Michel Foucault: Historians Who Made Me

Or Why I Never Was and Never Will Be a Marxist

Every month in 2026 as part of the World History Book Club, I am sharing reflections on an historian who made me. This month’s historian is: Michel Foucault.

His ‘complicated’¹ relationship with history, madness and Marxism set the course of my early intellectual life, including my doctorate. This fence-jumping French philosopher, who died of AIDS in 1984 aged but 57, is an historian who made me.

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REMINDER: The World History Book Club Live Call is this Friday 31 July at 10:00 AM Eastern Australian time. Paid subscribers can join me live - and discuss the books, Foucault and Marxism - or watch the recording. The call and registration link is available for paid subscribers in this post.

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Debates on Foucault and the Left

Foucault is a timely choice since debates have broken out recently, even here on Substack, about this leading 20th century intellectual, who is seen by conservatives and some Marxists as the Great Satan who corrupted the Western Leftist intelligentsia. Conservatives see Foucault as the founder of “wokeism” who desecrated Western ideals in his analyses of power, truth and biopolitics. He is a particular bugbear from all those faux intellectuals of the alt-right and ‘intellectual dark web.’ On the other hand, some Marxists - notably Gabriel Rockhill in Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (2025) and other works - castigate the “fickle Foucault” as a “staunch opponent to all forms of actually existing socialism.” In this account, Foucault was a Pied Piper who seduced the Western intelligentsia away from true, proletarian “anti-capitalist revolutionary politics.” Despite the conservatives wailing about Foucault as the founder of the Woke, the decolonising left have long suspected, for good reasons, he shared their profound Eurocentrism. Edward Said wrote

“Ignoring the imperial context of his own theories, Foucault seems actually to represent an irresistible colonizing movement that paradoxically fortifies the prestige of both the lonely individual scholar and the system that contains him.”

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993), which I might add has an epigram from Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Neither the “anti-woke” Right nor the new materialist Left understand Foucault well, in my opinion, having read every word he ever wrote. The recent hard Left assessment of Foucault as a faux Leftist, who distracted revolutionary politics from its real missions of class, socialism and anti-empire to pursue cultural and sexual identity politics, is a caricature. Foucault’s relationship to Marxist ideas of history was complicated. Étienne Balibar claimed that “Foucault killed the Marxist tradition in a sense. In another sense, this was operated through a form of critical appropriation of the thinking of Marx.”

Here arises my second timely reason to discuss Foucault, and his complicated relationship with Marxism. This week, Nel Bonilla asked some very pertinent questions about my admittedly distempered “dismissal of the Marxist/Leninist timeline of empire” in my July Long Read, World War Three Isn’t Coming — The Armed Peace Never Ended.

To answer Nel’s question, I must discuss the madness of Foucault in my early intellectual life, and how my wrestling with his texts and experiences set me free from the influence of both Marxism and, after some intense preoccupied years, Foucault.

Foucault: An Historian Who Made Me

I was obsessed with Foucault in my twenties. It began when I was still a teenager and read Madness and Civilization. I bought it in the old International Bookshop in Melbourne, an outlet of the Old Left, where you could still buy the Collected Works of Stalin from its shelves, and indeed the new chic French poststructuralist theories, as they were called then. Foucault’s style and subject - rhapsodic, surreal historic prose and the experience of madness - mesmerised me. Over the next decade, I read every text he ever wrote, and spoke, including translating a few obscure texts myself from French. I did so despite his early death and my calm distance from his combative radical political postures. It was his difference from my temperament, that made his thought experiments, despite the evident failure of his political actions, so intriguing to me.

In my doctoral history thesis, I sought to apply his ideas of regimes of power/truth to Marxism itself, and its histories and theories of class - especially the topos of class consciousness and the arcane difference between a class in and for itself. I speculated that Marxist intellectuals, of many classes, fixed the identity of workers to their regimes of truth. They ruled or exercised social power, through Foucault’s truth/power too. I examined the case of of how Marxists defined nineteenth century craft workers as puppets controlled by false consciousness. From Marx to Lenin to Hobsbawm, the non-revolutionary workers were condemned as failing to realise their true identity as a class. In this way, I conceived my PhD thesis as a kind of Foucauldian history of work and unions. I traced how Marxist intellectuals constructed a certain truthful identity - ‘labour aristocrats,’ ‘craft unions’ - to define, regulate and, in oppositional ways, dominate the fluid, undifferentiated social lives of these workers. Their truth, the only material truth that mattered, lay in their labour, the material circumstances of production, their functional role in the class structure. Bugger anything else going on in their heads or their hearts, rational or otherwise.

This idea fascinated me, and enabled me to discard the accumulated misunderstandings that had obscured the actual beliefs and experiences of the workers and unionists whom I studied. But it did not really help me write the thesis. Foucault’s method and style - the ravings of a self-proclaimed modernist outcast - both mesmerised me and paralysed me. At some point, I had to set aside Foucault’s radically cast theories to deal with the actual work and social experiences that I was trying to reconstruct from incomplete, fragmentary documentation. By the end of the thesis, I had turned away from Foucault. After the thesis, I did not read him for twenty or more years.

As I have written elsewhere, including in a 2017 essay published in my book, From the Burning Archive, the spell Foucault cast over me was broken by encounters with the more sordid, sadistic shadows of Foucault’s biography, the more complex social realities that I encountered in both government offices and psychiatric hospitals, and by reading better histories more suited to my temperament and concerns. Until this morning, however, when I checked the bibliography of my PhD and discovered I had cited no text by Foucault despite three years of theoretical ravings at ANU, I had not remembered that I had to free myself from Foucault in order to finish writing my PhD.

So Foucault was always going to be one of the historians I wrote about this year as an historian who made me. In recent years, Foucault has also become the whipping boy of critics of identity politics, radical critiques of the West, and the failures of the Left. Coincidentally with my scheduled discussion of this historian-philosopher, the Tech Bro Internationale and their magazine brigades have turned on Foucault and French theory in the last few months. A minor count of the European wing of the Internationale led by Musk and Thiel, has sought to find favour with his North American sponsors by writing an article that apologizes, “on behalf of all French people, for having given birth to French Theory (which gave rise to the worst of all ideological excrement: wokeism).” This start-up, upstart is named Brivael le Pogam, and styles himself “Techno-emperor Argil.” He is a software engineer pontificating on cultural, historical, and social issues beyond his ken, like the Techno-pretender he is.

We have given the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville*. And then, in the intellectual ruins after 1968, we gave the world Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who, in the elegance of the French language, built the ideological weapon that now paralyzes the West.

Brivael Le Pogam: The French owe everyone an apology for the scourge of wokeism, *Note: The gifts honoured by the Tech Bro Internationale are two mathematicians and a flattering writer on the USA’s democracy who advocated violent colonialism in Africa.

I have read a lot of Derrida and Deleuze too, but Foucault was the only one of these philosophers who cosplayed as a historian. More so than Deleuze and Derrida, who Foucault acidly condemned as a pedant, Foucault became a talismanic figure in the post-1968 politics of social identity. Foucault exposed the regimes of power that operated in disciplines of truth, whether psychiatry, prisons, medical clinics, sexuality, or the humanities themselves. In doing so he became Saint Foucault of the radical Left. And the belligerent iconoclasts of the Right have lined up to take him down for decades, whether they read him or not.

But the idea that a personally troubled professor from Paris corrupted Western political culture through the spectacle of his politics, and his sometimes tortured prose, is laughably simplistic. Similarly, the Stalinist Left’s critique of Foucault as a playboy tool of a CIA psyop is equally dumb. Foucault had many good reasons to rebel against the oppressive, Stalinist politics of the European Left in the 1950s to 1970s. No sinister CIA plot is required to explain why a gay man with mental health issues in the wake of May 1968, and the dawn of the age of liquid modernity, wanted out of the French communist party and the sclerotic institutional left before the Fall.

One key example was psychiatry, and the treatment of the mentally ill. Any reader of Foucault can deduce quickly that the grand philosopher struggled with his mental health, and identified more with the lonely, mad rebels he wrote about, like Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud or Pierre Riviere, than the rational materialist certainties of orthodox Marxists. Foucault himself attempted suicide in his youth. His first career move was as a psychologist in French mental hospitals, but what he saw there - perhaps as both trainee and patient - repulsed him. It set him on his strange trajectory of literary, philosophical, historical writing, which began with a fascinating text on the interpretation of dreams by the Swiss existentialist humanist psychologist, Ludwig Binswanger. This experience was the chthonic force beneath his doctoral thesis, and first breakout text as a public intellectual, L’Histoire de la Folie, abridged in English translation as Madness and Civilization. In this way too, the politics of mental illness became one of the first fields of identity politics, exposing all kinds of abuses, mistreatments and misunderstandings behind the locked doors of the asylum, rather than on the factory floors of the proletariat.

There were many such abuses in Western society, but also, as Mark B. Smith documents in Exit Stalin, in Soviet Civilization. For example, Natalya Gorbanevskaya was a member of the intelligentsia who in 1968 protested for a different kind of society. She and many fellow dissidents were arrested and sent to mental hospitals, prison or internal exile.

“Gorbanevskaya was dealt with separately. She was rearrested, held in remand in a mental hospital from September 1968 and tried later, alone, in July 1970; she was sentenced to indefinite incarcertation in a psychiatric ward. Police confined her in very frightening living conditions. Doctors tormented her with endless drugs and treatments. Lawyers harassed her in a legal labyrinth.

Smith, Exit Stalin, p. 198

Foucault may not have exposed these abuses, but in the late 1950s he had already had run-ins with the Communist authorities in Poland, where he worked as an emissary of French culture. The Communist authorities placed Foucault under surveillance because the wealthy gay Westerner was seducing young socialist men with offers of cigarettes, vodka, and liberation from the proletarian sexual conventions of really existing socialism.

Foucault both expressed and was an expression of the social changes that occurred in the transition of traditional modernist European societies of the 1950s to the wild abandon of libertine, LSD-laced liquid modernity in the bath houses of 1970s San Francisco. Those social changes made identity politics more than French theory. Foucault’s self-abandonment in those changes also killed him. By the 1970s, revolutions in societies had moved on, even if proletarian obsessed revolutionaries of the anti-capitalist left had become caught like flies in the amber of Marxist-Leninist doctrines.

While Foucault died before Gorbachev’s ascent to power, the fall of Berlin Wall and the final collapse of the Western social democratic project, he did witness the early defeat of that project under Mitterand, when the French Left quickly retreated from socialism in one Western country in panic at sell-offs on the financial markets. He also no doubt witnessed the exhaustion and hypocrisy of the late Soviet Union, following the sensation caused by the publication of Solzhenitsyn's accounts of the Gulag in the 1970s, and repression of the dissident movements of Eastern Europe.

Yet his yearning for radical social ecstasy also led him into a strange embrace of the 1979 Iranian Revolution as the irruption into rationalist modernity of a form of political spirituality, not an act of anticolonial struggle.

I do not feel comfortable speaking of Islamic government as an “idea” or even as an “ideal.” Rather, it impressed me as a form of “political will.” It impressed me in its effort to politicize structures that are inseparably social and religious in response to current problems. It also impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics. . . .

For the people who inhabit this land, what is the point of searching, even at the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a political spirituality. I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong.

Michel Foucault, What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?

All of these late experiences of Foucault were also my youthful experiences. We also shared an intimate history with the complexities of mental illness and its impact on social status. How in this context could I ever have written, after first reading Foucault, a conventional Marxist history of the working class?

Until 1989, I was very well-read in the Marxist traditions. In that year of Tiananmen, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution and the USA’s betrayal of Gorbachev, I fully abandoned Marxism, but not in anger. In 1989, it appeared that the gulfs of history had washed Marxism down. In desperate poverty, in the last year of my scholarship, I sold my many Marx texts, which I had dutifully read, but mostly never enjoyed. The big exception was Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism that I was reminded of by a recent piece by Branko Milanovic. I still regret losing that three volume masterpiece, which also introduced me to Zygmunt Bauman who I was reading then through his rewriting of the sociology of class. I sold my Freud, my Derrida, so many good novels and history works; but I did not sell my Foucault.

Although I had detached from my obsession with Foucault, I remained grateful to Foucault. He had guided me away from Marxism, even if he was pulled, like all the French Left, into a cohabitation with Marxist thinking, as remarked upon in his later interviews, Remarks on Marx. That cohabitation was evident too in the analyses of Madness and Civilization that relied, at key moments in the story, on the intervention of the cunning divinity, the capitalist mode of production. It was not Foucault’s theories that protected me from Marxism, but his attention to other forms of experience, not conceived of in historical materialist philosophy. These liminal experiences, which were composed of ideas, bodies, emotions, cultural artefacts, and social practices, have intrigued me ever since: banality, ecstasy, violence, dream states, the history of emotions, madness, the habitus of social codes, temperaments, ordinary virtues of governing rather than politics, and how the waltz and the ballroom conditioned modern love. All history, it turns out quite simply, is not the history of class struggle.

I also discovered this week, in Foucault’s Remarks on Marx, that I had absorbed an intellectual ethic from reading so many of Foucault’s texts. His better nature entered into my heart.

The role of the intellectual does not consist in telling others what they must do. What right would they have to do that? And remember all the prophecies, promises, injunctions, and programs that the intellectuals have managed to formulate in the course of the last two centuries. The job of an intellectual does not consist in moulding the political will of others. It is a matter of performing analyses in his or her own fields, of interrogating anew the evidence and the postulates, of shaking up habits, ways of acting and thinking, of dispelling commonplace beliefs, of taking a new measure of rules and institutions. . . . it is a matter of participating in the formation of a political will, where [the intellectual] is called to perform a role as citizen.

Michael Foucault, Remarks on Marx.

“Shaking up habits, ways of acting and thinking, of dispelling commonplace beliefs, of taking a new measure of rules and institutions”—these are the practices I try to adopt in my writing here on the Burning Archive. It is another way in which Foucault was an historian who made me.

After 1989, I left behind a career as an historian, however, and became a very, very minor government official for thirty-three years. That very, very complex experience put even more distance between me and Foucault, and between me and Marxism. I saw the government of institutions from the inside. I witnessed the corrupt abuses of unions, workers and the Left. I did so not from the back of the spectator stands in the “role of citizen” alone. I performed the role of a governing official. I came to see that so many intellectuals, including Foucault, failed to practise their injunctions of intellectual discipline when it came to offering opinions about life within government. They had no experience. They sneered at my social role. And they knew nothing, John Snow. Absolutely nothing. But that is another story which I relate in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat.

I remained in my private and family life and through my government roles very much involved in the governing of mental illness in its many forms. I had deep and wide encounters with the very real dilemmas of caring for people with mental illness and negotiating how public institutions manage the good, bad and ugly of mental illness, psychiatry, psychology and the common mores of all three. Foucault’s rhapsodic prose offered nothing helpful or even terribly insightful for these dilemmas. I largely forgot Foucault’s ideas, even though I never forgot Foucault’s guiding political and historical emotion: to give the experience of madness a voice.

In the last few years, I have done several videos on my experiences with Foucault and madness, in early, middle and late life.

In this video, I actually read sections of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization that inspired me four decades and some ago.

In this video, I explained my thoughts about Foucault, identity politics, and the social transformations of liquid modernity in more detail. I am planning to remake this podcast in video format shortly with some additions and amendments.

And in this video, I discuss Foucault’s and alternative best books on the history of madness and mental illness.

Why I Am Not A Marxist

Finally, let me return to Nel Bonilla’s question about my distempered “dismissal of the Marxist/Leninist timeline of empire.” I hope this piece gives you some understanding of the depth of my reaction to Marxist versions of history. But why was I so dismissive of Leninist theories of imperialism?

I confess I find Lenin to be a deeply unappealing man. He had an abhorrent violent, controlling personality and an atrocious prose style. Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train (2016), is a brilliant empathetic masterpiece portrait, if you get a chance to read it. However, Nel raises some good points that deserve responses, especially in the context of the ongoing dialogue, as part of this year of writing on decolonisation, about the nature of empire and its disintegration in contemporary conditions.

I agree with Nel’s comments about violence preceding the law and organised violence, although my understanding of Benton’s argument is that law and violence are mutually constitutive. Neither is primary. My summary of Benton may have over-emphasised Benton’s focus on the legality of coercion rather than the brutality of raiding, retributive and dehumanising violence.

On ideology and the qualitative shift from the mentality of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Western colonisers’ dualistic mentality, there is much to discuss. Nel comments that “we cannot discard ideology entirely in favor of legalism and institutions” and that a meta-ideology, based on Karl Mannheim’s concept, suppressed the “non-dichotomous, communal worldviews (and practices).” I agree a mental social world, which many call ideology, is part of the story of imperial rule. I tend not to think of it as ‘ideology,’ given the baggage of that concept as a form of false consciousness. However, I recognise that Mannheim’s and Nel’s concept of ideology is closer to my intuited sense of life world.

I am also intrigued by Nel’s thesis, which I hope to discuss with her, that

To understand the scale of these qualitative shifts, one example that comes to my mind is pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. In that era, wars and organized violence were not fought to exterminate; they were fought to capture and ritualize. The very weapons they developed were designed to harm and subdue, reflecting a non-dichotomous, communal worldview. (Which doesn’t mean all was great, but the point is about the qualitative change.) The European conquest replaced that with a Manichean, exterminatory meta-ideology. That is a qualitative societal and historical shift we cannot even comprehend for those affected.

Nel Bonilla

This situation was discussed in one of the Book Club’s early 2026 books, Cervantes, Conquistadores. I am, through habit, temperament and acquired methods, reluctant to posit meta-ideologies that assume dichotomous worldviews. I prefer explanations that assume more tangled, semi-fluid beliefs, emotions and social practices. But that is just me, and I welcome conversation about these ideas.

Indeed, there is another angle on this argument in the August book of the month, Lyndall Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: the German Peasants’ War. The German Peasants’ War in 1524-25 was “the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution.” Luther’s Reformation may have sparked the revolt, but Luther soon joined the conservative forces to crush this rebellion. Roper recovers the deep pulses of the revolt in the beliefs, emotions and life world of German peasants in the sixteenth century.

“The passions and dreams that drove the movement can seem inchoate, naïve, and contradictory. Though historians have tried to distil the movement’s ideology from the programmatic writings of some of its leaders, this was not a revolt driven by the literate few. It was a mass struggle by individuals who risked and lost their lives to try to bring about a new world.”

Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood, p. 4

In this violent uprising, and internal European conquest, the peasant mentalities were the central drivers and primary victims. Their life world was overwhelmed by the perhaps dualistic, perhaps more complex, meta-ideology of Germany’s ruling strata, which itself was undergoing the turmoil of the Reformation. Many thousands were killed, and the course of European history changed. It was eerily coincident with the clash between European Conquistadores and Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Indeed, Roper suggests the conflict was an echo and expression of the same historical forces.

“Despite the forces ranged against them, for most of the war the peasants were nonviolent; they humiliated but did not kill their lords. They questioned the established order at just the moment when capitalism was expanding and when Europeans were encountering new worlds, but they did not necessarily want to destroy authority of all kinds. Yet the authorities destroyed them, obliterated their movement, and built the structures of the current world on its ashes.

Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood, p. 4

This remarkable story has not attracted a history for forty years, not since before the end of the Cold War. One reason for that was the history of the German Peasants’ War became an ideological stomping ground for German nationalists and European Marxists, all the way back to Marx and Engels themselves.

In her concluding chapter on the historical legacy of the Peasants’ War, Roper makes criticisms of the Marxist historical tradition, especially its refusal to listen to or respect the voices of the leading actors of this revolt, and several revolutions over the next five hundred years in Europe, Asia and the Americas: the peasantry.

An unwillingness to theorise how peasants engaged in revolution was one of Marxism’s great failures. Classical Marxism was unable to imagine Maoism and a revolutionary peasantry and had no adequate account of the relationship between human beings and the environment.

Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood, p. 380

Not only did Marxism fail to understand the peasants; it failed to understand that fundamental part of all our history, emotions.

“Marx’s attraction to a scientific study of history also led him to reject idealism and, above all, emotion. . . . Marx’s suspicion of emotion also means that he accords little significance to the rebels’ dreams and hopes, or to what he termed their ‘ecstasy’, the experience of revolution which, I have insisted, is so central to the story of the German Peasants’ War.”

Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood, p. 380

The great theorist of revolution had no feeling for the entire human experience of revolution, and most of human history. He and his followers stripped history down to class struggle, material conditions, and the march of the ‘isms’ of capital, empire and social life.

In so far as I have a practice as an historian, it is to seek to grasp emotions and the enigmatic non-material experiences of human life.

That is why I am not and never will be a Marxist.

It is why I chose to forget Foucault, who mistook those universal daily experiences for radical transgressions reserved for Nietzschean supermen.

And it is also why, despite that way of being within history, I choose to converse with all who think differently, and are committed to dialogue, not dogma. And I know Nel Bonilla is, and I look forward to discussing these issues with her and with you over the coming months.

So why not join me for the Live Call on 31 July at 10:00 am Eastern Australian time to converse about these ideas as part of the history book club. Call details are available to paid subscribers in this post.

Thanks for reading and listening

Jeff

1. “Complicated” is the term that Emily Wilson chose to translate the description of Odysseus in the opening line of the Odyssey. I should have my review of the Nolan film out in the next few days.