Foucault and Rawls: Government and Public Reason

Foucault and Rawls represent very different approaches to political philosophy. Whereas the former pursues a resolutely descriptive approach to the techniques, strategies, and forms of rationality of power, the latter is explicitly normative in setting out and arguing for principles of justice that should inform the government of society conceived as a fair system of co-operation. I propose to show that the distance between them is less extreme than might be supposed and that differences between them are instructive. They converge on the analysis of particular conceptions of the proper business of government and the institutions and policies it should embrace. While Rawls is explicitly concerned with ideal theory rather than actual societies, he recognizes that a theory of justice will have implications for the way that society should be governed and that these should be spelled out and examined in order to test the theory. By contrast, Foucault is explicitly concerned with actual historical conceptions of government rather than normative considerations about the most reasonable form of government.