Foucault and France’s Liberal Moment

Abstract

Can one be a liberal without calling oneself a liberal? How constitutive is the speech act of declaring oneself a “liberal” to embracing a liberal politics? On the face of it, such a speech act is nothing more than a statement of identification: one affirms a connection between oneself and a set of beliefs, and nothing more. If so, there should be nothing fundamentally different between asserting one’s identity as a liberal and declaring oneself, say, a communist, an ecologist, or a born-again Christian. Yet, it is possible that in the act of self-identifying as a liberal, something else is going on. One is not simply stating a belief; one is saying something about one’s attitude toward belief. One is not simply expressing one’s identity; one is making a point about what one understands “identity” to be. To call oneself a liberal is to say that any belief—including one’s own—shares a pluralistic horizon with other plausible beliefs, and that the process of forging an identity is as meaningful and important as the particular identity one happens to settle upon. If so, it follows that the speech act of saying “I am a liberal” would (I submit, very hesitantly) be as constitutive to being a liberal as adhering to any number of philosophical positions or political commitments.