Letters

Foucault among the Buckleyites

I was delighted to see Daniel Foster quoting Michel Foucault in your pages. Despite his reputation as being the typical French intellectual who is chic, impenetrable, and wrong — which he was, on occasion — Foucault took many positions we would recognize today as being right of center. He disavowed Marxism by 1973, supported Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his struggles against the Soviet state, and toward the end of his life was recommending that people read Mises and Hayek. I am presently writing a book about his last three lecture series before his untimely death in 1984, when he was taking seriously such questions as truth-telling and character development and, as he put it, “not being governed quite so much.”