Intersect Conversations: Michael Behrent

Starting with Foucault, you talk about him being a philosopher of experience. So how does this inform his work? I really liked how, in Becoming Foucault, you link his work with his early experiences. And it's this dialectical process. How does that work?

Well, what struck me in looking into his early life is just how frequently one comes across –– when one tries to tell the story of Foucault in those years –– topics that would inform his later work. The most overwhelming and important of those topics being the role of medicine. He grows up completely in a medical household, not only is his father a doctor, but his mother's family is a line of doctors and pharmacists. It’s this kind of aristocracy of medicine that you find in his background. It struck me that, in a lot of ways, Foucault's intellectual interests were deeply inspired by his childhood and the experiences that he was exposed to at that phase of his life. And so in a sense, my argument is that many of the topics that interest Foucault, much of the subject matter of his thought, is to a significant extent informed by this early experience.

What I don't claim is that that early experience necessarily tells us a great deal about the specific philosophical positions that he would take. You do need to look at the thought that he's exposed to and his rejection or modification or adoption of that thought and his own specific philosophical work, his own thinking through things to understand that. But it is just striking to me the extent to which his childhood really is central for understanding what I call this first layer of experience, which really is, in a sense, the subject matter of his thoughts. So that would include, obviously, things like medicine and an entire range of issues having to do with medicine. There's very few of Foucault's works that do not, in some way, relate to medical questions. But also issues having to do with the family, in particular the family as a site in which sexuality develops and is monitored and problematized. 

“I think that the question of experience itself, including that very word, figures quite prominently in Foucault’s thought.”

Also, questions of social class which matter to a considerable extent for Foucault, and also even some issues having to do with the question of power which I show in particular through…the fact that he lives through the entire Second World War as essentially an adolescent and young man. So that's really the argument, that there's a way in which the subject matter of his thought is not entirely, but to a significant extent, informed by his childhood. And then I would also just say that the question of experience itself, including that very word, figures quite prominently in Foucault's thought. It acquires a very distinct philosophical sense when he becomes interested in the so-called German Idealist school, people like Kant and Hegel, who are specifically concerned with trying to explain how experience works epistemologically and metaphysically. What is the specific kind of relationship between subjects and objects that has to happen, and which ones are given in advance, which ones are not? There's a whole philosophical reflection on that, that obviously I don't think comes from his childhood, but I do think that's another element at which it makes sense to reflect on him as a philosopher of experience. 

And there's something intuitive about this that is sometimes missed by some of Foucault's commentators and fans, that he's not simply just an abstract theorist, that he really is trying to make sense of his own world and the world that he's lived in. And Foucault is very explicit about that at times. And so I’'m taking what you might see as an invitation from Foucault himself to think about what the nature of that experience is, which might not be exactly the same thing as doing his biography because you could argue that in many ways the book that I wrote is not exactly a biography. Because I have relatively little information about his own personal life, what I've tried to do is reconstruct the experiences to which he was exposed.

That really struck me in the book as well: the way that his early life –– his experience with a family of doctors; living through World War II; his experiences of depression –– shaped some of his work. It's really a shame…but the only work that I've read the whole way through is The History of Sexuality which was a revelation for me as a young undergrad. 

I think by far the best known book these days is Discipline and Punish so that's interesting you had an exposure to that one.

Would Discipline and Punish be the book that you'd recommend for someone if they're looking to get the best encapsulation of his thought? 

He's one of these thinkers –– and I don't like my answer because it sounds like a vaguely unhelpful, professorial answer which is not the intent with which I say it –– that it's difficult to find really a single work that captures all of his thought because he really is someone who changes, not completely, but who changes significantly. Long story short, there's the early work, which is very much focused on knowledge. There’s the middle period, of which the first volume of The History of Sexuality is a part, which is focused on power. There's this late Foucault that's focused on selfhood, and then there's themes that pervade these different moments. Discipline and Punish is probably, in some ways, the most important statement about his views on power, probably his most cited. Although, in a lot of ways, in [The History of Sexuality], which is slightly later, I think he's more explicit about [his view of power]. 

But the work that I'm trying to think about right now is this earlier period and to relate that to a still earlier period in Foucault's thought. So something like The Order of Things, Le Mouvement des Choses in French, is an absolutely crucial book and probably is the most philosophically sophisticated. It's a very dense and difficult book. Also, Madness and Civilization, which is his first major book, is an extraordinary and often beautiful book whatever you think about it.

I do think that there's a kind of Foucault –– I don't want to say the word, but the only word I can think of right now –– brand, but it does vary considerably from work-to-work. I always feel like there's a certain type of philosopher that is always writing the same book. Foucault is not one of those. 

For the sake of time, I want to move to Clouscard because I think that his conception of the liberal-libertarian is very important for Michéa. I'd never heard that term before, the liberal-libertarian, but it seems in both of their works, it's really important to understanding how economic and cultural liberalism are linked rather than distinct entities.

I think that's exactly right. The essence of that concept, liberal-libertarianism, is captured by what's arguably Michéa’s main thesis which is the so-called argument about the “unity of liberalism” which is that cultural and economic liberalism are not contradictions but are essentially identical and highly consistent with one another… And I think that the term libéral-libertaire was really coined by Michel Clouscard who is this interesting and somewhat marginal French philosopher who was born in the 1920s… He did his academic work in the 50s and 60s initially as a sociologist. In many ways his work, to a significant extent, is a revolt against the 1960s and in particular against the May 1968 student and worker demonstrations that nearly led to a political collapse in that year. And essentially what Clouscard is getting at is his reaction against that. 

It's very much a reaction of an awkward provincial in a big, cosmopolitan city. That might be a bit unfair to him, but it has something of that kind of dimension where he has a hard time seeing the cultural radicalism and even political radicalism of the 1960s as very radical at all. He fundamentally sees it as various forms of bourgeois and elite one-upmanship. Furthermore, he also believes that this kind of cultural radicalism is deeply tied to a consumer mentality which he associates with, interestingly, the post-war period. There're all these denunciations of the Marshall Plan and things like that in Clouscard’s work which he sees as having introduced consumer values into a traditional economy. 

There might be some empirical objections to that because there's all kinds of ways in which certain forms of consumerism were introduced to Europe in the late nineteenth century already. But it's an interesting claim. Therefore, his suggestion is that just as people seek to define themselves and to distinguish themselves and to compete with one another through the various kinds of commodities that they consume, particularly in the cultural realm, to distinguish themselves through the kind of clothes that they wear or where they vacation; [so to do] a lot of philosophical trends replay a certain sort of consumer dynamic. People are competing to have the most innovative, sexiest philosophical position. And that's a big part of his denunciation. 

“He fundamentally kind of sees it as various forms of bourgeois and elite one-upmanship. ”

He is particularly critical of… Freudo-Marxism, as he calls it. He certainly is denouncing people like Herbert Marcuse, but he lumps people like Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and so on into that [category] also. The implication is that –– there are aspects of this that I haven't managed to completely untangle –– Clouscard believes that consumption, culture, and sexuality all participate in this competition, this elite competition for status, that is made possible by these economic and cultural transformations that are taking place in the post-war era. 

I forgot to mention just one thing that I always found sort of particularly intriguing about Clouscard is his use of this word that's difficult to translate into English. The term that he really uses to denounce this elite culture and elite circle is this French word, very important in French culture, le monde. It’s literally the word for “the world,” but it also is the word for society. Like when you talk about being a member of society or in that late 19th, early 20th century sense of society. Meaning: a very elite circle of people who meet together at museum exhibits and cocktail parties and things like that on a regular basis. It's society in that sense. 

And someone who participates in that in France, who's kind of part of that world, is called mondain, but in that specific connotation. And that's very much his denunciation of the direction of French and European culture in this time period. It’s that you have intellectuals, writers, and so on –– fundamentally bourgeois, maybe even petty-bourgeois –– who are mondain, who are worldly in the sense that they're really concerned with being part of society. It's a very interesting and quite harsh and bitter analysis. It’s hard not to detect his own resentments in a certain way in that, but it is an interesting position.

Yeah, it's interesting because I really tried to find some Clouscard to read in English.

Impossible. 

(Laughs) So I think I found a PDF of Being and Code that was all in French.

There's an effort to make his work available in French. There are a lot of PDFs of his work available in French online, but there's almost no English versions of it. I did a podcast interview a month or two ago with a guy named Daniel Tutt, who has this Marxism podcast called Emancipations. Because he's actually a big Clouscard fan and he knows some of the –– it's a very niche thing –– but he knows some of the Clouscard followers in France. He's talked about the difficulty of trying to see if he can get him published in the US. He thinks that university presses are not terribly interested in it because even though there's a whole side to Clouscard that is orthodox Marxism –– he doesn't want to do any newfangled New Left kind of Marxism. He presents himself as an old-fashioned materialist and Leninist and things like that. Again, he's not: it's not totally true. But he likes that identity. The problem is that he's one of these thinkers that certain elements of the right find quite appealing. And Daniel thinks that may be the reason why there's a resistance to publish him in the US.

Yes, I was wondering if his criticism of the French post-structuralists who are so dominant, at least in the undergraduate curriculum, if that was a reason why there was a resistance to publishing him.

I don't specifically know, but it might be…There are people who have much more expertise in Clouscard than I do. But I mean, to me, even though he's quite knowledgeable and erudite, I find him fundamentally a polemicist. Good on him for that, right? That has a place in intellectual discourse, too. And so it could be that element as well. There's a strongly polemical character to his work that doesn't have that kind of cool obscurity of French theory. That could explain some resistance to him as well. He's a firm critic of contemporary liberal and leftist culture too which can be a hard-sell to institutions that are fundamentally invested in that culture.

I want to jump to Michéa. And I'm curious what his relationship to Marx is because he grew up in this communist household and later kind of distanced himself from the Communist Party. But he has that passage about “all that is solid melts into air” which, to me, was about the corrosive effect of economic liberalism on traditional institutions like the family, the church, stuff like that. So what is his relationship to Marx?

I think that's a very good question and a complex one. That's one where you can do a textual analysis to find things that he's on board with and things that he's critical of. I'm trying to recall these right now. But he's clear that he's a fan of Marx, right? There’s no polemical, philosophical critique of Marx in any broad way. He's happy to see himself as influenced by Marx and he seems to know Marx very well and to quote him a lot. He mentions in in the interview that we do in [Towards A Conservative Left] that he did his undergraduate master's thesis on Marxist dialectics, so he is very influenced, broadly speaking, by Marx's account of capitalism which is a huge part of Marx's thought but of course not all of it. 

He seems to take very seriously a lot of the arguments in Capital about the commodity form as being the essence of capitalism; capitalism as necessarily entailing strong class divisions; that the pursuit of profit is the basic driving force of the modern economy… I think that one aspect of Marx's thought that he's a little bit more reluctant to endorse is the theory of history and maybe certain aspects of Marx's theoretical materialism. His critique of Marx’s theory of history has to do with the fact that, fundamentally, Michéa is a critic of progress and believes that an essential characteristic of liberal-libertarian culture is the absolute commitment to the idea of progress.

“I think that one aspect of Marx’s thought that he’s a little bit more reluctant to endorse is the theory of history and maybe certain aspects of Marx’s theoretical materialism.”

He thinks this is one of the main reasons why people –– who are culturally liberal, who end up having fashionable, anti-capitalist positions –– ultimately embrace or make do at least with capitalism in certain forms and maybe even quite openly embrace certain kinds of capitalist tendencies. But obviously in some broad complicated sense Marx is, maybe not a progressive in the sense in which we use that term today, but someone who takes the idea of progress seriously and sees it as a necessary concept for a socialist outlook. The workers' revolution is what happens when we get beyond capitalism, right? So that's something that [Michéa} has some doubts with.

There’s certain moments when Michéa suggests that Marx may at times have rethought or reconsidered certain aspects of [his faith in progress]. I'm forgetting the details, but there's a passage in the book where he talks about Marx's engagement with people in Russia who were tied to the populist tradition, which is this kind of pro-peasant and somewhat anti-modern movement, and suggests that maybe Marx got something about their skepticism about progress. So that's one thing. The skepticism about progress is one step he takes away from Marx. Another one is that he isn’t a diehard materialist in the theoretical sense. Especially the crucial essay that's in the collection on the “unity of liberalism” where he obviously makes the connection between cultural and economic liberalism. 

But he has this intriguing, at times problematic, but still very intriguing genealogy that he traces of liberalism where he takes it back to the European wars of religion of the 16th and 17th centuries. He suggests that liberalism emerges as a doctrine that says that we cannot agree on fundamental social values, so we have to organize society on these secondary values like personal rights, freedom of circulation in the market, and things like that. He also ties this into a famous argument by the economist Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, which argues that some of the first arguments in favor of the free market were that the free market was essentially a mechanism for cooling political and religious passions. If you can get people to focus on making money and work and the marketplace, then they won't be obsessed with conflict between Catholics and Protestants and want to massacre each other. It suggests that, at a very basic level, ideas and values and beliefs play a crucial role in history and even in the development of our current liberal, capitalist order and not simply just capital accumulation and class relations.

I'm thinking now of the other major thinker that he draws on, which is George Orwell. And it seems like he's almost trying to rehabilitate Orwell… But the thinker who I also think of is Camus. They're not really perceived as serious philosophers by some people. I don't know if that's because they wrote in novel format or for some other reasons, but Orwell, it seems like he takes really seriously the arguments put forth in 1984, Animal Farm, and some of his other essays. So what's his relationship to Orwell?

Orwell is absolutely one of his key influences. What gets him into writing, he was always an Orwell fan and his first book is a little sort of pamphlet that he writes on Orwell, the ‘Tory anarchist,’ as he calls him. Basically he's just a fan of Orwell and Orwell is very crucial to driving his thought. The first thing that's crucial to understand about Michéa and Orwell is that his embrace of Orwell has very little to do with what's maybe the most familiar kind of Orwell which is essentially using Orwell as an anti-totalitarian, and frankly, usually anti-communist and anti-left thinker. That's the first association that most people have in a certain way with Orwell, but anybody who's actually read deeper into him, this is just a fact that's hiding in plain sight, knows that Orwell always strongly identified with the left and considered himself to be a kind of socialist except for the fact that he just was maddened by how silly a lot of contemporary socialism was in his day in the 30s and 40s. And so he wants to rehabilitate, like you said, Orwell, but to claim him as a thinker of the left.

But with the significant caveat that Orwell's one of these people who spends much more time developing his thought through critiquing people on the left than he does with articulating his key idea. That said, there is one claim, one argument in Orwell that is positive, that's not just critical of other thinkers or other socialists that is fundamental to Michéa. I think a lot of [Michéa’s] work is an attempt to tease out this idea, which is Orwell's definition of socialism, which you see in several writings by Orwell, but probably, most importantly, in this book The Road to Wigan Pier. It is really his sustained engagement with trying to reflect on the state of socialism in Britain, in particular, in the 1930s. It also has these accounts of visiting the miners, and the miners take him into the mines. And he has these fascinating descriptions of that. But in the more reflective parts of that essay, in 1937, he says ‘socialism is common decency.’ 

There’s something irritatingly, in-your-face British about that claim. It's a complete rejection of dialectics which Orwell thinks –– again, in this snobbishly empirical way, which I also think can be quite British –– is a slightly embarrassing and childish philosophical game that immature intellectuals play. His insight is that what socialism is about is tapping into spontaneous moral instincts that he very genuinely believes are more present in working classes than in upper classes. Particularly, that they are more present in working classes compared to intellectuals, and I think that this is a huge theme in Michéa’s work. Bluntly, I just think that they believe [in common decency.]

“ But in the more reflective parts of that essay, in 1937, he says ‘socialism is common decency.’”

Another place that Orwell mentions this definition is in this fascinating little essay that he wrote on Charles Dickens at the time and, somewhat unfashionably, at least for a left intellectual, was saying that Dickens is great, he's not some kind of stuck-up, moralistic, Victorian, but that he gets something deep about society, about human nature, and that there's an implicit socialism in there… I think it's in the interview that I do with him in the book and [Michéa] suggests that people who are engaged in labor of a more manual nature and people who have just fewer material resources that they can rely on, he thinks that common decency springs from those kinds of experiences… But the example that he gives that struck me is the French word entraide, mutual aid.

And at a very practical level he says how in certain groups who can be considered working class: if someone's car breaks down, you lend your car to them, whereas professors don't do that, right? (Both laugh). I actually find that to be a compelling point. Some of the people that I've talked to about this issue have this precisely post-structuralist or a certain kind instinct to say: well, this a particular kind of construction of the working class, it's endowing the working class with these virtuous qualities. Whereas I think that Michéa and Orwell too are taking this kind of claim quite seriously. And so for Michéa, the argument then becomes, in relation to the previous point, liberal-libertarianism: the whole problem with liberalism as a political philosophy now, according to Michéa, is the way that it encourages people to second-guess and, ultimately, to abandon common decency. 

Because liberalism says: you should have a more capacious kind of conception of what rights are and what justice is. To use the sort of fancy philosophical terms, these should be procedural and formal. And what defines justice is “just processes” and not being kind to someone or lending them money or something like that.. And that's precisely what Michéa thinks. That's his 17th century argument, right, that the kind of angst created by the terrible violence of the religious wars makes people no longer trust moral reflexes and turn to some more formalistic conception of justice. But he thinks that's the problem. And I would also say his critique of the present is that, and his attitude towards things like wokeness and so on in a certain way is precisely that, paradoxical though it may sound: it’s a revolt or a critique of instincts of common decency.  And so that was my long response to the question about Orwell, but the philosophical or political idea that's most compelling in Michéa is the way that he teases out this notion of common decency as a way of understanding a range of contemporary issues.

Something that I think that's also impressive about his work is I found it pretty accessible. And it's weird because, when I was younger, I used to associate complexity or obscurity or how abstruse an article or a book was with its philosophical rigor. And I think as you get older, you start to see the value of concise, clear writing.

I completely agree. I actually sort of encounter this a lot with my work on Foucault because, generally speaking, I have been told by people: your work on Foucault is actually clear. And I think [obscurantism] is an issue, but I do think that to the extent that Foucault, whatever one thinks about him, but to the extent that one sees him as a significant philosopher, one has to be able to articulate what his positions and stances are and not just make one impressed by him due to this smokescreen of obscure language, which I think repels some people and attracts some people. And I think it's unfortunate because I actually do think, again, whatever one's position on it is, I think he has things to say. You will get critiques of Foucault that say: yeah, it's just kind of bullshit. And I don't really see that. 

Michéa is interesting, I'll just say since you mentioned it because he's actually fairly difficult to translate, and we did have to sort of make these decisions — me in conversation with him — to basically sand off some of the flourishes that were in the writing. He has long sentences and lots of parentheses and a whole system of footnotes and references of different layers. But I still think that a French person reading him would have a reaction that's quite similar to yours. In other words, I guess what I'm saying is, I think a lot of that might be more due to French writing conventions than obscurity in his work because it's an interesting thing about him. 

I don't know a huge amount about his reception in France. I've read a little bit, and I know a couple of people who are into him. But I do think that his success is tied to relatively young people reading his books, finding them powerful, and wanting to talk about him. So he's one of these kinds of authors that people meet as a result of sharing an interest in him and recognize one another as fellow travelers of a certain kind. And the issue is the weird, interesting connection between, a fairly radical position on a lot of contemporary economic issues that are recognizably leftist and this kind of anti-progressive [cultural stance]. That's the flavor of Michéa. 

Definitely. And that just leads me to my last question. This figure of François Ruffin? Ruffin seems like a totally Michéan political concoction. 

A fellow traveler. Short answer, yes, I think that's basically right. I actually have not asked Michéa about Ruffin and I've not had any connection with Ruffin. The key idea, at least in terms of contemporary politics, is the critique of the left. In other words, this real concern that the left has not only ceased to be a working-class party, but it's actually in many ways become critical of the working class, primarily because the working class is now seen as attracted to far-right ideas. And a sociological recognition that the left is the party of, maybe not the one percent, but of relatively wealthy and, especially, very educated people. And that the left has become the political form of that group's interests. 

Also, there's this interesting kind of 21st-century revival of an earlier kind of socialist infatuation with the working class. But it's the contemporary working class which, especially in France, is strongly associated with people who were screwed over by deindustrialization and now often live outside of city centers and work low-end service sector jobs. That's what they share. And, obviously, the big sort of political challenge that both –– this is almost the common theme of this series of articles that I've written [for Compact and Dissent] –– is all of these people make these critiques of the left and have this interest in the contemporary working class. And it leads them to a similar point which is, if we start from those premises, this means that we really have to take the far-right and the populist right seriously in a way that a lot of the left is unwilling to do. 

So there's this reckoning with the fact that you have to see the far-right as getting something right if you're going to seriously engage with them from a leftist point of view. I think that Michéa and Ruffin both agree with that. And there's some kind of intuition about that in Clouscard, even if it's before the mass emergence of the far right, but there’s a tension between the working class culture and petty bourgeois cultures as he would put it.

Michael Behrent is a Professor in the Department of History at Appalachian State University. He teaches classes on modern European history, the history of European thought, the Western intellectual tradition, and modern French history. His recent scholarship has sought to historicize the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He earned his Ph.D. from New York University.