The History and Critique of Modernity:

Dewey with Foucault against Weber

To Appear In:
Paul Fairfield (ed.), Dewey and Continental Philosophy

Colin Koopman, University of California at Santa Cruz
cwkoopman@gmail.com


Interpreting and Criticizing Modernity
In bringing the philosophical traditions of pragmatism and genealogy to bear upon
contemporary debates regarding modernity, the work of both John Dewey and Michel
Foucault has been subjected to misinterpretations that portray both traditions in a way
that depletes them of the full force of their critical insight. The source of these
misinterpretations is in many cases an attempt to squeeze the philosophical projects of
pragmatism and genealogy into the mold that shapes the thought of most participants on
both sides of the modernity debates. This mold can usually be traced back to the work of
the influential sociologist, political economist, and philosopher Max Weber. One
unfortunate residue of the subtle dominance of Weberian concepts in contemporary
debates over modernity is that many thinkers who operated largely outside of these
1
concepts cannot be brought into these debates without filtering their thought through this
conceptual prism. In the case of Dewey and Foucault, their contributions to our
understanding of the basic problems of modernity are widely misunderstood due to being
filtered through Weberian concepts that simply were not central in Deweys or Foucaults
thinking.
Weber was an extraordinarily complex thinker. This helps explain why his
interpretation of modernity has proven capacious enough to provide fuel for both pro-
modern optimists and anti-modern pessimists. But it is important to be precise here.
Webers interpretation justifies either pro-modernism or anti-modernism and yet never
both at the same time. Where Dewey and Foucault are interpreted through the Weberian
prism, the usual result is to assimilate their critical stances on modernity to either side of
this familiar for or against debate. Thus Dewey is often read as a resolutely optimistic
modern thinker whose thought warrants comparison to Habermass defense of modernity.
And Foucault is read from the opposite perspective as a decidedly pessimistic anti-
modern whose thought can be usefully compared to such thoroughgoing attacks on
modernity as those given by Adorno or Heidegger. But I want to suggest that Dewey and
Foucault were operating outside of the orbit of Webers understanding of the basic
problems of modernity and that this point of convergence is significant insofar as in both
cases it is part of a broad interpretation of modernity which enables an alternative
evaluation of modernity that cuts across all of the familiar either for or against positions
which have left the current debates rather vacuous. Dewey and Foucault were complexly
both for and against modernity. This more complex view leads in turn to a more
effective critical stance than that mounted by Webers approach. My claim, importantly,
2
is not that Webers work on modernity is burdened by a cognitive defect which Dewey
and Foucault could help us to repair, but rather that Webers work is burdened by a
critical deficit which Dewey and Foucault enable us to overcome. Weber did not get
modernity wrong so much as he left us without any effective means to develop the better
aspects of modernity whilst also resisting its worse parts.
This essay attempts to more sharply define these points of contrast. My
arguments here can be summarized as follows. Weber offered a sociological portrait of
modernity in which the differentiation of value-spheres is the major thrust of modernity.
Weber thus saw modernity in terms of the differentiation of such spheres as science and
politics followed by the tendency toward the bureaucratization of each. Those working
within Webers interpretation of modernity either celebrate the basic modern project of
differentiation or mourn the lost unity and hope for some future reunification. Dewey
and Foucault, by contrast, offered an intellectual historical portrait of modernity which
focused not on the differentiation of sociological spheres but on the purification of
separate modes of thinking. Dewey and Foucault should be read as responding to a
modernity whose basic contrast is that between Enlightenment and Romanticism as
described by intellectual historians such as Arthur Lovejoy and Isaiah Berlin.
1
The
paradigmatic forms of these two modern currents of thought are utilitarianism and
romanticism. While present throughout modernity, utilitarianism and romanticism
ascended to prominence over the course of the nineteenth century such that today we

1
The contrast between Enlightenment and Romanticism is given central place by many important
intellectual historians. Exemplary for my approach are Berlin (1960, 1965, 1975) and Lovejoy (1936). See
also Maurice Mandelbaum (1971), Hayden White (1973), Charles Taylor (1989), David Hollinger (2001),
and taking a much longer view see Harold Blooms (2004) description of Homeric cognitivism and Hebraic
spiritualism as the two great forces of Western wisdom
3
might refer to each as indispensable for modernity. It follows from their indispensability
that any historical-philosophical evaluation of modernity must be able to accommodate
both. Dewey and Foucault painstakingly labored to show that modernity has thus far
accommodated both by means of a process which I call purificationour tendency to
hold apart utility and romance, reason and imagination, sociality and individuality, public
and private. Dewey and Foucault sought to elaborate an alternative means of
accommodating these two currents of thought which I call experimentationon this
model utility and romance would no longer be opposed currents of thought but would
rather be alternative tendencies whose internal tensions it is our task as moderns to
explore.
By distancing Dewey and Foucault from Weber as concerns their interpretations
of modernity a significant point begins to emerge: a hitherto unnoticed convergence
between pragmatism and genealogy. This convergence is significant because
comparative analyses of pragmatism and genealogy, like those of these two traditions and
Weber described above, generally tend to miss the important points of resonance which
prove these traditions much closer than is commonly thought.
2
After explicating Weber,
Dewey, and Foucault I will conclude my discussion by considering briefly the attractive
philosophical possibilities of combing Deweys work on inquiry as reconstructive
problem-solving with Foucaults work on critique as genealogical problematization.


2
The most important of this work is that of Richard Rorty (1981a), but see also discussions by Cornel West
(1989), Thomas McCarthy in Hoy and McCarthy (1994), John Patrick Diggins (1994), James Marshall
(1994), Jim Garrison (1998), and Todd May (2004).
4
Weber on Modernity
There is much to be learned from Max Webers sociological interpretations of
modernity. I will here focus on those interpretations only insofar as they can be read as
representative of a very typical misinterpretation of modernity. While there are certainly
other quite provocative and interesting ways of reading Weber, the view which continues
to hold dominance over contemporary interpretations of modernity is that which
emphasizes the familiar Weberian theme of differentiation and such of its implications as
rationalization and bureaucratization.
3

Webers extraordinarily rich interpretation of modernity is above all distinguished
by his strong claim that [o]ur age is characterized by rationalization.
4
Weber
understood the process of rationalization as locking us into an iron cage which
inextricably binds our era to the technical and economic conditions of machine
production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this
mechanism.
5
But Weber also thought that rationalization presents us with unique
opportunities, precarious though they may be: The fate of an epoch which has eaten of
the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world

3
Recent revisionist scholarship notwithstanding, the best of which is Lawrence Scaff (1989) and Wilhelm
Hennis (1987), most theorists continue to interpret Webers theory of modernity according to the classic
terms of rationalizing differentiation-cum-bureaucratization established by Karl Lwith (1932), Reinhard
Bendix (1960), and above all Talcott Parsons (1937). See Richard Swedberg (2003, 2005) on the current
state of Weber scholarship. My presentation of Weber here is not so much an attempt at fine-grained
Weber scholarship as it is an attempt to dispute the central Weberian theses which continue to exert
tremendous influence on political philosophy and intellectual history. I leave it to others to show how the
thought of Weber can today be reinterpreted so as to yield better resultsmy project is merely to cast doubt
on a certain Weberianism dominant in contemporary histories and critiques of modernity.
4
Weber 1919, 30
5
Weber 1905, 181; cf. Weber 1923, 354.
5
from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to
create this meaning itself.
6

There is a basic ambiguity in Webers thought which enables critics as different in
temper as pro-modern celebrants and anti-modern skeptics to take up their philosophical
and political criticisms of modernity within his common interpretive framework.
Webers concept of rationalization contains both an idea of the proliferation of
instrumental rationality and an idea of the expansion of self-assertive free thinking. On
the one hand modern rationalization seems to promise autonomy while on the other hand
it seems to deliver us to obedience. Thus Alan Sica notes a Faustain bargain in Weber
while Fritz Ringer describes the two faces of Webers evaluation of modernity.
7
James
Kloppenberg succinctly captures this basic duality in Webers thought: In one sense
disenchantment meant decline, because it robbed man of confidence. But in another
sense, it meant progress, because it opened the door to unprecedented autonomy.
8

Which is the real meaning of modernity? It is difficult to say. But perhaps it is not as
important to determine which interpretation better reflects the facts as it is to recognize
the underlying presuppositions which animate both interpretations. At the bottom of both
estimations of rationalization is a separation between a certain picture of scientific
technicization and a certain picture of political emancipation, that is a separation between
the categories of objective control and subjective freedom in which Lawrence Scaff
and others find a central tension in Webers thought.
9
This process of separation-cum-
development can help explain why pro-moderns can celebrate Weberian modernity (they

6
Weber 1904, 57
7
Sica 2000, 56 and Ringer 2004, 220
8
Kloppenberg 1986, 345
9
Scaff 2000, 103
6
recognize in it the basic promise of a rationalizing world) at the same time that anti-
moderns can mourn Weberian modernity (they see in rationalization the promise of
disenchantment and the impending demise of mystical moods).
This core theme of the separation of technicization and emancipation is disclosed
in Webers concept of differentiation, to which he once strikingly referred with his
famous metaphor of the modern parceling-out of the soul.
10
Differentiation refers to
the modern tendency to splinter off from one another the various value-spheres such as
science and politics. As value-spheres get increasingly differentiated powerful modes of
thought are opened up whereby each domain can push its immanent logic to its furthest
limits. This enables an unprecedented development of rationality in all spheres at the
seemingly small cost of the isolation of each mode of practice from every another.
In contemporary deployments of Webers interpretation of modernity, the idea of
differentiation is marshaled to explain the increasing dissociation of, in particular, the two
value-spheres of science and politics. The increasingly autonomous character of these
value-spheres was discussed at length by Weber in his two Vocation Lectures.
11
The
distinction implicitly drawn in these lectures is not aimed at showing that scientific-
instrumental rationalization is necessarily opposed to political-emancipatory
rationalization. Weber was rather concerned to show that the spheres of science and
politics are merely separable insofar as each is capable of autonomous development. It is
this fact of autonomous internal development which Weber above all else marked as
distinctive of modernity: technicization and emancipation are disconnected in a way that
seems to promise an unprecedented development of each. It is true that this condition

10
On the complicated textual context of this metaphor see Sica (2000, 53).
11
Weber (1917, 1919)
7
ultimately drives us toward the conflict between the gods implicit in Webers claim
that the different value systems of the world are caught up in an insoluble struggle with
one another.
12
But for Weber this fact of modern pluralism was not nearly as important
as the differentiations giving rise to it.
Differentiation on the whole can be understood in terms of the external face of
bureaucratization which is symptomatic of an internal process of rationalization. David
Owen and Tracy Strong claim that [b]ureaucracy is thus the front of a great historical
process of rationalization.
13
Bureaucratization and rationalization thus together form the
core of the interpretation of modernity which Weber has bequeathed to much of
twentieth-century critical theory. This iron-fisted image offers a seductive picture of
modernity as an age where an ambiguous rationality comes to increasingly gather
everything under its unified purview even if this rationality itself is necessarily
differentiated in its various deployments. Weber thus beautifully portrayed that familiar
image of modernity as the unity of reason in the diversity of its voices.
This helps explain why pro-moderns and anti-moderns are both able to use
Webers interpretation of modernity as a basis upon which to articulate their conflicting
evaluations of modernity. While some witness differentiation as a legitimate move which
today only requires piecemeal adjustment others regard it as signaling the demise of
emancipation as modernity is increasingly swept up by promises of technicization. This
suggests that pro-moderns and anti-moderns embrace all the same dualisms: reason
versus imagination, intellect versus will, sameness versus difference, social versus
individual, technicization versus emancipation. The only difference is that each side

12
Weber 1917, 27, 22; see commentary by Raymond Aron (1959, 360-72).
13
Owen and Strong 2004, lvi
8
inverts the privileges the other accords to either pole of these dualisms. As Bruno Latour
states, [e]xcept for the plus or minus sign, moderns and antimoderns share all the same
convictions.
14
This series of basic contrasts, so easily and so often inflated into
dichotomies, should be the focal point of attempts to evaluate the viability of Webers
interpretation of modernity. The central question concerns whether or not Webers
interpretation of modernity as an era of differentiation locks us into these contrasts or
provides a means for thinking beyond them. My argument is that Webers theory forces
us to leave modernity more or less where he finds it. It is, in other words, critically
debilitating.
This central problem in the Weberian frame is exemplified on both sides of the
familiar debates between the pro-moderns and anti-moderns. The opposition between
Habermas and Derrida, for example, reflects the Weberian assumptions which typically
separate pro-moderns from anti-moderns.
15
If Derrida is concerned to blur the very lines
between philosophy and literature which Habermas strives to sharpen, then already both
positions are framed in Weberian terms of differentiation, which Derrida is against and
Habermas is for. In working from a Weberian starting point, whether consciously or not,
such critics of modernity risk descending into reductive interpretations of modernity
which can only yield simplistic for or against evaluations. This shows not that the work
of Habermas and Derrida is essentially incorrect. It shows rather that thought that is so
fecund can be rendered so barren by hewing to an interpretation of modernity that is all
too often unquestioningly accepted. In order to adopt a properly critical relationship to

14
Latour 1991, 123
15
While the Derrida-Habermas debates have been much discussed, two particularly helpful evaluations are
those of Richard Bernstein (1991) and David Hoy (1989).
9
modernity we must first adopt a critical relationship to modernitys interpretation of
itselfwhich means getting away from a certain picture of modernity for which Weber is
representative.

Deweys and Foucaults Alternative to Weberian Sociology
In focusing on modernity, pragmatism and genealogy have together departed from
the sociological style of interpretation of which Weber is representative in favor of a
more intellectual historical style of interpretation. This difference emerges as crucial
when one moves on to develop critical evaluations of modernity on the basis of differing
descriptive interpretations. Those working with Webers interpretation tend to evaluate
modernity in terms of sociological categories such as science, politics, religion, and art.
This too often leads to generalizing evaluations to the effect that science is good or
religion is dangerous. Such views are rarely helpful because scientific and religious
practices are often too complex for these canonical sociological boxes. Those working
with Deweys and Foucaults interpretation would do better to focus instead on currents
of thought and styles of practice such as utilitarianism, romanticism, rationalism, and
mysticism. These currents of thought cut across familiar sociological distinctions. There
are utilitarians and romantics in science, in politics, in religion, and in art. It is easy to
generalize here too. But in turning from interpretation to evaluation, focusing on currents
of thought enables us to distinguish what we like in scientific and religious practices from
what we find troublesome. This means we can stop worshipping and castigating
sociologically-defined categories such as science and religion in favor of a more complex
argument to the effect that scientists and religions ought to play up some aspect of their
10
practices whilst playing down other aspects. I will not here engage in this sort of
evaluative work in order to concentrate instead on explicating the interpretations of
modernity offered by Foucault and Dewey.
Genealogists like Nietzsche and Foucault are, and not without some warrant,
represented by most critics as firmly in the camp of the anti-modern pessimists.
Countless commentators have suggested that Foucault intensifies all of the key problems
formulated by Weber and thus leaves us impotent. The standard line is that whereas
Weber saw modern rationalization as an iron cage Foucault saw it as a something like
an iron cave which we cannot even see we are in let alone see our way out of. Indeed it
is difficult not to hear the retroactive echo of Discipline and Punish when reading the
passages on discipline in Economy and Society.
16
Such echoes have led commentators as
insightful as Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus to claim that Foucaults work should be
seen as an advance, not a refutation of the Weberian project insofar as he inherits
Webers concern with rationalization and objectification as the essential trend of our
culture and the most important problem of our time.
17
Rabinow and Dreyfus here make
explicit a tacit assumption at work in much of Foucault criticism, both friendly and
hostile. The assumption is that Foucault engages modernity to respond to the basic
problem of differentiation paradigmatically formulated by Weber.
18

Rather than expressing what is really valuable in Foucault, this common
interpretation instead reflects just how pervasive the Weberian framework is for

16
See Foucault (1975) and Weber (1964, 1148-1156).
17
Rabinow and Dreyfus 1982, 133, 166; in recent work Rabinow reiterates this interpretation (2003).
18
See work by John ONeill (1986), Peter Dews (1987), Colin Gordon (1987), Bryan Turner (1987), David
Owen (1994), and Arpd Szakolczai (1998); for an excellent account of why Foucault should not be read in
Weberian light see Mitchell Dean (1994).
11
contemporary historical interpretations and critical evaluations of modernity. There are
at least two difficulties yielded by reading Foucault through Weber. First, it is tough to
square Webers image of value-sphere differentiation with Foucaults presentation of the
increasing interlacing of power and knowledge in modernity. This is an example of how
reading Foucault as a Weberian would expose Foucaults own thought to many of the
traps which it was designed to point out. One of Foucaults most enduring points was
that the core political problems of our day should not be described in terms of reunifying
the differentiated modes of knowledge and power because this would merely be a call for
more of the same. A second difficulty for reading Foucault as a Weberian is that it makes
Foucault seem far less unique than he really is. Is Foucault really just one more protestor
in a long line of intellectuals chanting the familiar mantras of anti-modernity? Foucault
was certainly critical of modernity, but at the same time he positively embraced what he
saw as its most valuable tendencies. Foucault was both for and against modernity.
Rabinow claims that that Foucault did not proceed by opposing modernity to post-
modernity, but by opposing modernity to counter-modernity, such that his parrhesiastic
practice was simultaneously modern and counter-modern.
19
What I am suggesting is that
Rabinow is right to see Foucault as both modern and counter-modern, and that this sort of
complex critical evaluation of modernity simply cannot be made sense of within the usual
Weberian frame that so thoroughly dominates contemporary thought about modernity,
counter-modernity, and post-modernity.
Turning now to pragmatism, the interpretive situation is a little different, but no
better for it. When pragmatism is not altogether neglected by those engaged in the

19
Rabinow 1994, 197; cf. Rabinow and Dreyfus (1986).
12
modernity debates, it is usually denounced as either a celebratory philosophy proclaiming
all the benefits of the modern age or as a profoundly relativistic doctrine out of step with
modern progress. Both of these caricatures borrow much from Weber and gather
relatively little from Dewey. As for explicit comparative research on Weber and Dewey,
there has been surprisingly little work here. The important exception is James
Kloppenbergs skillful attempt to establish important points of connection between
Weber and Dewey. Kloppenberg finds the most important point of overlap in Dewey and
Webers shared view that differentiating rationalization is the central problem of
modernity.
20
Kloppenberg goes on to detail their divergence in terms of Deweys
optimism and Webers pessimism in the face of this rationalization. While not
discounting other similarities between Weber and Dewey concerning ethics and
epistemology which Kloppenberg has helpfully explicated,
21
I wish to call into question
his claim for a more basic point of convergence in terms of their supposedly shared
interpretation of modernity. We simply cannot make sense of Deweys most central
commitments if we see him as responding to problems that were not really his but
Webers. Weber sees modernity as haunted by a series of divisions which Dewey may
indeed have found troubling had he not confronted modern culture as problematized by a
more basic dichotomy. Weber saw modernity as split between science and morality, but
Dewey saw modernity as split between utilitarian rationality and romantic pathos.
Deweys view enabled him to move beyond many of those critically-debilitating

20
Kloppenberg 1986, 349-94. In the only other comparative works on Dewey and Weber of which I am
aware, Emirbayer (2005) rather loosely argues my point, Roederer (2000) concedes my point within an
account which explicitly aims to build on Kloppenberg, while Diggins (1999) compares Dewey and Weber
very quickly in only summary terms.
21
Kloppenberg 1994, 82-99
13
categories which have haunted so much of modern thought, including Webers. This
helps explain why Weber retained many of the dichotomies which Dewey thoroughly
rejected (for instance, that between facts and values).
22

What I am claiming is that Deweys pragmatism should not be seen as an attempt
to reunify the scientific and political spheres of experience, which is what Kloppenberg,
Martin Jay, and numerous other intellectual historians of pragmatism have argued.
23

Deweys pragmatism is better seen as attempting to develop a conscious integration of
utilitarian and romantic styles of thought. On the traditional interpretation, Dewey is
presented as championing something called scientific method which supposedly stands in
contrast to differentiated spheres of activity such as art, morality, and politics.
24
But
when Dewey spoke highly of science, he was not thinking of a separable sphere of human
culture, because, after all, he would have agreed with Foucault that science gets practiced
alongside of politics.
25
Dewey, rather, was thinking of an attitude which he found
exemplified in certain early modern scientists, but also in certain artists, politicians,
novelists, and everyday people. This is the attitude of experimentalism and it was
Deweys alternative to brazen celebrations of pure utility and pure romance. Deweys
concern was not that modernity had parsed itself out into a good science over here and a
bad morality over there, but rather that the attitude of experimentalism had not
sufficiently taken hold throughout the great variety of our modern practices including our
modern scientific practices. Dewey was interested in generalizing an isolated mode of

22
In the two other comparative works on Dewey and Weber of which I am aware, Emirbayer (2005) rather
loosely argues my point while Roederer (2000) concedes my point within an account which explicitly aims
to build on Kloppenberg; Diggins (1999) compares Dewey and Weber only but only summarily.
23
See Kloppenberg (1986) and Jay (2005)
24
Helpful discussions of the charge of scientism in Dewey include those by Thayer (1968, 165ff.),
Hollinger (1980, 29ff.), and Kloppenberg (1986, 383ff.).
25
See, for one of countless examples, Dewey (1939).
14
experience thus far present only in the scientists laboratories. Rather, he was interested
in reconstructing experience in terms of currents of thought which he thought could reach
throughout modern consciousness. Dewey was not interested in praising a differentiated
bureaucracy of science, but rather an experimentalism for which science had provided
many, but certainly not the only, exemplars. Only on this view can we understand why in
addition to certain scientific practices, Dewey also championed certain aesthetic,
religious, political, and ethical practices. Dewey found in each of these the seeds of an
experimentalism that he hoped could flower forth practically anywhere.
Dewey and Foucault should not be read through the prism of Weberian concepts.
Dewey and Foucault never argued that power and knowledge, expressions of the
supposedly differentiated value-spheres of politics and science, ought not to be separated.
They argued that the two had never been separated. Modernity as Weber described it had
never taken place. As such, Dewey and Foucault never urged a reunification of the
various modalities of experience split off into various differentiated value-spheres.
Rather, they responded by urging the adoption of a critical attitude which both of them
often referred to as experimentalism.

Dewey on Modernity
My approach to pragmatism takes as one of its points of departure Richard
Rortys fertile suggestion that we think of pragmatism as romantic utilitarianism.
26


26
See numerous works by Rorty (1998a, 1998b, 2004). Similar interpretations of pragmatism as between
romanticism and utilitarian positivism have been offered by James Livingston (1994, 2001), Thelma Lavine
(1991, 1995), and H.S. Thayer (1968). Notable is George Herbert Meads view in his impressive
intellectual history, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, where he explicitly contrasts
15
Rortys image of pragmatism as an experimentalism which integrates romantic and
utilitarian currents of thought captures what is best in the work of John Dewey. Seen in
this way, the tradition of pragmatism should be understood as an attempt to further that
experimental project of forging productive new relations among modernitys utilitarian
and romantic tendencies.
In books such as The Quest for Certainty and Reconstruction in Philosophy,
Dewey describes modernity as held captive by a process of purification which rigorously
divides reason from its others.
27
Dewey here and elsewhere details the philosophical
quest for certainty which emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as
truth was increasingly identified with the condition of subjective certainty. Although this
quest is unique to modernity, it is central to Deweys argument that it institutes no deep
breaks from the ambition for transcendence that has characterized philosophy since its
beginnings. In ancient thought, purity was figured as the self-identity of eternity. In
medieval philosophy, the purity standard was similarly articulated as a divine force to
which human reason and imagination should chain themselves. In modern thought,
purity is relocated in the unassailability of mental certainty. The ongoing quest for
certainty simply revamped the ancient and medieval quests for purity in the light of the
subjectivism of the modern age. Going forward into the nineteenth century we witness
the full and final solidification of the quest for certainty as the currents of utilitarianism
and romanticism assumed cultural ascendance. What the simultaneous ascendance of
these two opposed currents of thought signals is the meticulous purification of two modes

pragmatism to the conception of inquiry common to the Romantic idealists and the rationalists according
to which knowledge is a simple getting of the nature of the world (1936, 344).
27
Dewey (1929, 1920)
16
of direct contact with truth. Certainty is enthroned as both a form of reason and a form of
intuition or imagination. Dewey summarized this picture of modernity in his description
of Kant as striving after cognitive certainty in the region of phenomena, practical
certainty in the realm of moral authority.
28

The question for certainty thus entails a separation of pure reason from its others.
This separation is the specific problem situation to which Dewey addressed his
pragmatism. Without this historical interpretation of the central problem of modernity as
its backdrop, much of Deweys thought remains difficult to understand. But with this
backdrop in place, many of his most central concepts can be clarified. For example, this
backdrop throws into clear relief Deweys attempt in his Ethics to reconstruct ethical
practice in such a way that would bring together the insights of the utilitarian focus on
instrumental rationality and the deontological focus on an active and spontaneous faculty
of reason virtually indistinguishable from romantic imagination.
29
Here as elsewhere,
Dewey should be read as responding to a modernity in which the central problem we face
is the separation not between two sociological spheres of experience but between two
moods of prosaic utilitarianism and poetic romanticism.
The central problem of modernity which emerges from Deweys writings is that
of the basic contrast, urged by utilitarians and romantics alike, between pure utility and
pure romance. From this there follows a whole train of invidious philosophical
distinctions that Dewey finds misguided: reason versus imagination, sociality versus
individuality, public versus private. As Dewey saw it in The Quest for Certainty such
various attempts at purification are motivated by a yearning for benefits bestowed by

28
Dewey 1929, 49
29
Dewey (1932)
17
powers that transcend our mere humanity. It is above all against this philosophical
thematic, and the modern figure of certainty which has been its outward face, that
pragmatism was written. Rorty nicely captures pragmatisms quintessential skepticism
toward the idea that there exist extra-human powers which we mere humans ought to try
and get in touch with: The problem with both universalist metaphors of grandeur and
romantic metaphors of depth is that they suggest that a practical proposal, whether
conservative or radical in character, can gain strength by being tied in with something not
merely humansomething like the intrinsic nature of reality or the uttermost depths of
the human soul.
30
The promises of grandeur and depth have been exciting for both
romantics and utilitariansthe spirit of purity pervades modern thought in both of its
major currents and the further each is pursued the more refined is its purification. It
follows from all of this, however, that the category most central to Deweys own
experimentalism, uncertainty, has been widely absent from most forms of utilitarianism
and romanticism. Deweys experimentalism should thus be seen as an alternative that
negotiates around both utility and romance which is to say that pragmatism is, to borrow
from Rorty once again, an alternative to both universalism and romanticism.
31

All of this helps explain why the charges of scientism and aestheticism imputed to
various pragmatists by their most hostile critics fail to capture crucial elements of
pragmatist experimentalism. These crucial elements, I have argued, are likely to be
overlooked if one understands pragmatism as attempting to come to terms with the kind
of modernity described by Weber. Pragmatists understand politics and sciencepower
and knowledge, value and factas reciprocal. Experimentalism is thus not operative

30
Rorty 2004, 137
31
Rorty 2004, 136
18
only in science (the scientism imputed to Dewey) or only in literature (the aestheticism
imputed to Rorty and sometimes James). Once we start experimenting on any broad
scale it turns out that science, aesthetics, and politics grow increasingly indistinguishable.
Experimentalism must therefore work across power and knowledge at once as a quality
operative throughout culture. The purest forms of utilitarianism and romanticism have
rooted themselves in just this waypurity has been operative simultaneously in
epistemic and political practice. Pragmatists interpret modernity as a series of decisive
transformations reverberating throughout all of culturethe purification of reason and
imagination that empties from each the corruptions of the other is a culture-wide project
occurring in legislatures and laboratories simultaneously and with reciprocal benefit to
both. The response to such a modernity bent on purification cannot be the expansion of
an experimentalism thus far developed in only one of science or politics (thus replacing a
monistic totalization for a purifying totalization), but rather must be an experimentalism
that will increasingly pervade both simultaneously. Pragmatists thus urge a
reconstruction of modern culture along paths worn by particular cultural moods (an
experimentalism about knowledge and politics) rather than others (utilitarianism or
romanticism about knowledge and politics). Rather than pressing for experimentalism on
the basis of an implausible and unhappy divorce of politics from epistemics, then,
pragmatists think of experimentalism in terms of synergistic democratizations of power
and knowledge.
This is an important point of connection linking pragmatism to genealogy. For in
his attempt to develop an experimental alternative to prevailing cultural tendencies,
Dewey makes much the same point as Foucault did when he envisioned practices of
19
experimentation and transgression which could carry us beyond the dominant confines of
modern thought. Deweys prose may have been limp and Foucaults sexy, but both were
looking forward to a culture which would sustain itself by simply trying things out as an
alternative to that cultural self-containment implicit in the modern will to purify.

Foucault on Modernity
I find the following remark of Foucaults one of the most fecund for
understanding the whole of his work: In every culture there exists a coherent series of
gestures of division [But] the moment they mark a limit, they create the space of a
possible transgression.
32
Across the long span of his career, Foucault returns again and
again to his central theme of two moments of modernity: division and transgression, or
purification and experimentation. These two moments form the central conceptual
apparatus through which Foucaults many interpretations and critiques of modernity
should be read.
Since my interpretation of Foucault amounts to a significant revision of the
standard reception of his work, it will be useful to summarize that standard reception in
order to appreciate the terms of my revisionist reading in terms of modernitys divisions
and transgressions. Most interpretations of Foucault leave him in a difficult bind
according to which his image of modernity as increasingly swept up in an insidious form
of disciplinary rationality provides us with little wiggle room by which we may come to
understand ourselves as either free or at least someday capable of freedom. On this
interpretation, a stifled and disturbed Foucault offers us little better than, in Richard

32
Foucault, quoted by Miller (1993, 115) from Les dviations religieuses et la savoir medical (1962, 19).
20
Rortys phrase, more and more sophisticated expressions of resentment.
33
Even
sympathetic critics such as James Bernauer similarly hold that confinements are the
central experiences that Foucaults work describes.
34
Consider the reception of Madness
and Civilization and Discipline and Punish.
In common accounts of Madness and Civilization, Foucault is described as tracing
the history of a Western rationality that would separate itself from its primary other,
namely madness, so as to exclude it from modern culture. For example, in his excellent
book on Foucaults early work, Gary Gutting unfortunately presents Foucault as charting
the suppression, conceptual exclusion, and condemnation of madness by reason.
According to this common line of interpretation, Foucault near the end of the book issues
a desperate cry on behalf of those banished madmen in lyrically invoking the names of
Nietzsche and Artaud, Sade and Hlderlin. Gutting finds in these closing pages
Foucaults romantic desire to see madness as an infrarational source of fundamental
truth.
35
This standard reading, the most forceful version of which was perhaps Jacques
Derridas,
36
appreciates Madness and Civilization as a lamentation over modern reasons
domination of madness, a domination that seems to leave us all, including Foucault
himself, feeling helplessly trapped in the iron cage of modern rationality.
Similar interpretations structured the reception of Foucaults later work, most
notably the image of modernity presented in Discipline and Punish. On the standard
accounts, this book offered a diagram of the workings of an insidious and unbeatable
form of power which had over the course of the past few hundred years come to structure

33
Rorty 1981b, 6
34
Bernauer 1990, 16
35
Gutting 1989 71, 74, 89, 109
36
Derrida (1963)
21
modern society, modern knowledge, modern law, and even modern subjectivity itself. It
is Foucaults point, commentator after commentator declared, that we cannot free
ourselves from the exercise of modern discipline. We inhabit the Panopticon everywhere
and have so thoroughly internalized it that we all harbor little policemen running around
inside of our heads preventing us from ever freeing ourselves. We are therefore swept up
in a power which renders freedom totally impossible. Foucaults best critic on these
matters was Habermas, whose chief complaint was that Foucaults interpretation of
modernity under the sign of disciplinary power eviscerates from modernity the very
premise of emancipation that is the condition of the possibility of critical reflection at all.
Foucaults diatribe, Habermas concluded, took place under the very conditions of modern
freedom which it announced as impossible.
37

Foucault found these early and late interpretations rooted in a misreading of his
work. To counter them, I would like to focus on a claim Foucault made near the end of
Madness and Civilization: Man and madman are bound by an impalpable connection of
truth that is both reciprocal and incompatible.
38
I find this idea of reciprocal
incompatibility crucially helpful for understanding Foucault. This formulation suggests
that Foucaults point is that the relations between pairs like madness and reason or power
and freedom constitute the very problematic of modernity itself. What Foucaults
histories of problematization demonstrate is that these relations are an intractable
problem for moderns such that they are constitutive of the modern condition as such. To

37
Habermas (1981, 1985). Habermas borrowed much of his argument from Nancy Fraser (1981) but see
also related criticisms by Michael Walzer (1983), Charles Taylor (1984), Thomas McCarthy (1990), and
Batrice Han (1998).
38
Foucault quoted in Eribon 1989, 97; this passage is from the longer version of Histoire de la Folie only
recently translated into English.
22
complain that Foucault failed to liberate either side of these oppositional terms from the
total repression of the other, then, is to entirely miss his point. Foucaults point was that
these terms are reciprocal but incompatible, that is they can neither be fully liberated
from nor totally assimilated to one another. This can be clarified by revisiting both
Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish.
Take those seemingly romantic passages at the end of Madness and Civilization.
Perhaps the Nietzsche in these pages is not for Foucault a forgotten madman, but rather
the philosopher capable of reinvigorating a forgotten dialogue between madness and
reason.
39
Foucault laments not Nietzsche as madman, but the fact that a Nietzsche can no
longer be on the border of reason and unreason since that border is forever banished by
modern purification.
40
On such a reading, Foucaults text would not witness reasons
subjugation of madness so much as a more insidious separation of reason from madness.
It is not that some former reality of madness is held at bay by the production of reason, it
is rather that madness and reason in their modern form are simultaneously produced as
incoherent with one another.
This reading sustains Foucaults remark that the study of madness and rationality
must go back toward the decision that simultaneously links and separates reason and
madness; it must aim to uncover the perpetual exchange, the obscure common root, the
original confrontation that gives meaning to the unity, as well as to the opposition, of
sense and non-sense.
41
We must, in other words, aim to restore that broken interaction
where madness and rationality are interactive with one another. It was in this spirit that

39
Clare OFarrell (1989, 74-78) develops a similar perspective.
40
Foucault 1961, 287
41
Foucault 1961 quoted in Derrida 1963, 43; from the longer version of Histoire de la Folie.
23
Foucault in an early essay celebrated the possibility of the mad philosopher.
42
The mad
philosopher would be the kind of experimentalist who could at once be mad and be
philosophical and in so doing transgress the separation of reason and madness which
forms a core problem of our modernity. In praising the mad philosopher Foucault does
not mourn a banished madman, but rather that forgotten space of interaction between
madman and philosopher. He finds Nietzsche, the paradigm of the mad philosopher,
waiting for us there.
There is an important symmetry between Foucaults earlier work on modern
reason and his later work on modern power. Just as madness can be neither totally
subject to nor totally liberated from reason, freedom and power are similarly bound to
one another. Seen in this light, Foucaults point in his late work on power and knowledge
was never that we are trapped in power. Foucault, rather, sought carefully to elaborate
the difficulty we moderns face in our task of simultaneously negotiating freedom and
power. The complex idea that Foucault was striving to articulate and which so many of
his critics misunderstood was that freedom and power can neither be dissociated nor
assimilated. They must be deployed simultaneously so that we can work within the
internal tensions of their relationships. Foucault therefore found himself working as a
transgressor and an experimentalist at the interstices where freedom and power connect.
The problem we moderns face, as Foucault elaborated it, is that there is no pure
freedom to be emancipated just as there is no pure power to repress it. Modernity
produces autonomous freedom and disciplinary power as two reciprocal but incompatible
aspects of our political existence. These two presuppose one another but are at the same

42
Foucault 1963, 80
24
time incoherent with one another. So it is not that disciplinary power eliminates
autonomous freedom, just as it is not that modern rationality eliminates madness. It is
rather that disciplinary power and autonomous freedom are simultaneously produced so
as to render the latter ineffective as a force pitted against the former. Just as madness
finds itself in no position to question reason, freedom understood on the modern model of
autonomy finds itself hardly equipped to oppose power on the model of discipline.
Foucault held that the freedom of resistance must be sought elsewhere than in the
romantic ideals of autonomy and liberation. Discipline and Punish had shown that
autonomous individuality is one of the intended effects of disciplinary power, rather than
a predisciplinary capacity for freedom which might seek revenge on power.
43
Freedom,
Foucault concluded, must work through, not merely against, power. But it was never
Foucaults point that we need regard modernity as a traphis more modest point was
simply that the modern conception of an autonomous freedom totally liberated from
power is but a corollary of a disciplinary power which totally cages up freedom.
Foucaults work on freedom is best interpreted in light of a distinction between an
autonomous freedom already presupposed by modern forms of power and an
experimental freedom which offers resistance to both modern power and modern freedom
in their pure forms.
44
Difficult as it may seem, and it was precisely Foucaults point that
it would be difficult, resistance to modern practices of power requires resistance to a
certain modern conception of the practice of freedom. This twin resistance to power and
freedom suggests an internal connection between selfhood and environment such that the
transformation of either requires the transformation of both. Experimentally freeing

43
Foucault 1975, 184ff.; cf. Foucault (1979) and Gordon (1991).
44
See a similar distinction by John Rajchman (1985, 92, 115) and discussion by David Hoy (2004, 100).
25
ourselves of particular forms of power circulating through us, therefore, involves freeing
ourselves of the forms of freedom through which we enable that circulation. Judith
Butler claims this in writing that, in Foucault, To be critical of an authority that poses as
absolute requires a critical practice that has self-transformation at its core.
45

Understanding his problematization of modern freedom and power in this way
enables us to recognize that Foucaults late work on ethics never sought to rehabilitate the
autonomous form of freedom which Foucaults middle work on power had ruled out.
46

Foucaults late work on ethical freedom is best understood as elaborating the possibility
for a modern form of experimental liberty on the basis of the study of pre-modern
practices in which freedom and power were not yet purified as they were to become in
modernity. Foucault thus did not in his late work abandon his earlier theses about
modern power in order to elaborate a theory of modern freedom which these theses had
explicitly invalidated.
47
On the contrary, Foucaults late work elaborates a conception of
experimental freedom which specifically aims to address the very problem established by
our reciprocal but incompatible practices of modern disciplinary power and modern
autonomous freedom.
48

What the foregoing discussion of Madness and Civilization and Discipline and
Punish shows is just how much Foucaults picture of modernity differs from the standard
Weberian image of modernity as an age of rationalizing differentiation. Foucaults
emphasis on experimental transgression and his concern with the pernicious effects of

45
Butler 2002, 218
46
Foucault (1984a)
47
Among those arguing for a basic incoherence between the so-called middle and late works are Peter
Dews (1989), Thomas McCarthy (1990), Batrice Han (1998) and Eric Paras (2006).
48
Among those arguing for important continuities between the so-called middle and late works are Ladelle
McWhorter (1999, 189ff.), Timothy OLeary (2002, 107ff.), Johanna Oksala (2005, 157ff.), Benda
Hofmeyr (2006), and Amy Allen (forthcoming, chapter 3).
26
much that has marched under the banner of modernity simply would not make sense if
interpreted through the Weberian picture of modernity. Foucault did not witness the
increasing differentiation of the vocations of science and politics. What he witnessed
rather was the increasing purification, the reciprocal incompatibility, of two great cultural
imperatives: emancipatory freedom on the one side and disciplinary control on the other.
So it would not make sense to understand Foucault as having rallied against
rationalization in the name of enchantment or mysticism or revolt or any other favorite of
romanticism. Foucault was never against reason and simply for passion, madness, and
freedom. He is better seen as having explored the long and slow formation of those great
divisions, those formidable reciprocal incompatibilities, through which we moderns have
attempted to erect high walls separating our reasons from our passions, our sociality from
our individuality, our utility from our romance. It was these walls that he found
debilitating, not the concepts (instrumental rationality, romantic passion) located on
either side of them. If Foucaults critical histories have any positive upshot, then it
consists in his articulation of practices of experimental transgression which would aim to
tear these walls down. These transgressions would not demonstrate that reason and its
others are really the same, but would open up the possibility of a new phase of modernity
in which these two aspects of modern culture were not as rigorously purified as they were
in previous phases of modernity. This new phase was envisioned by Foucault not as a
reunification of power and knowledge (for that is what modernity has deployed all along)
but rather as an intensification of experimental tensions resulting from the blending of
powers and freedoms, rationalities and madnesses. That is why Foucault should be read
27
as neither pro-modern nor anti-modern, but as complexly modern in the interests of a
future phase of modernity.
49


Toward a Genealogical Pragmatist Critique of Modernity
Foucault and Dewey are best read as picking up on a crucial but underdeveloped
aspect of Kants legacy to modernity. Weber, and all those in his train, located Kants
legacy in a modern tendency toward differentiation by which we have carved ourselves
up into separate spheres according to the critical limits located in the first two Critiques.
But Foucault and Dewey located Kants legacy elsewhere. According to their view, we
do not find ourselves divided into the two worlds of experience discerned by a
sociological interpretation of Kants critical philosophy. We find ourselves instead
divided into two currents of thought, or two different standpoints for thinking, which
Kants critical system was an attempt to do simultaneous justice to. This division in
thought should not be overcome by reunifying supposedly divided spheres of experience,
but rather by experimentally testing the divisions between utilitarian rationality and
romantic autonomy which we impose on ourselves.
The important details of Deweys and Foucaults conceptions of an experimental
critique of ourselves will have to be elaborated on another occasion. What I have sought
to focus attention on here is the important overlap between Deweyan pragmatism and
Foucaultian genealogy in their interpretations of the basic problems of modern culture.
In closing, I would like to point out that from the point of view of both traditions this is
no small similarity. Both traditions hold that processes such as modernity gain their

49
See the interpretations offered by Rabinow and Dreyfus (1986), Hoy (1988), and Rabinow (1994).
28
coherence from the problems they are formulated as responses to, such as the inheritance
of utilitarian disciplinary imperatives and romantic emancipatory dreams. Gaining a
view of the problems we face is, for both genealogy and pragmatism, a crucial task for
thought. On Deweys view, this is expressed in terms of his account of inquiry as
beginning with and aiming at the resolution of a problem situation.
50
On Foucaults
view, this is expressed in his articulation of a historiography focused around
problematizations, or the ways in which accepted truths come to be problematized over
time and as a result propel the new truths achieved by the resolution of these problems.
51

This shared focus on problems suggests an important elective affinity among pragmatism
and genealogy which those working in both traditions have thus far failed to take
seriously enough.
52

Despite these similarities concerning their shared focus on thought as addressed to
problems, an important difference is that Foucault was largely focused on the creation of
problems and Dewey on their resolution. This difference has given rise to the familiar
caricatures of Foucault as somewhat too pessimistic and Dewey as somewhat too
optimistic, caricatures which are ultimately unfair but nevertheless rooted in obvious
predilections of both thinkers. Fortunately, this seeming disjunction is easily overcome.
All we need to do is to recognize that, from a robustly philosophical rather than a merely
scholarly point of view, pragmatist problem-solving and genealogical problem-specifying
are two activities that require one another. Problems that do not invite solutions are as

50
Dewey (1938)
51
Foucault (1984b)
52
Overlaps between Dewey and Foucault along these lines have thus far been very much unexplored,
although an important comparison in similar terms is given by Rabinow (2003, forthcoming). For
important comparative work on Dewey and Foucault along different lines see Stuhr (1997, 2003), Auxier
(2002), and my own work in Koopman (2007, forthcoming).
29
worthless as solutions which do not respond to problems. The prospective orientation of
pragmatism is blind without the retrospective orientation of genealogygenealogy
without pragmatism is likewise an empty exercise.
By bringing genealogy and pragmatism into intimate dialogue with one another
we are finally able to realize the important promise that lay at the heart of both traditions:
that we moderns can look forward with hope when we face up to the endless uncertainty
which threatens continually to undo everything which we have in our history struggled to
create. We can characterize both traditions as oriented simultaneously toward
problematization and solution, toward past and future, and toward history and
philosophy. This characterization fits with what is best in both Deweys pragmatism and
Foucaults genealogy: the practice of a criticism that is simultaneously philosophical and
historical.
53


References
Allen, Amy. Forthcoming. The Politics of Our Selves. New York: Columbia University, forthcoming.
Aron, Raymond. 1959. Max Weber and Modern Social Science in Aron, Franciszek Draus (ed.), Charles
Krance (trans.), History, Truth, and Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985.
Auxier, Randall. 2002. Foucault, Dewey, and the History of the Present in The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy 16, no. 2, Summer, 2002: 75-102.
Bendix, Reinhard. 1960. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. London: Methuen, 1966.
Berlin, Isaiah. 1960. The Romantic Revolution: A Crisis in the History of Modern Thought in Berlin,
Henry Hardy (ed.), The Sense of Reality. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1996.
Berlin, Isaiah. 1965. The Roots of Romanticism. Henry Hardy (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University, 1999.
Berlin, Isaiah. 1975. The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will in Berlin, Henry Hardy (ed.), The Crooked
Timber of Humanity. Princeton: Princeton University, 1990.
Bernauer, James. 1990. Michel Foucaults Force of Flight. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1990.
Bernstein, Richard. 1991. An Allegory of Modernity/Postmodernity: Habermas and Derrida in Bernstein,
The New Constellation. Oxford: Polity Press, 1991.

53
For helpful comments on this paper I would like to thank Barry Allen, David Hoy, and Martin Jay, each
of whom made valuable suggestions on how to improve the explications and arguments herein. In addition,
Amy Allen read a longer version of the section on Foucault and offered helpful comments on issues raised
in that discussion. Lastly, I gratefully acknowledge a postdoctoral research grant from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada which provided me with the opportunity to undertake this
work and the larger project of which it is a part.
30
Bloom, Harold. 2004. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? New York: Penguin, 2004.
Butler, Judith. 2002. What is Critique? An Essay on Foucaults Virtue in David Ingram (ed.), The
Political. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
Dean, Mitchell. 1994. Critical and Effective Histories: Foucaults Methods and Historical Sociology. New
York: Routledge, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques. 1963. Cogito and the History of Madness in Derrida, Alan Bass (trans.), Writing and
Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978.
Dewey, John. 1920. Reconstruction in Philosophy in Dewey MW12.
Dewey, John. 1929. The Quest for Certainty in Dewey LW4.
Dewey, John and Tufts, James H.. 1932. Ethics, revised edition in Dewey LW7.
Dewey, John. 1938. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry in Dewey LW12.
Dewey, John. 1939. Theory of Valuation in Dewey LW13
Dewey, John. 1969-1990. The Early Works (EW1-5), The Middle Works (MW1-15), and The Later Works
(LW1-17). Jo Ann Boydston et. al. (eds.). Southern Illinois University, 1969-1990.
Dews, Peter. 1987. Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory.
London: Verso, 1987.
Dews, Peter. 1989. The Return of the Subject in Late Foucault in Radical Philosophy, 51, Spr., 1989: 37-
41.
Diggins, John Patrick. 1999. Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy. New York: Basic Books,
1999.
Emirbayer, Mustafa. 2005. Beyond Weberian Action Theory in Charles Camic, et. al. (eds.), Max
Webers Economy and Society. Stanford: Stanford Univeristy, 2005.
Eribon, Didier. 1989. Michel Foucault. Betsy Wing (trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. 1961. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard
Howard (trans.). Vintage Books, 1965.
Foucault, Michel. 1963. A Preface to Transgression in Foucault EW2.
Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. Vintage
Books, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason in Foucault EW3.
Foucault, Michel. 1984a. What is Enlightenment? in Foucault EW1.
Foucault, Michel. 1984b. Polemics, Politics and Problematizations, interview by Rabinow, in Foucault
EW1.
Foucault, Michel. 1997-2000. Essential Works, Volumes 1-3 (EW1-3). Paul Rabinow and James D.
Faubion (eds.) New York: New Press, 1997-2000.
Fraser, Nancy. 1981. Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions in
Unruly Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989.
Garrison, Jim. 1998. Dewey, Foucault, and Self-Creation in Educational Philosophy and Theory 30, no.
2, 1998: 111-134.
Gordon, Colin . 1991. Governmental Rationality: An Introduction in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller (eds.),
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991.
Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1989.
Habermas, Jrgen. 1981. Modernity versus Postmodernity, Seyla Benhabib (trans.), in New German
Critique 22, Winter, 1981.
Habermas, Jrgen. 1985. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Frederick Lawrence (trans.).
Cambridge: MIT, 1987.
Han, Batrice. 1998. Foucaults Critical Project. Edward Pile (trans.). Stanford: Stanford University, 2002.
Hennis, Wilhelm. 1987. Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction. Keith Tribe (trans.). London: Allen &
Unwin, 1988.
Hofmeyr, Benda. 2006. The Power Not to Be (What We Are): The Politics and Ethics of Self-Creation in
Foucault in Journal of Moral Philosophy, 3(2), Jul., 2006: 215-230.
Hollinger, David. 1980. The Problem of Pragmatism in American History in Hollinger, In the American
Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989.
Hollinger, David. 2001. The Enlightenment and the Genealogy of Cultural Conflict in the United States
in Baker and Reill 2001.
Hoy, David (ed.). 1986. Foucault: A Critical Reader. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
31
Hoy, David Couzens. 1988. Foucault: Modern or Postmodern? in Jonathan Arac (ed.), After Foucault.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 1988.
Hoy, David Couzens. 1989. Splitting the Difference: Habermass Critique of Derrida in G.B. Madison
(ed.), Working Through Derrida. Evanston: Northwestern University, 1993.
Hoy, David and McCarthy, Thomas. 1994. Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Hoy, David Couzens. 2004. Critical Resistance. Cambridge: MIT, 2004.
Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal
Theme. Berkeley: University of California, 2005.
Kloppenberg, James T.. 1986. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and
American Thought: 1870-1920. Oxford: Oxford University, 1986.
Kloppenberg, James. 1994. Democracy and Disenchantment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and
Rorty in Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University, 1998.
Koopman, Colin. 2007. A New Foucault: The Coming Revisions in Foucault Studies (review essay) in
Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, v11n1, Spring 2007: 167-177.
Koopman, Colin. Forthcoming. Genealogical Pragmatism: Problematization and Reconstruction.
Latour, Bruno. 1991. We Have Never Been Modern. Catherine Porter (trans.). Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1993.
Lavine, Thelma Z.. 1991. Modernity and the Spirit of Naturalism in Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association 65, no. 3, Nov., 1991.
Lavine, Thelma Z.. 1995. America and the Contestations of Modernity: Bentley, Dewey, Rorty in
Herman Saatkamp (ed.), Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics.
Vanderbilt University, 1995.
Livingston, James. 1994. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940.
University of North Carolina, 1997.
Livingston, James. 2001. Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American
History. Routledge, 2001.
Lovejoy, Arthur O.. 1936. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1964.
Lwith, Karl. 1932. Max Weber and Karl Marx in Bottomore and Outhwaite (eds.), Karl Lwith: Max
Weber and Karl Marx. London: Routledge, 1993.
Mandelbaum, Maurice. 1971. History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought.
Balitmore: Johns Hopkins, 1971.
Marshall, James D.. 1994. On What we May Hope: Rorty on Dewey and Foucault in Studies in
Philosophy and Education 13, 1994: 307-323.
May, Todd. 2004. Michel Foucault: Nietzschean Pragmatist in International Studies in Philosophy 36,
no. 3, 2004: 63-75.
McCarthy, Thomas. 1990. The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School in Political
Theory, 18(3), Aug., 1990: 437-69.
McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization.
Bloomington: Indiana University, 1999.
Mead, George Herbert. 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Merrit Moore (ed.).
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1936.
Miller, James. 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
OFarrell, Clare. 1989. Michel Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? London: Macmillan, 1989.
OLeary, Timothy. 2002. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum, 2002.
ONeill, John. 1986. The Disciplinary Society: from Weber to Foucault in The British Journal of
Sociology 37(1), Mar., 1986: 42-60.
Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2005.
Owen, David and Strong, Tracy. 2004. Max Webers Calling to Knowledge and Action in Weber 2004.
Owen, David. 1994. Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason.
New York: Routledge, 1994.
Paras, Eric. 2006. Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge. New York: Other Press, 2006.
Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press, 1968.
Rabinow, Paul and Dreyfus, Hubert. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics.
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982.
32
Rabinow, Paul and Dreyfus, Hubert. 1986. What is Maturity? Habermas and Foucault on What is
Enlightenment in Hoy 1986.
Rabinow, Paul. 1994. Modern and Counter-Modern: Ethos and Epoch in Heidegger and Foucault in Gary
Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994.
Rabinow, Paul. 2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton: Princeton
University, 2003.
Rabinow, Paul. Forthcoming. Marking Time. Princeton: Princeton University, forthcoming.
Rajchman, John. 1985. Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy. New York: Columbia University,
1985.
Ringer, Fritz. 2004. Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004.
Roederer, Christopher. 2000. Ethics and Meaningful Action in the Modern/Postmodern Age: A
Comparative Analysis of John Dewey and Max Weber in South African Journal of Philosophy
19(2), 2000: 75-94.
Rorty, Richard. 1981a. Method, Social Science, and Social Hope in Consequences of Pragmatism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982.
Rorty, Richard. 1981b. Beyond Nietzsche and Marx, London Review of Books, 19, February 1981: 5-6.
Rorty, Richard. 1998a. Afterword: Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism in Rorty, Philosophy and
Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Rorty, Richard. 1998b. Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism in Morris Dickstein (ed.). The Revival of
Pragmatism. Durham: Duke University, 1998.
Rorty, Richard. 2004. Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Depth, Pragmatist Cunning in Diogenes 51, no.
202, Smr., 2004.
Scaff, Lawrence A.. 1989. Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max
Weber. Berkeley: University of California, 1991.
Scaff, Lawrence A.. 2000. Weber on the Cultural Situation of the Modern Age in Stephen Turner (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000.
Sica, Alan. 2000. Rationalization and Culture in Stephen Turner (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Stuhr, John. 1997. Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community. Albana: SUNY,
1997.
Stuhr, John. 2003. Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy. New York: Routledge,
2003.
Swedberg, Richard. 2003. The Changing Picture of Max Webers Sociology in Annual Review of
Sociology 29, Aug., 2003: 283-306.
Swedberg, Richard. 2005. The Max Weber Dictionary. Stanford: Stanford University, 2005.
Szakolaczai, Arpad. 1998. Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works. New York: Routledge,
1998.
Taylor, Charles. 1984. Foucault on Freedom and Truth in Hoy 1986.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1989.
Thayer, H.S.. 1968. Meaning and Action, A Critical History of Pragmatism, second edition. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1981.
Turner, Bryan. 1987. The Rationalisation of the Body: Reflections on Modernity and Discipline in in S.
Whimster and S. Lash (eds.), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. London: Allen and Unwin,
1987.
Walzer, Michael. 1983. The Politics of Michel Foucault in Hoy 1986.
Weber, Max. 1904. Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy in Weber, Edward Shils and Harry
Finch (eds.), The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Free Press, 1949.
Weber, Max. 1905. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Talcott Parsons (trans.). Dover, 2003.
Weber, Max. 1917. Science as a Vocation in Weber 2004.
Weber, Max. 1919. Politics as a Vocation in Weber 2004.
Weber, Max. 1923. General Economic History. Frank Knight (trans.). S. Hellman and M. Palyi (eds.).
Dover, 2003.
Weber, Max. 1964. Economy and Society. Guenter Roth, Claus Wittich, et. al. (ed. and trans.). Berkeley:
University of California, 1978.
33
34
Weber, Max. 2004. The Vocation Lectures. David and Owen and Tracy Strong (eds.), Rodney Livingstone
(trans.). Hackett, 2004.
West, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989.
White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins, 1973.