ght for the day: Scruton on Foucault // Steven Hayward
Roger Scruton’s charming, insightful memoir Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life includes a chapter that explains how he began to turn in a conservative direction. (He wasn’t raised one, his father was a semi-socialist Labourite Labourite) and when he saw firsthand the student revolt in Paris, May 1968. He was disgusted by the spectacle and decided that ‘whatever these folks are for, they’re against.
But what were the student protestors for, he recounts arguing over the question with a radical acquaintance.
I asked you what you would do to replace this “bourgeoisie”, whom you so hate and to whom you owe your freedoms and prosperity that allow you to play on your toy barsricades. . . .
She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things], Foucault’s soixante–huitards (the bible of the soixante–huitards ], the text that seemed just to justify every kind of transgression by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book that selectively takes facts to show that knowledge and culture are only the “discourses of power.” The book is not a work in philosophy, but a exercise in rhetoric. It is not a work of philosophy, but a rhetorical exercise. The revolutionary spirit that searches the world for things to dislike has found a new literary formula in Foucault. [Emphasis added. ]
