The Foucault Reader

"I wanted to recommend a couple of Foucault books here. He’s going through a less fashionable phase now, but I think he’s one of the most exciting, innovative thinkers of the twentieth century. I also wanted to show that part of post-structuralist thinking in the twentieth century – i.e. what went on to become cutting-edge modern philosophy – was still deeply indebted to the Enlightenment. Something amazing happened in the last years of the seventeenth century that somebody in the 1960s was still thinking through. And I suppose that the question Foucault asks is, how, after the catastrophes of the twentieth century— the Holocaust , the world wars, the economic depression—are we going to reground ourselves? How are we going to find an intellectual framework from which we can understand what we’ve done to ourselves and establish the foundations of an ethical life? There were cultural turns that Foucault was considering that had not yet become central issues in Kant’s time: the historic and philosophical meaning of insanity, of poverty, of certain kinds of deviant sexuality. So Foucault is daring to know, but what he wants to look at are the margins of cultural life, what the rejected parts of life look like. He’s inserting what had previously been unknowable narratives into our understanding of what it means to be human. Lots of things are interesting about this book. Neal Stephenson has this unbelievably capacious and exciting mind that links things in entirely unexpected and convincing ways. This is a book about late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century Europe and also America, and is really the template for me of what an historical novel should be. It feels completely contemporary. The research is just unbelievably detailed and perceptive, yet is presented in a way which feels entirely familiar and vivid. It’s a great historical novel. It’s also not the easiest. It’s intellectually very dense. Newton’s one of the main characters in the early part of the book and basically what Stephenson’s doing in the Baroque Cycle book trilogy in general I think is to draw together all the threads of the Enlightenment – the scientific Enlightenment, the philosophical Enlightenment, revolutions in finance and credit. At the same time the English colonial adventure is reaching its height and in particular the relationship between England and America is approaching its revolutionary crisis. He has a magisterial understanding of how all these different ways of understanding the world are coming together, resonating with each other, and yet at the same time how each requires a different form of expertise. So that in the Enlightenment the idea of the renaissance man, the well rounded man, the man accomplished in all branches of art and science, is replaced by admiration for the expert or specialist. This is what intellectual rigour comes to look like. Yes, I think this novel makes you understand why people felt that they were standing at the beginning of a new age, the modern world… Why it felt like a series of changes were taking place that fundamentally altered what it meant to be human – altered what it meant in a good way. It was a profoundly optimistic period in many ways. Leviathan and the Air Pump . Yes. A history of science book. It’s a brilliant title that perhaps doesn’t perhaps draw you into reading the book, but to me, this is perhaps the single best history of science book that’s ever been written. It’s a fantastic book, though again it’s gone a little out of fashion. But at the time it fundamentally changed the way that people saw the history of science. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The claims that the authors are making in the book are essentially that the political philosophy of Hobbes and other contemporaries, including Locke, and the scientific breakthroughs of Boyle who did the first set of experiments using an air pump – that these two bodies of thought weren’t developing human understanding in parallel. They were part of a cultural shift that was interlinked and that was going to produce a new account of what it meant to be a human being. So in other words what this book really did was to show that changes taking place in apparently different areas of human understanding were actually linked to one another and that the Enlightenment, while dependent on immensely talented individuals and specialists, was a kind of collective commitment – a commitment which paradoxically transcended the individual."