Thinking the Twentieth Century with Michel Foucault

Despite being committed to a "history of the present", Michel Foucault's "own" present-the twentieth century - seems to be curiously missing from his major works. Yet if one examines his interviews, interventions, and courses, one can find in Foucault a genuine conception of the twentieth 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 nineteenth-century ideologies that nonetheless marked the course of the twentieth 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 twentieth century Europe. Two conclusions emerge from Foucault's analyses of these events: the twentieth century seems always "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.