Thinking the 20th Century with Michel Foucault

Despite being committed to a “history of the present,” Michel Foucault’s “own” present??”the 20th century??”seems to be curiously missing from his major works. Yet if one examines his interviews, papers, and courses, one can find in Foucault a genuine conception of the 20th century. He addresses Nazism, which he presents as sovereignty’s return from within biopolitics; the legitimation of politics through economics in postwar Europe; socialism and communism as 19th-century ideologies that nonetheless marked the course of the 20th century; the way in which the modernization project became archaic, notably in Third World countries like Iran; the “counter-meaning of May ’68; and, finally, the decline of the revolutionary idea in late 20th-century Europe. Two conclusions emerge from Foucault’s analyses of these events: the 20th century always seems to be “non-contemporaneous” with itself, always within the grips of a past from which it has yet to fully emancipate itself; and recognition that the century was marked by a politics aimed at conquering the state and using state power.