Scholarship at UWindsor

Michel Foucault and History: Toward Understanding Human Rights

University of Windsor

Late in life, Michel Foucault used the term "human rights" in essays written for newspapers and other publications, though he never gave human rights a systematic treatment in his work. How is it that a "post-structuralist" philosopher who denies concepts such as dignity and personhood could employ such a term? This paper will show the coherence of Foucault's thought on human rights through a treatment of his work on history, which allowed him to open a new conceptual framework for thinking about politics, one that could make sense of human rights without an appeal to metaphysics. Foucault's work in history employs two broad approaches — archaeology and genealogy. Archaeology looks toward method and the bounds of knowing the past, rejecting that the past as entirely knowable or that as a past that yields a necessary present. The world as we know it becomes contingent and malleable. Genealogy rejects the development of trends such as liberty or human rights across broad swaths of history and looks to undermine such notions by tracing the "ignoble beginnings" of ideas such as rights. Ideas that seem to hold sway over the development of history become entirely contingent and susceptible to social and political maneuvering as well. Through his approach to the past in these ways, Foucault rejects the key, paradigmatic approaches to political thought. Power is no longer a thing the sovereign or elected government holds, but instead is a relation of forces. Similarly, autonomy no longer belongs to the subject; individuals form themselves through "technologies of the self," or self-forming practices that yield a subject that fits a certain mold, from "the subject," the most basic type of concept, to the monk, for example, who molds himself according to the monastic ideal, a carefully articulated sense of self. Foucault thinks these two sets of ideas — power and technologies of the self — in the paradigm of governmentality. By understanding the interactions between governments and individuals as reciprocal governing of discourses and actions to certain ideas that appear and are shaped through history, we can also see how human rights could be understood on these terms. Having laid out Foucault's basic conceptual framework, the paper turns to several of Foucault's essays from the 1980s to show how the conceptual framework with which he worked can provide a coherent reading of "human rights" as he employs the term. Looking in particular at one piece published only days before he died, "Confronting Governments: Human Rights," the paper will show how he means "human rights" in three ways: as a protection against governments, as a form of liberty for citizens, and as a technology of the self, forming individuals in a certain image.