Foucault as Rousseauian

From Rousseau’s 1749 Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences:

“Princes always view with pleasure the spread, among their subjects, of a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluities … The sciences, letters, and arts spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, … make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized peoples.”[1]

And from Foucault’s 1975 Discipline and Punish

“A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; … this link is all the stronger in that we do not know what it is made of and we believe it to be our own work.” [2]

I’m charmed by the rhetorical connection, because the subtitle of my Explaining Postmodernism is “Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.”

Sources:

1. Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), p. 36.
2. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 102-103.

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