Michel Foucault’s Defamiliarizing View of the Enlightenment

In the last years of his life, Michel Foucault became increasingly preoccupied with the Enlightenment and its legacy. He recognized that these issues remained at the heart of today’s concerns, especially in the area of governance. In order to understand the relevance and nature of the legacy, he undertook a genealogy of liberalism, the basic socio-economic model for Western societies. In his seminars at the Collège de France, he developed the concepts of governmentality and biopower as tools for understanding the nature of liberalism and for explaining liberalism’s failure to live up to the ideals once promoted by the Enlightenment.