A warning from history. On 17th December 2020 Liz Truss outed herself as a Foucauldian. We are now living with the results
On 17th December 2020 then Equalities Minister Liz Truss launched a Tory Culture War on equalities.
It didn’t of course actually say much specific except that the Tories plan to end unconscious bias training in the Civil Service. They still do. These things take time…
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/fight-for-fairness
One entertaining passage referred to the late French philosopher Michel Foucault who died in 1984.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
Unfortunately the reference to Foucault was deemed to be party political and not allowed in an official speech and cut from the version now on-line in what we now can now understand as a typical Truss refusal to conform to accepted protocols.
Foucault was a student of another French philosopher Louis Althusser, the nemesis of English Marxist historian E P Thompson. Indeed in the Poverty of Theory, Thompson’s attack on Althusser, Foucault does get a passing mention.
Thompson is critical of both Althusser and Foucault’s structuralism. He argued:
One can study how concepts are engendered one after the other within determined categories. But neither time itself nor, consequently history, can be made the object of a concept’
Thompson’s point is that it is not structures but people that make history.
Truss’s argument was that equalities agendas have focused too much on polices and statements and not enough on grappling with the problems faced by individual people.
Perhaps but that doesn’t mean the policies need to be abandoned. They are there as a way of holding power to account if it doesn’t actually act on them.
Judging by the very unequal composition of employees in Truss’s own department it could be a good place to start.
Truss on Foucault
“While we were taught about racism and sexism, there was too little time spent making sure everyone could read and write.
“These ideas have their roots in postmodernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault – that puts societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.
“In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view – truth and morality are all relative.
“Rather than promote policies that would have been a game-changer for the disenfranchised like better education and business opportunities, there was a preference for symbolic gestures.”
In her 44 days in Office as Prime Minister it turned out that Truss was actually a Foucauldian. How else to explain the economic wreckage she created but by being someone whose own views triumphed over objective reality
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