Colin Koopman, The power thinker, Aeon, 15 March 2017
Imagine you are asked to compose an ultra-short history of philosophy. Perhaps you’ve been challenged to squeeze the impossibly sprawling diversity of philosophy itself into just a few tweets. You could do worse than to search for the single word that best captures the ideas of every important philosopher. Plato had his ‘forms’. René Descartes had his ‘mind’ and John Locke his ‘ideas’. John Stuart Mill later had his ‘liberty’. In more recent philosophy, Jacques Derrida’s word was ‘text’, John Rawls’s was ‘justice’, and Judith Butler’s remains ‘gender’. Michel Foucault’s word, according to this innocent little parlour game, would certainly be ‘power’.
Colin Koopman is the author of a book on Foucault and numerous essays in The New York Times, Critical Inquiry, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a genealogy of the politics of data. He teaches philosophy at the University of Oregon.
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