Contingent Product Of Contingently Existing Forces [131]

Richard Rorty
The attempt to break down the distinction between the private and the public sphere is characteristic of a long–standing tradition in social philosophy. This is the tradition which, with Plato, sees society as man writ large. Most philosophers in this tradition try to isolate some central, ahistorical, noncontingent core (e.g., "reason" or "a specifically moral motivation") within us, and to use the presence of this element within us as a justification for certain political arrangements, certain social institutions. Foucault inverts this attempt. Since he sees human subjectivity as a contingent product of contingently existing forces, he does not believe that there is any such ahistorical noncontingent core. So he concludes, at least in his anarchist moments, that every social institution is equally unjustifiable, that all of them are on a par. All of them exert "normalizing power." From the failure of the Platonic attempt to find something deep within us which will let us answer Thrasymachus, he comes close to concluding that there is no interesting difference between Pericles and Critias.