Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Andrew Zimmerman,
Foucault in Berkeley and Magnitogorsk: Totalitarianism and the limits of liberal critique
(2014) Contemporary European History, 23 (2), pp. 225-236.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777314000101

Abstract
Returning to Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization almost two decades after its publication allows us to take stock, from a slight temporal distance, of the reception in our discipline of the work of Michel Foucault. Magnetic Mountain is the one of the books that came out of a project that Kotkin and a number of other students began under Foucault’s direction at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 (p. xviii). Foucault’s work in California occurred during a particular turn in his political thinking, a moment when he experimented with liberal alternatives to the left theories of the first decades of his career. Kotkin’s book is not simply an application of a general Foucauldianism, but rather of a specific California Foucault.

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