Foucault and Weber on Leadership and the Modern Subject

Authors

  • Tahseen Kazi Georgia Southern University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i0.5238

Keywords:

parrhesia, Weber, Menschentum, governmentality, leadership

Abstract

I propose in this paper that Foucault’s interest in parrhesia as a “technique of the self,” particularly in his reading of Cynic parrhesia, can be fruitfully taken as an exemplar for new political thought on leadership. I make my case by comparing parrhesia with Weber’s charisma, which is the only force Weber allows for inserting new valuations into traditional and rational-legal legitimate dominations. I propose that charisma and parrhesia not only share several key characteristics, but express an overabundance of identities. Although it is rarely acknowledged, I propose that this should hardly be surprising given Foucault’s longstanding interest in Weber’s work. Foucault’s governmentality can be productively set next to Weber’s psycho-sociology of modern man, Menschentum, to reveal the parallel courses taken by these two thinkers on the modern predicament. Both share a critical curiosity – one that revolves around Kant’s presentation in “What is Enlightenment?” – about life, and about seeing how we have come to be how we are as a philosophical problem. Yet, even with all of their parallels, particularly on the subject of leadership, the staggering difference between Foucault and Weber is that while Weber approached charisma as a possible therapy to the problem of the Menschentum being unable to derive new valuations from his rational-legal calculations, Foucault approached parrhesia by looking for techniques for confronting disciplined and biopolitical subjects within society with dangerous truths. Whereas conventional wisdom may presume that it is at such points as Weber’s charismatic leadership that Weber and Foucault would part ways, careful study shows that leadership is a point of connection between these two thinkers.

References

Árpad Szakolczai, The Genesis of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003)

Arpad Szakolczai's Max Weber and Michel Foucault Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works (New York: Routledge, 1998)

Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," Political Theory 12, no. 2 (1984) https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591784012002002

Colin Gordon, "Soul of the Citizen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on Rationality and Government," in Max Weber. Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987)

David Konstan, "The Prehistory of Sexuality: Foucault's Route to Classical Antiquity," Intertexts 6, no. 1 (2002)

David Owen, "Ambiguity of the Modern: Neitzsche, Weber, Foucault, and the Fate of the Subject of Modernity" (University of Durham, 1989)

David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (London: Routledge, 1994)

Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber & Faber, 1968)

Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press, 2006)

Frédéric Gros, "Course Context," in The Government of Self and Others, ed. F. Gros, Lectures at the College De France (New York: Palgrave, 2008)

Frédéric Gros, "Course Context," in The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège De France 1981--1982, ed. F. Ewald and G. Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006)

Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983)

H. Becker, R. Fornet-Betancourt, and A. Gomez-Müller serves as a good introduction to the truth games in care for the self "The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom," in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: Free Press, 1997)

Henry Myers and Herwig Wolfram, Medieval Kingship (Burnham Inc Pub, 1982)

Hubert Treiber, "Nietzsche's Monastery for Freer Spirits and and Weber's Sect," in Weber's Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, ed. H. Lehmann and G. Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

J. Thomas Wren, Inventing Leadership: The Challenge of Democracy (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2007) https://doi.org/10.4337/9781847207241

John Oneill, "The Disciplinary Society - from Weber to Foucault," British Journal of Sociology 37, no. 1 (1986) https://doi.org/10.2307/591050

John Patrick Diggins, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 1998)

Jorge Davila, "Ethique De La Parole Et Jeu De La Vérité," in Foucault Et La Philosophie Antique, ed. Frédéric Gros and Carlos Lévy (Paris: Kime, 2003)

Kimon Lycos, "Foucault, Freedom and Truth Emergence," ibid.1(2003);

Kimon Lycos, "Foucault, Freedom and Truth Emergence," ibid.1(2003); Matthew Sharpe, "'Critique' as Technology of the Self," Foucault Studies 2 (2005) https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i2.862

Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall, "The Clown at the Gates of the Camp: Sovereignty, Resistance and the Figure of the Fool," Security Dialogue 44, no. 2 (2013) https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010613479994

Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991)

Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Vol. 1, ed. Gunther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)

Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Vol. 2, ed. Gunther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)

Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (London: Unwin Hyman, 1998)

Michel Foucault, "Subjectivity and Truth," in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Work of Foucault, Vol. I, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997)

Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001)

Michel Foucault, Power, ed. J.D. Faubion and R. Hurley (New Press, 2001)

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France 1977--1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2007)

Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the College De France, 1983-1984, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1990)

Michel Senellart, Les Arts De Gouverner (Paris: Seuil, 1995)

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)

Oneill, "The Disciplinary Society - from Weber to Foucault; Nicholas Gane, Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalization Versus Re-Enchantment (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)

Pasquale Pasquino, "Hobbes, Religion, and Rational Choice: Hobbes's Two Leviathans and the Fool," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82, no. 3-4 (2001)

Pasquale Pasquino, "Machiavelli and Aristotle: The Anatomies of the City," History of European Ideas 35, no. 4 (2009) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2009.05.002

Pasquale Pasquino, "Political Theory of War and Peace: Foucault and the History of Modern Political Theory," Economy and Society 22, no. 1 (1993) https://doi.org/10.1080/03085149300000003

Pasquale Pasquino, "Spiritual and Earthly Police: Theories of the State in Early-Modern Europe," in The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance, ed. M.D. Dubber and M. Valverde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006)

Paul V.A. Williams, The Fool and the Trickster: Studies in Honour of Enid Welsford (Rochester: D. S. Brewer, 1979)

Paul Veyne, "The Final Foucault and His Ethics," in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. A.I. Davidson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997)

Robert Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1983)

Roger-Pol Droit, Généalogie Des Barbares (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007)

Scott Lash and Sam Whimster, Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, (New York: Routledge, 1987)

Stephen A. Kent, "Weber, Goethe, and the Nietzschean Allusion: Capturing the Source of the "Iron Cage" Metaphor," Sociological Analysis 44, no. 4 (1983) https://doi.org/10.2307/3711612

Tahseen Kazi, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978--1979, ed. Michel Senellart and Francois Ewald (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College De France, 1982-1983, ed. A.I. Davidson and G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2011)

The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège De France 1981--1982 (New York: Palgrave, 2006)

Thomas Flynn, "Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the College De France (1984)," in The Final Foucault, ed. J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)

Thomas Lemke, "Foucault's Hypothesis: From the Critique of the Juridico-Discursive Concept of Power to an Analytics of Government," Parrhesia 9 (2010)

Wilhelm Hennis, "Max Weber's 'Central Question'," in Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988)

Downloads

Published

2017-01-06

How to Cite

Kazi, T. (2017). Foucault and Weber on Leadership and the Modern Subject. Foucault Studies, (22), 153–176. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i0.5238