from the central role of the economic base. Foucault was interesting in that he retained a view of historical materialism as a broad theory of change which stressed the integral role of both history and social construction, while not becoming encumbered with the problems of economic determinism, of a closed totality, or of the inevitability of historical progress towards a communist utopia.
Since those early days of my first academic appointment my academic programme has continued to be influenced by Foucault in important respects. With Foucault I found a liberation from the prison house of received opinions and conventional social science verities. Foucault managed to look back at history and ask whether it was necessary that our received understandings and institutions were in fact strictly necessary or whether they could have been different if certain events in history had only occurred in a different way. While in
That such a relativity creates problems for truth and morality can be acknowledged as the hard issues, and I quickly recognized, as did Foucault, that there is little prospect of confronting and solving the issues head-on, in any simplistic manner. Yet, in my books, as well as my articles, I express concern and awareness of these issues, and indeed, the inclusion of articles within this volume can be seen to contain insights as to how best these issues can be tackled. While truth and ethics must be seen to operate as necessary codes in terms of such a historical materialism, what is important to understand is how what is necessary and what is relative mutually coexist and implicate each other, without cancelling each other out, and without turning into incoherence. It is how truth and ethics manifest themselves and are justified, or warranted, within a contingently assembled social order that generates the most interesting and most difficult issues to understand.
Relativity also applies to knowledge and the disciplines themselves irrespective of any verities revealed. The emergence of the disciplines of science themselves reflected the imperatives of particular social structures and particular historical changes. Facts were incomplete, partial, mixed with other values and perspectives, represented from a particular point of view. It is no accident that psychology emerged with the Enlightenment and reflected the new-found position of man at the center of the universe, even of the cosmos. In this sense, psychology could be represented as an apparatus (dispositif) of power itself constructed as a means of disciplining and positioning individuals within a new hierarchy of life. Although several articles on educational psychology are not reproduced within this volume of papers (see Olssen, 1991, 1993), the Kantian emphasis upon autonomy is referred to in Chapter 1. In this article, Kant’s emphasis on autonomy is briefly subjected to a Foucauldian critique. Foucault is useful for questioning normative axes and beliefs that have
Foucault was also influential in terms of my understanding of the political. Firstly, his conception of critique was important. If Descartes’s axiom that reason can be separated from superstition is false, that the Evil Genius of the First
Foucault was also important in terms of his opposition to Hegel and Marx, or perhaps, to express the point better, in terms of the particular way in which he opposes Hegel and Marx. I have included three chapters on my writings or reflections on Marx and/or Hegel. These express how I have read Foucault, and what for me Foucault articulates. All of these express different aspects of Foucault’s relation to Marxism, and serve to highlight, or illustrate, the senses in which Foucault draws on Marx and Hegel, and the senses in which he stands opposed to Marx and Hegel. “Foucault and Marxism: Rewriting the Theory of Historical Materialism”, published in Policy Futures in Education, serves to suggest the particular nature of Foucault’s own form of historical materialism in contrast to Marx’s historical materialism. The article with my New Zealand compatriot, Michael A. Peters, “Marx, Education and the Possibilities of a Fairer World: Reviving Radical Political Economy through Foucault”, was initially published in a book edited by Anthony Green, Glenn Rikowski and Helen Raduntz, Renewing Dialogues in Marxism and Education (Olssen & Peters, 2007), and subsequently revised and republished in the journal Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations (Olssen & Peters, 2015), and it is this later version that appears here. The interview with Rille Raaper sets out clearly the senses in which Foucault stands opposed to Marx and Hegel, as well as his incorporation of Nietzsche as a means of displacing Hegel, in addition to addressing many related issues in poststructuralist thought, including the issue of relativism. What emerges overall is that to the extent that Foucault is a historical materialist, his is a profoundly non-Marxist version of that doctrine. In essence, his version is simply a theory of change which characterizes how changes in one part of the
Finally, I have maintained an interest throughout my work on Foucault on normative political theory, especially in relation to ethics and education. While in the early and middle period of his writing, Foucault took a view of the subject as constructed and shaped by power, in his later writings, from 1978, after the publication of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, he sought to develop a more ethical sense of the subject. Although, as is well known, Foucault eschewed advice-giving and shied away from facing the conundrums associated with normative justification. To my mind this avoidance, together with the perceived absence of ethical foundations within his work, constitute limitations to what is in all other respects a powerful correction to the lacunae and omissions of the Western intellectual tradition, from Plato to Kant, and from Kant to Nietzsche. How could his work inspire an ethics and an education if it was solely concerned with genealogy? The insight that power is ubiquitous and constitutes both a limitation and enabling condition of action and thought is just one insight which until the 20th century only thinkers like Nietzsche and Marx took seriously. The insight that it is people who make history but under conditions given and transmitted from the past is another. While neither of these insights are, in themselves, therefore novel, with Foucault they are assembled in relation to a new theory, one which manages to avoid the determinism of Hegel and Marx, and which permits the incorporation of conceptions of liberty, pluralism, and power, compatible with liberalism itself.
I have sought to develop a normative conception for Foucault from within the body of Foucault’s later work, a conception which is set out more fully in another book, Constructing Foucault’s Ethics: A Poststructuralist Moral Theory for the 21st Century, published in June 2021 by Manchester University Press. Hopefully this book will dispel the view that Foucault’s system necessarily constitutes a quagmire of ethical and moral relativism. Here, in this collection, however, the attentive reader will be able to discern the early echoes of my interest in the issue of normativity within Foucault, especially in the articles such as, “Foucault and the Imperatives of Education: Critique and Self-creation in a Non-foundational World” (Chapter 1), “Totalitarianism and the ‘Repressed’ Utopia of the Present: Moving beyond Hayek and Popper with
Taken as a whole, these essays represent a selection of my published work between 1995 and 2020. Although minor edits have been performed in several chapters, these have only been undertaken for the purposes of resolving ambiguities, correcting errors in the original, or clarifying textual comprehension. In addition to these minor edits, some textual repetition occurs across the different chapters. This applies to repetition in quotes, sentences, paragraphs, or to longer sections, which while occurring only in a few instances, have been retained in this volume in the interests of accuracy and completeness so that the integrity of each original published work is preserved. The original publishers are acknowledged as each chapter merely reproduces the initial article, and the title and co-authors are retained in the order as originally published. Here I would like to thank the co-authors and publishers of the originals for the reproduction in this context. I hope that this book makes their work as well as mine more accessible to a wider public. I would like to thank Michael Jones for assistance with bibliographical querries. I would also like to thank Jolanda Karada, Henriët Graafland, and John Bennett for steering this project so efficiently to its conclusion. I would also like to thank Michael Peters for inviting me to compile this volume, and to him and Stephen J. Ball for the respective forewords that they have so kindly written for it.
Notes
See especially the April 4th Lecture where Adam Ferguson’s model of civil society is discussed, a model which revolves around both the economic and governmental as linked.
Poincaré was important for the topographical conception of the social and physical realms, a mathematical formulation which echoes in important ways Spinoza’s field metaphysic, as well as his resolution to the “three body problem” as always defying determinism. Importantly, this makes Poincaré the father of chaos theory.
Prigogine is important in his contributions to chaos theory and for his formulations relating to chance, that is, to constraint and necessity, in scientific terms.
See note 1.
My most significant journal article on neoliberalism, co-authored with Michael Peters, published in the Journal of Education Policy in 2005, is not included in this volume (Olssen & Peters, 2005). Not only is this a very long article, comprising almost 20,000 words, but it has already been republished numerous times. This article, titled “Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism”, was also constructed in an unusual way, where I constructed it by simply adding my article first, followed by Michael’s article following on. The entire first part, up until the subheading “Knowledge as the new form of capital under neoliberalism”, was written by me, Mark Olssen, and Michael Peters wrote the latter part from and including that subheading. That this article was actually constructed in a highly unusual fashion can be accepted, and it is partly for this reason, together with the fact that it is easily available that I have decided not to reproduce it again in this volume.