Miguel Vatter, Care of the Self and the Invention of Legitimate Government. Foucault and Strauss on Platonic Political Philosophy. In Jeffrey A. Bernstein and Jade Larissa Schiff, eds. Leo Strauss and Contemporary Thought : Reading Strauss Outside the Lines. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021.
This chapter offers an interpretation of Michel Foucault’s last lectures at the Collège de France, The Courage of Truth : The Government of Self and Others II, by reading them against the backdrop of Leo Strauss’s conception of classical natural right formulated in such works as On Tyranny, Natural Right and History and What is Political Philosophy? The justification for what appears, at first blush, an unseemly and even shocking comparative exercise is that in these last lectures Foucault’s chosen theme is the one preferred by Strauss— namely, the opposition between Platonic political philosophy and democratic political life. His analysis coincides with the genealogy offered by Leo Strauss on several key points. Ultimately, Foucault and Strauss agree that “political philosophy” or “normative political thought” is not what the Western tradition has made of it: it is neither a discourse that seeks to understand the nature of political things, nor does it delineate a theory of justice for the sake of moralizing politics. For these two authors, “political philosophy” is a practice that seeks to replace the pre-philosophical practice of political life in democracies with a new practice of politics: the philosophically justified “legitimate government” of some over others.
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