Power and right in Nietzsche and Foucault

International Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2004, Pages

  Patton, Paul ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33748976148     PISSN: 02705664     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/intstudphil2004363150     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Tom Keenan, "The 'Paradox' of Knowledge and Power: Reading Foucault on a Bias," Political Theory 15, no. 1 (February 1987): 23-24
2. Kenneth Baynes, "Rights as Critique and the Critique of Rights: Karl Marx, Wendy Brown, and the Social Function of Rights," Political Theory 28, no. 4 (August 2000): 452
3. Duncan Ivison, The Self at Liberty: Political Argument and the Arts of Government (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), p. 41
4. Ivison, p. 42
5. In "The Subject and Power," Foucault writes: "To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others" (EW 3: 341)
6. See also François Ewald's comments on the possibility of a Foucauldian philosophy of law and the manner in which Western legal systems draw support for their most general principles from their own history in "Une Expérience Foucauldienne: Les Principes Généraux du Droit," Critique 471-72 (août-septembre 1986): 788-93
7. References are to numbered paragraphs in the translation by Hugh Tredennick in E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, eds., Plato: The Collected Dialogues (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961.)
8. I comment further on the connections between honor, pride and the feeling of power in "Nietzsche and Hobbes," International Studies in Philosophy, 33, no. 3 (Fall 2001): especially 110-16
9. A further illustration of the applicability of this account of the rights of nations may be found in Robert Kagan's argument that the differences in approach to foreign policy between Europe and the US should be understood in terms of their relative power: "When the United States was weak, it practiced the strategies of indirection, the strategies of weakness; now that the United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do. When the European powers were strong, they believed in strength and martial glory. Now, they see the world through the eyes of weaker powers. These very different points of view, weak versus strong, have naturally produced differing strategic judgments, different assessments of threats and of the proper means of addressing threats, and even differing calculations of interest." See Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003), pp. 10-11
10. Originally published as "Power and Weakness," Policy Review, no. 113 (2002): 3. Available online at [http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan- print. html]
11. The context and rationale for this right are spelled out in "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," September 17, 2002, available online at [http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nssall.html]
12. This characterization of Nietzsche's naturalism is indebted to Richard Schacht's excellent essay "Nietzschean Normativity," in Schacht, ed., Nietzsche's Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche's Prelude to Philosophy's Future (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 149-80
13. Recent feminist legal and political theorists have drawn attention to the relational character of rights. For a summary of some of this work, see Virginia Held, "Feminism and Political Theory" in Robert L. Simon, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Social and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), especially pp. 160-65
14. Jacques Derrida, "Declarations of Independence," in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 46-54
15. Keenan:23
16. Richard Rorty follows Judith Shklar in defining a liberal as someone who believes that cruelty to others is the worst thing that we do. Cruelty here should be understood in a broad sense to include all forms of causing or allowing others to suffer. It follows that this is something that a liberal will strive to eliminate (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989], p. xv)
17. Rorty defends the human rights culture which has become entrenched in Western political discourse since the second half of the 20th century in these terms in "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality" (Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers; Volume 3 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998], pp. 167-85)