Leonard D’Cruz

Leonard D’Cruz (PhD in Philosophy, 2023) ‘Foucault and Normative Political Philosophy’

This thesis brings Michel Foucault’s work into dialogue with the tradition of normative political philosophy inaugurated by John Rawls. More specifically, it draws on Foucault’s ideas to develop an original approach to normative theorising that emphasises the importance of situated insights in reconstructing our normative political concepts. With this goal in mind, my thesis makes a systematic contribution to two distinct bodies of literature. First, it offers a critical account of Foucault’s underlying methodology. More specifically, it clarifies several controversial methodological questions that are frequently raised with respect to Foucault’s work. These include whether his historicist mode of critique successfully overcomes transcendental philosophy, whether his power-knowledge analytic is supported by a satisfying epistemology, and whether his normative commitments can be reflexively accounted for and then reconciled with his aspiration to develop a rigorous descriptive method. Second, it develops an original approach to normative political philosophy by leveraging these insights into Foucault’s methodology. I refer to my proposed framework as the situated approach to normative political philosophy. This approach conceives of normativity as immanent to power, and thus treats our normative concepts as pragmatic tools that we use to negotiate real contexts of action. In this way, I argue that normative political philosophy needs to become more sensitive to the way our normative standards and processes of justification have been shaped by relations of power.

On this basis, I suggest that my broadly Foucauldian approach offers an improvement on both the dominant paradigm of ideal theory as well as the resurgent tradition of political realism. In this way, I attempt to push Foucault’s work towards a more systematic approach to normative political questions concerning distributive justice and state legitimacy. As part of this effort, I will locate the situated approach in relation to recent methodological debates in analytic political philosophy. These debates cover a significant amount of ground, including a) the question of whether ideal theory can guide action; b) whether ideal theory is sufficiently critically reflexive; c) disputes over the nature of political normativity and its relationship to morality; and d) the role that general principles should play in framing specific political situations. With respect to these questions, my goal is to show how the situated approach constitutes an improvement on its main methodological alternatives within normative political philosophy.

Supervisors: Dr Andrew Inkpin, Dr Knox Peden