All you need to know for the final exam of political philosophy for organization studies!!

Final exam – Political Philosophy
Power & Organization

Lecture 7 – Michel Foucault on Power
Preview
- ‘’’Power’’
- Power relations, crucial in our reality
- Imbalances of power relations
- Navigating relations of power between people
- Next lectures all about navigating power relations…
Critical Theory
- From normative theory to critical theory
- A recap:
o Normative theory: 2-step procedure
 First legislate set of moral standards
 Then apply them to reality (judge)
 Set of moral standards  reality
 Political philosophy as a branch of moral theory;
philosopher as legislator and judge; John Rawls
o Critical theory:
 Describe social reality as we encounter/observe it
 Social realities come with conflict: people disagree with each
other all the time -> offering opportunities for change
 Reality  conflict (reality)  opportunities for change
 Political philosophy as a branch of social philosophy;
philosopher as cartographer; Michel Foucault
o Marx doesn’t follow the scheme of normative theory: he describes
at length how capitalism functions / description of capitalism ->
then he discovers that in the development of capitalism he
encounters conflict, conflict of interests between classes ->
capitalists want to extract as much resources as cheaply as possible
-> the richer the rich class, the poorer the working class -> the
harder the contradictions become: it will burst, workers will start a
revolution -> opportunities for change
- Split in the tradition of political philosophy
o Anglo-Saxon (English) normative theory versus continental critical
theory
 Normative approach is more in USA Anglo-Saxon
 In Europe more critical theory
- Start from non-ideal circumstances
o Presence of conflict: ‘politics is war through other means’ (Foucault)
 War is all about conflict; difference in war is you use physical
violence, in politics we use other means, battling opposing
views; conflict




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,  Multiple types of conflict in reality: gender, ideologies, work
places, prisons, etc. -> they all mix and intersect with each
other


o Political philosopher as cartographer of the present
 Cartographer = map out reality by describing all the
opportunities and tendencies towards change
o Foucault: Philosophy as a ‘critique’
 Summarizes it as philosophy as critique -> that’s why it’s
called critical theory
 Kant: how is modern society possible? How can Newton
formulate natural laws that actually work, like gravity?
Others: ‘’God created it’’, but Kant says ‘’we did it, our minds
possessed certain structures through which we filter the
information we get from reality, we use this structure to come
up with laws’’ -> Foucault: ‘’I have noted that scientists
actually do disagree on the structure in reality, the structures
in our head aren’t universal, they change across time, so
mental structures should be seen as historical’’ -> critique of
scientific reasoning like Kant, but a historical critique,
Foucault wonders how knowledge came about
Michel Foucault
- Who is Michel Foucault (1926-1984)?
o French political philosopher
o The interweaving of knowledge and power
 1) Traditional view
 Knowledge and power are opposed (=conflicting)
o Relation between power and knowledge? People
on the street would see it as a contradiction:
‘’power corrupts, it makes something bad’’
 Conflicts of interest
o Abusive power of authority of teacher on
student, student wants to create knowledge, but
teacher obeys student to do other things he
wants; conflict between knowledge and power
 Example: tobacco industry and cancer research
o Through financial power of the tobacco industry
they were able to undermine scientists’
projects/piece of knowledge -> power is the
interrupting factor
o Research: > where does the increase in cancer
come from? ''Because people smoke cigarettes'',
''Tobacco is causing the cancer'' -> has been
confirmed by scientists, however the tobacco
industry was unhappy with these results (not
good for business) -> they started funding
counter-research: buy up scientists to gain
different results in order to create confusion;

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, creating multiple reasons which could cause
cancer
 2) Foucault’s view -> ‘’Contradiction is only part of the bigger
picture’’
 Knowledge and power presuppose each other
o Even where things go well, someone still has
power, this doesn’t always have to be bad. For
example, the teacher could also give the student
advice and help them out; power is also
productive and legitimate
 Knowledge informs the exercise of power + power
facilitates the acquisition of knowledge
o Knowledge and power are actually mixed with
each other -> ‘’knowledge power’’ is often used
as one word
o Knowledge creation requires something like a
university where power is present: we listen, the
professor talks, we make an exam, the professor
can say whether we passed the course or not
o Hopefully all power relations are productive and
help to shape you as an individual
o Power facilitates acquisition of knowledge & the
other way around: use knowledge to advice on
power relations
o ‘’’knowledge informs power and power informs
knowledge’’
- ‘Knowledge-power’
 Power relations facilitate
knowledge production
 Knowledge production informs
power relations
o Examples:
 Psychiatry (Foucault’s PhD project): studied all the archives of
psychiatry in wars, findings -> governments would have
institutions for the ‘unreasonable’, ‘’the irrational
populations’’, but these people weren’t insane -> this
included everyone who didn’t have a job, they had to go to
these institutions. Different kind of groups were hard to
handle, for example groups who didn’t obey since they didn’t
understand the orders, group that stood out: ‘’the insane’’,
these turned out to be mental health patients. Power created
knowledge, the insane was invented due to the power of
putting people in the psychiatric institutions
 Criminology: knowledge about criminal behavior, why do
certain people commit certain crimes?; it’s helpful when you
have a prison system where prisoners are kept for a long time
(power), then you can do longitudinal studies to find out the
answer(s). Knowledge can help perfect the prison system
Foucault’s typology of power


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, - Wrong assumptions you might have about power…
o 1) Power is bad
 No, power is productive and can be legitimate
 There is no ‘’power-free’’ society -> any human relation
involves power one way or another, ‘’power-free’’ is a myth
o 2) Power is a resource (possessive theory of power)
 No, power is a relation in which the balances of power
continually shift
 There is no stable ‘possession’ of power -> you can’t own it
o 3) Power prohibits (prohibitive theory of power) -> ‘’telling people
what not to do’’
 No, power is also productive (‘’empowerment’’) -> it can
enable you to do certain things/ increase your options
 Contra psychology and sexual liberation movement ->
distinctions between sexual behavior and sexuality as an
identity. Foucault himself was gay, interested where notions
of sexuality come from; Contra psychology = idea of deep
identity that you ‘’can’t let out’’, but aren’t prohibited by
society
o 4) Power is exercised by the state (juridical theory of power)
 No, also private agents exercise power/ there is also a private
sphere
 Example: doctors -> also not a state employee; student –
teacher relation: teacher is not a state employee, works for
Tilburg University; children – parents relation: also not a state
representative
- Power is …
o A) Everywhere -> ‘’a power-free society doesn’t exist’’
 Not localized in the state apparatus, but spread out across
society
 ‘Microphysics of power-relations’
o B) Productive
 Power-relations produce knowledge and subjectivity (example
of psychiatry and criminology)
 Power not only prohibits, but also incites
o C) Reversible
 Wherever there is power, there is resistance
 Power versus domination
- Historical survey of different kinds of power-relations
o 1) Sovereign power (will not be explained in detail, since it doesn’t
happen often)
 Power to decide over the life or death of its subjects
 Power of sovereign (usually king) over those
subordinate to them, for example, someone has
complete power over whether you live or die,
happened in the middle ages
 Feudal relations
 State did not exist  personal relations of subjection
 Power of the king to expose subjects to death (war and
capital punishment)

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