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Foucault’s parrhesia and Rawls’s public reason: different yet complementary

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Torben Bech Dyrberg


Content:

Abstract_______________________________________________________________2Introducing Foucault and Rawls_____________________________________________2Foucault and political theory_______________________________________________4The specificity and autonomy of politics in relation to parrhesia___________________6

Power: meritocracy vs. social stratification__________________________________7Knowledge: political judgement vs. expert knowledge_________________________9Ethics: responsibility and secularization vs. dogma___________________________11

The specificity and autonomy of politics in relation to public reason_______________12Rawls’s take on public reason and the original position_______________________13Public reason_________________________________________________________17Public reason and the democratic principle of inclusion/exclusion_______________18

Parrhesia and public reason: complementary differences_______________________20References____________________________________________________________22

Words: 10.033


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ABSTRACT

There are two aims of this article. The first is to situate Foucault’s analyses of parrhesia in the context of political theory and clarify that what he has on offer is relevant to political theorists. The second forms the specific focus of the article. It analyses how Foucault’s parrhesia and Rawls’s public reason supplement each other and together advance an understanding of the specificity of politics, the power of political authority and public political reasoning as freestanding in a democracy. Parrhesia and public reason call for truthfulness and reasonability. It goes for both of them that democracy is founded on the autonomy of politics, meaning that democracy is a way to structure the political field as autonomous. On this background I will claim that Foucault is closer to a kind of leftist political liberalism than is usually assumed and that he is open for the possibility that political power is not only, let alone primordially, about controlling and dominating others. Parrhesia and public reason are conditional for critique, which is not only to speak truth to power. Critique must also assume that political authorities might be trustworthy and capable of truth-telling.

INTRODUCING FOUCAULT AND RAWLS

Foucault and Rawls are typically portrayed as belonging to two entirely different intellectual and political traditions, which do not have anything in common with regard to conceptual and methodological approach.

Foucault is seen as the critic of power/knowledge as productive submission, which maximizes efficiency and minimizes resistance, which is part of the establishment’s truth-regime and normalization strategies. This forges the image of a critical thinker who questions what passes as true and rational and reveals that what is taken for granted is the outcome of power struggles. Seen in this light Foucault politicizes what otherwise passes as rational and normal. Yet, this take on Foucault obscures his insight that politics cannot be boiled down to apparatuses of productive submission. Especially his later works focus on political authority as an autonomous practice, which is established via exclusions related to power, knowledge and ethics. By contrast, Rawls is seen as the epitome of liberal normative philosophy with its rationalist and intuitive common-sense modelling envisioned at a distance from the actual workings of power beneath the


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surface, and who takes for granted just about everything Foucault digs up in his genealogical power analytics. These differences add up to contrasting leftist radicalism and conformist political liberalism. However, this is misleading, as it ignores that both of them are concerned with carving out the specificity and autonomy of politics and that both of them see this as the precondition for sustaining a democratic set-up that defies hierarchy and obedience.

The idea of discussing Rawls’s public reason and Foucault’s parrhesia is to show that they complement each other in contouring the features of the autonomy of politics as the basis for democracy. Both of them regard public political reasoning as freestanding and as governed by its own rules related to power, knowledge and ethics. They both stress the endogenous relations between political authorities and political community, and that the political power of authority is intertwined with democracy in ways that are both facilitating and dangerous. They seek ways to connect the practice of freedom in political communities – ‘the fact of reasonable pluralism’ (Rawls) and ‘agonistic democracy’ (Foucault) – with the exercise of political power through non-dominant and reasonable public authorities.1 Whereas Rawls’s public reason embraces everybody when acting in their political role, Foucault’s parrhesia is largely associated with those who have the skills required for articulating and acting authoritatively in a trustworthy and truthful manner. Another difference is that Rawls places politics (inputs) before policy (outputs) in contrast to Foucault who puts policy before politics, which is especially clear in his emphasis on problematizations (Foucault 1989a; Bang 2014).

Public reason and parrhesia are organised around the axis of leadership and citizenship, but they have different foci and functions. Foucault and Rawls seek to situate leadership selection in the demos to strengthen this link in order to generate accountable political authorities. Parrhesia, as the prototype of critique (Foucault 2001: 170), is an integral part of political processes engaging authorities. Public reason is a political intervention setting the terms of political discourse, which will conflict with those comprehensive doctrines that challenge its status as freestanding and, by implication, citizens as free and equal.

The table below provides a rough guide to the similarities and differences between parrhesia and public reason:

1 Rawls is critical of the term ‘political community’, which he associates with a purposive association based on comprehensive doctrines, which again links up with a communitarian perfectionism. In contrast, I will use the Easton’s term who operates with three concentric circles: the political community is the most inclusive category, the political regime consists of rules and resources and political authorities are those making binding decisions for a society. Political community contains, says Easton (1965: 176), ‘a group of persons [that] are for one reason or another joined together in a common political enterprise’ although they might belong to different cultures, traditions and nationalities.


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Foucault’s parrhesia and Rawls’s public reason: similarities and differences

Themes: Foucault: Rawls:

Main issue: Sustain the autonomy and integrity of the political realm: exercising political authority and cultivating political capital

Politics and society:

Underpinning the autonomy of parrhesia by bracketing social stratification, religious dogma and expert knowledge

Underpinning public reason as freestanding by bracketing comprehensive doctrines

Focus: Politics: political authorities and their criticsSociety: political authorities in relation to citizens

Politics: authorities governing common concernsSociety: the building of political capital

Emphasis: Output politics: trustworthy and truthful governing

Input politics: framing public debate and decision-making

Equality and difference:

Parrhesia: making a difference + differentiating among citizens

Public reason: the political equality of citizens

Politics as doubling:

The power of political authority: ‘the conduct of conduct’

Justice as fairness: ‘a social union of social unions’

Nature: Parrhesia: supplementary discourse of trustworthiness/truth geared to events and education

Public reason: platform for political interaction and for building political capital

Values: Citizens as free and equal + critique of domination/obedience

Citizens as free and equal + critique of the priority of the good over the right

Power and knowledge:

Disconnected to avoid expert discourse and its truth-regime in politics

Disconnected in the original position to ensure the equality of members

Political code:

Acceptance vs. non-acceptance

Despite their differences, public reason and parrhesia complement each other in two ways. First, they accentuate that democracy has to be based on the autonomy of politics and that it operates by way of reasonability and trustworthiness. This is crucial for the quality of political communication along the authority/citizen axis and for laypeople in the political community. Second, whilst public reason serves a framing function that embodies the political capital of liberty and equality, and operates as an input category, parrhesia is invested in problem solving and delivering policies, and is bound up with exercising power and operates as an output category.

FOUCAULT AND POLITICAL THEORY

Foucault kept a distance to political theory and he praised Nietzsche as ‘a philosopher who managed to think of power without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so’ (Foucault 1980a: 53). Is it feasible and interesting to construe a


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dialogue between Foucault and political theory? I think it is, and it might throw a different light over the critical tenets of Foucault’s work.

Both mainstream and radical traditions look primarily on the input side of political processes. This is not only a matter of constitutional and procedural set-up as well as more generally, questions related to rights. The input category covers more ground as it is related to recognition of political agency, access to as well as participation in political bodies, representative and/or direct democracy, interest group politics and legitimacy. Foucault was not concerned with the ideological framing of power, which, in industrial society has been based on social stratification and cleavage-lines, and which looks at the input politics. Instead, he focussed on output politics where things get done and trigger reflection.2

Foucault seldom spoke of legitimacy, but looked at acceptability. This cannot be settled by reference to legal models of power as we find in normative theory. Foucault looked at the distinction between ethical practices and moral codes, that is, how one lives one’s life in relation to societal norms. As with Rawls, acceptance, not legitimacy, is the bottom-line of political authority. If that goes everything else goes, which is an issue related to what people do as opposed to whether they think governing is legitimate. Foucault’s focus is geared to how individuality and governing are fortified in the political realm. This is where we find critique and parrhesia as essential aspects of a vibrant political culture.

Parrhesia refers to open-minded, truthful and trustworthy speech, which is, when it operates in public political settings, entwined with democracy. It orbits around the power/knowledge/ethics triangle and the output side of political processes where decisions take effect. In contrast to rule-following, parrhesia is a way of coping with real situations. It is an act of creation based on factual knowledge, sense of judgement and power. As the origin of critique parrhesia signals speaking truth to power, which takes courage and steadfastness. But it also goes the other way around, as those wielding political power may speak the truth of what has to be done and be trustworthy. Two points are worth noting: the nature of parrhesia and how it relates to key issues in political theory centred on the authority/laypeople axis; and the link to Rawls on how parrhesia and public reason posit the autonomy of politics that conditions democracy.

Foucault addresses classical issues in political theory on relations between political authorities and citizens as well as, although to a lesser extent, relations between citizens. He looks at the qualities characterising the members of a political community engaged in public political reasoning, which links up with toleration, self-esteem and cooperation (Foucault 2011: Ch. 18). He is concerned with the ability of political authorities to 2 This holds not only for parrhesia, but also for his earlier works on the productive power of shaping capabilities through disciplinary mechanisms.


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cultivate a sense of judgement, show courage and resolve in the face of danger, exhibit a sense of timing to be able to spot openings and possibilities. Foucault also looks at the pitfalls facing political leadership, notably flattery and manipulative rhetoric.

THE SPECIFICITY AND AUTONOMY OF POLITICS IN RELATION TO PARRHESIA

For Foucault the autonomy of politics conditions democracy as the regime form of free and equal citizens; practicing trustworthiness and accountability are the personal and institutional basis of democracy, which is ‘a dynamic and agonistic structure of parresia’ (Foucault 2010: 156) opposed to autocratic hierarchies.

How does Foucault image the autonomy of politics, and how does parrhesia fit in? He proceeds in relation to the three axes of power/knowledge/ethics. They make up a triangle of government and political experience in which parrhesia is the glue connecting them. This is clear when he speaks of parrhesia as being located in-between ‘the obligation to speak the truth, procedures and techniques of governmentality, and the constitution of the relationship to self’ (Foucault 2010: 45). This location of parrhesia points at the relationship between political authorities and citizens, it holds a door open for the possibility of a democratic political community and it underlines that democracy is incompatible with government based on hierarchy/obedience.

Foucault operates with three types of exclusions pertaining to the three axes. They revolve around social stratification, expert knowledge and religious dogma. The aim is to eliminate as much as possible that people are caught up in what he calls ‘states of domination’, which cripple their capacities to govern themselves. The freestanding nature of public reason takes off through the three exclusions, which assert the autonomy of public reason. There are parallels to the arguments advanced by Rawls in relation to public reason. Both of them stress that politics – whether it is viewed from the vantage point of agonistic power struggles or public reason – is a form of interaction that must remain freestanding in a democracy.

Politics must, first, be a type of interaction that is not bound up with social stratification, which is an issue Foucault (1990: 81-95) raises in connection with ‘the political game’. Politics ought not to be subsumed by power struggles amongst the rivalries of the ruling classes. Instead, it is a practice that has to be freed from its bonds to social stratification, which implies that government ought to be guided by a meritocratic principle. Second, politics should be free vis-à-vis comprehensive doctrines, which means that they have


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no veto power in a democracy. This is not Foucault’s line of inquiry, but he does deal with religious comprehensive doctrines when he speaks of the secularization of parrhesia. People address each other on an equal footing, and from this egalitarian premise it follows that they use reason to convince each other as opposed to some being interpreters of divine providence or possessing superior moral insights. Both aspects emphasise liberty and equality, and see politics as the practice of elevating these qualities. Third, there is an affinity between Foucault and Rawls with regard to the role of knowledge and truth in politics. This is spelled out by Rawls when he holds that ‘philosophical experts’ should not govern public reason, as external criteria cripple the autonomy of politics. Foucault is on to something similar in his analyses of parrhesia where truth differs from the epistemological concern of philosophers and from the disciplinary and normalizing objectives of science with its ‘technology of demonstrative truth’ (Foucault 2006b: 236).3

POWER: MERITOCRACY VS. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

The free and equal status of citizens is decisive for pursuing a meritocratic principle of ascendance, which is conducive for public political reason in general and parrhesia in particular. Both principles operate by way of bracketing the impact of social class status when dealing with issues of common concerns.

Foucault (1990: 84-5) draws attention to two ways of wielding political power in Roman society. On the one side, we have ‘the verticality of differences’ where political power is entangled in social stratification and the tactics and strategies of achieving, maintaining or avoiding to lose power and prestige, together with the scheming and plotting that go into these games. On the other side, we find ‘the public character of existence’, where one forms and recognizes oneself ‘as the subject of one’s own actions, not through a system of signs denoting power over others, but through a relation that depends as little as possible on status’ (Foucault 1990: 85). The point is to stun the impact of social stratification to be better equipped to focus on common concerns and to support truth-telling and trustworthiness, on the one hand, and ascendency, on the other. For, as Foucault (2010: 201) paraphrases Plato, ‘the essence of the evil is the lack of the rightful ascendancy of true discourse’. This is not an easy task as achieving/maintaining power and truth/trust often pull in opposite directions, and it draws attention to the ambitious but fragile nature of democracy governed by public reason among equals.

3 The following sections of power, knowledge and ethics are a revised version of the argument I put forward in Dyrberg 2016.


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Those who aspire for political power should be fit for the job: they should be knowledgeable, possess a sound sense of judgement, and be trustworthy and courageous to be able to take action at the right time. It is also essential that they be kept in a short leash by the citizenry to limit the risk that they will abuse their power. Criticism of manipulation and incompetence on the part of political authorities also takes courage, as speaking truth to power is dangerous. The relation between power and parrhesia goes both ways: truth is not the prerogative of those who speak up against power, which is the standard case of critique, but it cannot be ruled out that those in power could be trustworthy and speak truthfully. The latter indicates the unprejudiced nature of critique. The democratic task operates in the political regime as well as in the political community. Thus Foucault pinpoints the importance of the institutionalization of rights at the regime level, such as the tripartition of powers, just as he is adamant to insist on the democratic necessity of an engaged and informed citizenry.4 Rights and civic capabilities are two sides of the same coin, which, again, joins up with Foucault’s claim (1984a: 245) that liberty cannot ever be guaranteed constitutionally as ‘”liberty” is what must be exercised’.

In contrast to rhetoric, parrhesia is not simply about convincing others, but of setting up a covenant, which binds the individual to his or her statement and further to the political community. ‘I am the person who has spoken this truth’, says Foucault (2010: 65), ‘I therefore bind myself to the act of stating it and take on the risk of all its consequences’. This is a pact the citizen enters with him/herself vis-à-vis the community in which there is a continuity between one’s beliefs, how one reasons in public and how one conducts oneself. The pact is a promise to match words and deeds, to make a fit between what political authorities and their critics say and do. The parrhesiastic pact is also a promise on the part of the authorities to act in accordance with the common interests of the political community in light of the challenges confronting it. This is the baseline of the trustworthiness of authorities and the accountability of political institutions. It links up with Foucault’s argument that the autonomy of the political field inhibits elite domination, although he does not, in contrast to Arendt, think it is viable to entirely eliminate domination in power relations (Foucault 1984b: 378).

There is another factor that hampers elite domination, which has to do with the conditions political agents should meet to be able to exert power democratically. It is to engage in true discourse as somebody who is knowledgeable and trustworthy perceives a situation from an informed partisan perspective. This is the conditional requirement worked out for the political realm where involvement as opposed to detachment reign. The conjunctional one refers to being able to act at the spur of the moment in the context of agonistic encounters (Foucault 2005: 384). Contestation is vital because it

4 Foucault 2011: Ch. 18. See also Patton 2005: 269-72 on Foucault’s way of approaching the question of rights.


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facilitates informed opinion and decision-making, which alleviate the democratic problem of how to differentiate between those who are able to govern from those who are not. It tests the trustworthiness of the speaker, which makes flattery and rhetoric less likely and facilitates entering the parrhesiastic pact where individuals bind themselves to their word.

KNOWLEDGE: POLITICAL JUDGEMENT VS. EXPERT KNOWLEDGE

In his exchange with Habermas in 1995 Rawls insisted that those who formulated ideas about fairness in public life did so as citizens among others. Philosophical experts were strictly forbidden.5 Foucault was on to something similar when underlining that politics ought not to be conducted in terms of expert-knowledge. Both are concerned with protecting the integrity of the political realm and public political reasoning vis-à-vis comprehensive doctrines and expert discourses.

In a lecture in 1974 Foucault (2006b: 233-64) made a distinction between two images of truth in antiquity: ‘truth-sky’ and ‘truth thunderbolt’. Truth-sky belongs to the order of what is; it is out there waiting to be discovered, and it presents itself in the form of excavation and through the mediation of instruments. It is something that is found and based on a ‘technology of demonstrative truth joined ... to scientific practice’; it is a truth ‘universally present behind the clouds’ (Foucault 2006b: 236, 237). This image of truth is historically invariant and objective. It is an epistemological image and to get access to it and assess it calls for methods facing up to the canons of science. It is a matter of knowledge based on subject/object relationships. The context of Foucault’s discussion of the scientific image of truth is that of psychiatric power. ‘If the medical character could circumscribe madness it was not because he knew it but because he mastered it; and what positivism came to consider as objectivity was nothing but the converse, the effects of this domination’ (Foucault 2006a: 505-6; see also 1991a: 65). What is presented as factual and objective is, on closer inspection, caught up in strategies of domination, and this means that a scientific truth regime, which relies on the subject/object distinction, cannot be primary. This does not entail relativism, but points in the direction of another take on truth encountered in practice.

5 ‘In justice as fairness’, says Rawls 1995: 174-5, ‘there are no philosophical experts. Heaven forbid! But citizens must, after all, have some ideas of right and justice in their thought and some basis for their reasoning. And students of philosophy take part in formulating these ideas but always as citizens among others.’ Walzer (2007: 19) similarly states, ‘[d]emocracy has no claims in the philosophical realm, and philosophers have no special rights in the political community. In the world of opinion, truth is indeed another opinion, and the philosopher is only another opinion-maker.’


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In his excursus on ‘a little history of truth in general’ Foucault (2006b: 235) outlines another image of truth, which is not caught up in expert discourses, but is conducive for getting at what truth could mean in politics. It is a way of imaging truth in relation to interaction, timing, events and the forming of the self. This is truth-thunderbolt, which belongs to the order of what happens and it is, says Foucault (2006b: 239), ‘linked to the event, to strategy, and to the hunt’. It is seized according to occasions, aroused and hunted down. Here, truth is not discovery but production, which is entwined with enhancing one’s capacities to act, which links up with leadership and trustworthiness, and with trust in oneself and others. This is relevant in relation to the normative implications of Foucault’s discussions of critical reflection. In both cases individuals invent themselves as opposed to discover who and what they are. The issue for Foucault is that of ‘self-direction rather than the self-realisation of our deepest purposes’ (Moss 2004: 42).

The image of truth-thunderbolt is important for three reasons related to the autonomy of politics. First, it is fundamental for getting at Foucault’s political way of dealing with power/knowledge/ethics as practical, argumentative and strategical, and as involved in exercising authority, which requires audacity, resolve and timing. Second, it supports the focus on the parrhesiast and his/her interlocutors as inventers of politics in contrast to being administrators of necessities. The political imperative is that acting entails responsibility, hence the stress on the parrhesiastic pact between citizen and community. Third, truth-thunderbolt stresses the democratic axiom that politics is for amateurs, not experts. This is the take-off for public reason, the demarcation of its specificity, and it links up with Foucault’s take on power as the conduct of conduct, which coordinates and directs (Foucault 1980b: 189; Dyrberg 2016: 272-5).

If truth is seen in terms of a technology of demonstrative truth, political practice is constrained, as it will obey true/false and subject/object dictums. If this logic colonizes political discourses, politics will succumb to elitist and technocratic imperatives, on the one hand, and political correctness, on the other, neither of which are in accord with democracy, as they are geared to hierarchy, submission and conformity.

By accentuating that truth in politics is not the same as demonstrative truth, but revolves around reflexivity, judgement, courage and timing, Foucault takes issue with Emancipation associated with Marxism for not questioning the link between politics and demonstrative truth. Politics could not be seen as autonomous as it was an instrument for the ruling classes, which is part of the reason socialist traditions did not develop a theory of governmental reason (Foucault 2008: 91-5, 312-3). For Marxism, emancipation was part and parcel of the anti-political stance of demonstrative truth dating back to Plato who inaugurated the Western myth that ‘[w]here knowledge and science are found in their pure truth, there can no longer be any political power’


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(Foucault 2000a: 32). The objectivity and universality of this truth was incompatible with the subjectivity and partiality of power. Emancipation thus could only be grasped as an eschatological escape from politics. But end of politics visions cannot be liberating according to Foucault. It is the road to enslavement as its ideological fantasy is construed around an alienating truth regime, which is antithetic to liberty as a political practice and to the integrity of the political realm.

ETHICS: RESPONSIBILITY AND SECULARIZATION VS. DOGMA

The ethical dimension’s emphasis on politics as the field of free and equal citizens requires that there is no higher authority than the one stemming from people reasoning and deciding in common about common concerns. The leaders/citizens link is the focal point of parrhesia, which is inseparable from the secularisation of reasoning, that is, of rejecting the veto power of religious doctrines. ‘Athens is’, says Szakolczai (2003: 189), founded on the secularisation of parrhesia’, which might have been the first of its kind and one that is as relevant as ever. Citizens exercising parrhesia speak for themselves and not in the name of a deity; they do not foretell the future but unveil the present and they do not speak in riddles, but say ‘things as clearly and directly as possible, without any disguise or rhetorical embellishment (Foucault 2011: 15-16).

Foucault raises the issue of secularisation in his analysis of Euripides’ play Ion. This is ‘the decisive parrhesiastic play where we see human beings taking upon themselves the role of truth-tellers – a role which the gods are no longer able to assume’ (Foucault 2001: 27; see also 2010: 205). ‘Truth is no longer disclosed by the gods to human beings ... but is disclosed to human beings by human beings through Athenian parrhesia’ (Foucault 2001: 38). Parrhesia is ‘a human practice, a human right, and a human risk’ (Foucault 2010: 154).

Individuals acting politically are not modelled in the image of their gods, but are shaped in their own image, and it is this act of creation that is brought into the domain of politics as a governing power. The point is not only that one has to be able to govern oneself to be able to govern others, but also that this power is not defined in repressive terms as power over others, but as a way to get things done. This is fundamental. How it is done is secondary: it might be to get others to do what they might not otherwise have done, been able to do or wanted to do. This approach to power calls for meritocracy, and it gives the care of self a central role for building political capital.

The link between political authorities and community is a political task, which entails responsibility. This is the parrhesiastic pact, which has a double aspect. First, citizens


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bind themselves to the content of the statement: does it make sense and is it a reliable interpretation of a given issue, trend or challenge, and is the suggested cause of action appropriate? Second, citizens bind themselves to the act of making it thereby ascertaining their trustworthiness and the political bond to the community. The ethical imperative of the parrhesiastic pact is, says Foucault (2010: 65), that ‘I am the person who has spoken this truth, I therefore bind myself to the act of stating it and take on the risk of all its consequences’. Responsibility means willingness on the part of citizens to assert their seriousness in speaking on behalf of or as a critic of political authorities and suggesting solutions. Words and deeds must not be out of joint, but should make a perfect fit. This suggests a third aspect of the parrhesiastic pact: timing. To be able to grasp the right moment or to create that moment, and to act with resolve, testifies to an attentiveness to political matters.

The secularization thesis and the parrhesiastic pact play a significant role in carving out a political realm and framing public reason. This places individual responsibility at the centre of politics, which is pivotal for a democratic political culture. Although Foucault speaks of religion, which is the classical case in dealing with toleration, it is just one among many comprehensive doctrines, which seek to ground the terms of political discourse. What we see here is that the political moment is founded negatively on the exclusion of what is antithetic to the freestanding nature of public political reasoning.

THE SPECIFICITY AND AUTONOMY OF POLITICS IN RELATION TO PUBLIC REASON

The three types of exclusion Foucault outlines underpin the democratic ethos of liberty and equality by founding it on the strategies of securing the autonomy of the political realm. Foucault and Rawls pursue similar lines of inquiry when viewing public reason as freestanding and that this implies bracketing issues related to power, knowledge and ethics. They both claim that citizens ought not to answer to higher authorities than can be reasoned out in the political community, which asserts the integrity of the political realm and the primacy of public reason. Both parrhesia and public reason are political interventions, which link up with democratic traditions of reasonable pluralism.

Whereas Foucault’s parrhesia is addressed primarily to political authorities and their critics, Rawls’s public reason is addressed to citizens and the background political culture. This is among other things a difference between the output politics focusing on the challenges political authorities have to deal with, and the input politics of the democratic set-up. This suggests another complementary difference: while parrhesia is


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expressed in the event, to seize the opportunity and act at the spur of the moment, public reason has a framing function related to fairness of underpinning liberty and equality. It follows that parrhesia and public reason are associated with difference and equality, respectively. This does not rule out that parrhesia is also a disposition ingrained in the political culture, just as public reason is also a way of presenting arguments and pursuing policy options.

To get a better grasp of how parrhesia and public reason complement each other it is worth noting that political liberalism advances three claims, which are relevant in relation to Foucault:

Public reason: individual reasoning in politics has priority over egoistic rationality and altruistic normativity, alias preference optimization and normative integration, both of which are social concerns.

Autonomy: individual and social freedom is not merely freedom from political power, but can be obtained only by engaging in common concerns. Politics is the realm of freedom as opposed a necessary evil or the upshot of class domination.

Anti-perfectionism: critique of ideal-based models in politics, where politics is the medium for advancing comprehensive doctrines, can be sustained only by granting the freestanding nature of public reason.

These claims set the terms of democratic interaction, which is geared to assess the adequacy and justification of governing in this or that way, according to this or that criterion, at this particular time, in that situation, and so forth. Seen in this light public reason and parrhesia are ways of exercising and critiquing political power.

Three points are worth mentioning, which clarify Foucault’s position and throw light on the themes he shares with Rawls. The first concerns the original position, which orbits around power/knowledge/ethics and operates by way of exclusions. The second deals with the pursuit of the rational within the reasonable, which touches on the relationship between authorities and community vis-à-vis regime. The third looks at practices of the self and how to conduct others, which concerns the cultivation of political capital.

RAWLS’S TAKE ON PUBLIC REASON AND THE ORIGINAL POSITION

The task of public reason is not to solve disagreements among comprehensive views or asserting truth claims (Rawls 1997: 771, 799). The democratic task is to outline the rules of engagement by creating a political field in which members treat each other as


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equals. This makes it possible to agree, disagree and agree to disagree, and this is what the political conception of justice as fairness focuses on: the framing of political authority by public reason. ‘The dualism in political liberalism’, says Rawls (1993: xxi), ‘between the point of view of the political conception and the many points of view of comprehensive doctrines is not a dualism originating in philosophy. Rather, it originates in the special nature of democratic political culture as marked by reasonable pluralism’. The criteria of being reasonable is that one accepts political terms of governing, that is, as freestanding vis-à-vis comprehensive reasons.

Whereas the early philosophical Rawls viewed public reason as an Archimedean point able to remove irrationalities and particularities from an underlying universal order, the later Rawls bases his justice as fairness on what is distinctively political about a modern democratic culture. Politics is the practice of creating order in the midst of disorder. It is this approach as well as the focus on the link between the autonomy of politics and democracy that makes it relevant to compare Rawls and Foucault. Public reason is a transformative capacity because it is able to bend comprehensive reasons towards itself and to bring about a democratic order that moves the boundaries of what is political beyond constitutional essentials and endorse/advance equality and liberty in the political community (Rawls 1993: 347).

In contrast to Habermas, whose ideal speech situation requires that knowledge rids itself from power relations to achieve epistemic and ethical validity, the ethical moment for Rawls is conditioned by a power to separate knowledge and self. This is a will to ignorance with regard to one’s identity and position (Rawls 1972: 145, 245), which taps into Foucault’s arguments concerning the meritocratic principles of parrhesia that brackets social status. Both of them focus on self/other relationships and that these can be translated into how the self relates to him/herself.

To act politically is modelled on the ability of governing oneself, which relies on one’s ability to take care of oneself (Foucault 2001: 25). For Foucault, politics is ‘to be exercised on the basis of the individual’s “retreat within himself”; that is, it depended on the relationship he established with himself in the ethical work of the self on the self’ (Foucault 1990: 91). This is an experiment geared to clarify the limits of acceptable governing. For Foucault the self/other issue is exemplified in the ethical maxim of treating others as one would treat oneself, which is a political ethics modelled on ‘power to’ rather than on ‘power over’. The task of political authority is to coordinate and direct (Foucault 1980b: 189).

The original position is, says Rawls (1993: 28), ‘set up by you and me in working out justice as fairness, and so the nature of the parties is up to us: they are merely the artificial creatures inhabiting our device of representation’. It is an egalitarian way of


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representing a common theme in social contract theory in which members of a political society equally share political potentials for decision and action. The just society is politically mediated and it is based on civic traditions, since it ‘is one whose members engage, not merely in activities coordinated by orders from a central authority, but in activities guided by publicly recognized rules and procedures that those cooperating accept and regard as properly regulating their conduct’ (Rawls 1993: 108).

Sovereignty lies with reasonable citizens and reasonability requires freedom to be part of a pluralist society. In addition, and this is especially relevant in relation to political capital, ‘justice as fairness is addressed not so much to constitutional jurists as to citizens in a constitutional regime’, and ‘citizens are regarded as having a certain natural political virtue without which the hopes for a regime of liberty may be unrealistic’ (Rawls 1993: 369, 370). This virtue springs from a democratic norm in which ‘the reasonable frames and subordinates the rational’ within the political realm (Rawls 1993: 339). The aim is ‘full autonomy’, which ‘is a political and not an ethical value. By that I mean that it is realized in public life by affirming the political principles of justice and enjoying the protections of the basic rights and liberties; it is also realized by participating in society’s public affairs and sharing in its collective self-determination over time’ (Rawls 1993: 77-8). Foucault’s counterpart to ‘full autonomy’ is his notion of autonomy as meta-capacity geared to self-direction as opposed to self-realisation (Moss 2004: 42). The former is open for discussion in a way the latter is not, for the language of ‘realisation’ links up with the ‘truth-sky’ idiom and hence with the logics of truth/false and subject/object.

The contract set up behind the veil of ignorance establishes criteria neither of bargaining and rational choice nor of a dialogue geared to normative consensus or common agreement. It follows its own political logic of recognition and acceptance organized around the political axis of authorities and citizens. There are some political values of a just society, notably liberty and equality, which must not be compromised as they are binding for every member.

As a device of representation the original position might consist of one person only. In contrast to the arguments put forward by the early communitarian critics of Rawls, this does not mean that deliberation and participation are superfluous. The point is rather to accentuate Foucault and Rawls’s egalitarian individualism. First, it goes for both of them that government is based upon how to govern oneself: the self/other relationship is modelled on the self/self-relationship. This indicates two things. It is an attempt to bypass the politics of ‘power over’, which is a self/other relation cast in terms of conflicting interests; and that political power is geared to getting things done, that is, ‘power to’. Political power cannot then be boxed into a conflict/domination scheme, and this means that we are neither looking at political power as a necessary evil, which


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encroaches upon a pre-given individual freedom, nor envisioning liberty in terms of a social revolution emancipating us from politics. This take on power/freedom highlights that a democratic political culture requires defending the autonomy and integrity of the political realm. For Foucault, this is drawn out in the three exclusions pertaining to power, knowledge and ethics, whereas Rawls focusses on relations between public reason and comprehensive reasons.

There is a parallel between Foucault’s care of the self and Rawls’s original position both of which are geared to forge a political link between self and other based on liberty and equality. The participants to the original position have to be ignorant not of this link, but of how they are positioned in it. Behind the veil of ignorance, we might know everything there is to know about things; yet what we do not know is how or where we are placed with regard to economic, social and political status, gender, religion, educational standing, ethnicity, and so forth. The veil of ignorance illustrates the contingency of position and identity, and its function is to disconnect power and knowledge to get a political ethics off the ground.

Foucault is on to something similar in his distinction between truth-sky and truth-thunderbolt where the latter also disconnects the power of status and privilege from knowledge to give room for politics. The result is a suspension of certainty, that is, to the bracketing of expert discourses when it comes to political ethics. The veil of ignorance illustrates the contingency of the self’s positioning and its claims to truth. The suspension of moral and calculative certainty is the founding political gesture conditioning public reason, which has to be learned and practiced. The political question is to identify when and how power becomes abusive in relation to incompatible views, interests and forms of life, which links up with how to govern oneself and others democratically.

The original position represents the ethical dimensions of public political reasoning, which ought to frame political authorities’ exercise of power. To bracket comprehensive reasons as well as to suspend certainty and identity is the political gesture conditioning public reason. This way of approaching the political ethics of public reason is different compared to Habermas for whom the advance of true as opposed to manipulated knowledge is moral philosophy applied to politics in search for consensus under ideal circumstances. The reason for this difference lies in the specific function Rawls assigns to public reason: it is a way of arguing publicly, which sets the parameters of political interaction rather than being a yardstick for differentiating right/wrong, true/false, etc. Public reason is, accordingly, geared to settle the terms of political interaction.

As a device of representation for a democratic society, the original position emphasises that the self has to meet certain criteria of reasonableness to pursue what it considers


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rational. The demand this imposes on comprehensive views is that they have to acknowledge that they have something in common. The participants to the original position have been framed by the political imperative of conditioning co-existence and by the ethical imperative to act so as not to violate the political commonalty of sharing, which conditions democratic interaction. Two political concerns are important: to define the criteria of fairness governing the mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion and to distinguish between using and abusing power. These are the limits of acceptability and the limits outlining the criteria for its fair exercise, respectively.

PUBLIC REASON

As with parrhesia, public reason does not rely on rational agreement or moral respect, just as it does not exclude power struggles. Political capital is not about social trust but about capacities for engaging in politics. Rawls approach to politics focuses on ‘the public culture itself as the shared fund of implicitly recognized basic ideas and principles’ (Rawls 1993: 8). The public political culture distinguishes a democratic political community from a social one where comprehensive doctrines reign. For political capital ‘virtues are built up slowly over time and depend not only on existing political and social institutions (themselves slowly built up), but also on citizens’ experience as a whole and their knowledge of the past. Again, like capital, these virtues depreciate, as it were, and must be constantly renewed by being reaffirmed and acted from in the present’ (Rawls 1993: 157n). To renew and reaffirm the links between the institutional and the personal aspects of politics, which cultivate our intuitions about fairness, are inseparable from struggles shaping political capital. Power is based on citizens’ political capabilities, which is why democracy should not be defined simply as a response to mistrust and conflict although scepticism towards political authorities forms part of what an active citizenry means.

Public reason is, says Rawls (1993: 369), intended ‘to connect a particular understanding of freedom and equality with a particular conception of the person thought to be congenial to the shared notions and essential convictions implicit in the public culture of a democratic society’. Public reason links political authorities and laypeople, as well as public political culture and background political culture, tailors comprehensive views to the political conception of justice and pushes in the direction of fair terms of cooperation (Rawls 1993: 203, 247). In addition, the principles of public reason will be suitable in non-public contexts as well although they are governed by comprehensive reasons and pursue specific interests (Rawls 1993: 220; Moss 1998: 153). Thus conceived reasonableness is cultivated in social relations as political capital operating as tacit knowledge. A ‘reasonable society is neither a society of saints nor a


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society of the self-centered. It is very much a part of our ordinary human world, not a world we think of much virtue, until we find ourselves without it’ (Rawls 1993: 54). This is a view of ordinary political engagement in which public reason involves the democratic traditions of agents who ‘do not affirm the same comprehensive doctrine [but] affirm the same political conception of justice’, and which is, moreover, ‘firmly established in its citizens’ conduct’ and connected with ‘the common sense of everyday life’ (Rawls 1993: 202, 252; Rawls 2001: 5).

Public reason and comprehensive reasons cannot be sharply differentiated. From an historical point of view the status of public reason as freestanding is the outcome of conflicts among vested interests and comprehensive doctrines. Here, the right and the good are two sides of the same coin. However, seen from the angle of political ethics, the preservation of public reason as freestanding requires that the right trumps the good so as to secure the autonomy of politics and hence democracy.

PUBLIC REASON AND THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE OF INCLUSION/EXCLUSION

‘What binds a society’s efforts into one social union’, says Rawls (1972: 571), ‘is the mutual recognition and acceptance of the principles of justice’. To clarify this we need to distinguish the non-political logics of agreement and respect from the political logic of acceptance. Rawls hints at this logic when he says that ‘[w]e must be able to argue that with the development or the recovery of his rational power the individual in question will accept our decision on his behalf and agree with us that we did the best thing for him’ (Rawls 1972: 249, see also 571). To ‘accept our decision’ is prior to ‘agree with us’, meaning that acceptance of authority forms the basis of agreeing, or disagreeing for that matter. What Rawls calls ‘the burdens of judgement’ refers amongst other things to this distance between accepting and disagreeing. The basic tenet of both Rawls and Foucault’s line of inquiry is that justification is grounded in the political logic of acceptance, as people can accept political authorities and power relations in general for all sorts of reasons ranging from fear to respect (Easton 1965: 107-8).

In the light of Rawls's anti-perfectionism and his political focus on authorities/citizens as well as the logic of authority/acceptance, he asserts that ‘public reason does not ask us to accept the very same principles of justice, but rather to conduct our fundamental discussions in terms of what we regard as a political conception’ (Rawls 1993: 241, see also 226-7). This is the framing function of public reason, which implies that it can be accepted by agonistic parties as long as they accept one another (Rawls 1993: 98; Lloyd 1994: 731). Anti-perfectionism is different from neutrality, which aims to strike a


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balance between various contending powers, where the resulting point-even is equally good for everybody (Rawls 1993: 39; Krasnoff 1998: 282). In this approach it is the private parties who provide the standards of what counts as good in their capacity as private. Rawls’s argument against perfectionism is that public reason ought not to be a medium for channelling comprehensive reasons, as this would compromise its status as freestanding. This insistence upon the political nature of the democratic bond plays into the parrhesiastic pact and is the bottom line of reasonability and accountability.

Public reason is open to comprehensive views, whose reasonableness is conditioning it, whilst it simultaneously ‘will have the capacity to shape those doctrines toward itself’ over long stretches of time (Rawls 1995: 145, see also 145-147; Rawls 1993: 168, 194, 203). Democratic public reason has to enforce limits towards these views to secure its defining political features by excluding types of behaviour, as opposed to opinions, inasmuch as they violate the founding principles of liberty and equality in the political realm. In Theory of Justice Rawls had emphasised ‘that strict compliance is one of the stipulations of the original position’. The political conception of justice is dogmatic when stating that those positions that violate its principle must be barred access to the domain of public reason (Rawls 1993: 64n, 151-4, 157). This is the bottom-line of acceptability defining the terrain of reasonable public power. It makes all the difference whether one is dogmatic in a democratic rather than in a non-democratic sense, as the former is the only regime form that has the virtue of potentially being able to include everybody as free and equal citizens.

It is from within public reason one can adopt either the inclusive or the exclusive view. To adopt one or the other depends on whether we are in a situation where somebody is excluded from public reason by being denied basic liberties. Public reason cannot accept exclusions based on, say, social class, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexuality, as it runs counter to the democratic principle of the liberty of equal citizenship. In this situation the inclusive view is adopted, which implies that public reason could in part be based on comprehensive reasons (Rawls 1997: 776, 784-5). To allow for the inclusion of comprehensive reasons into public reason implies that those comprehensive views, which are articulated with public reason, might slide away from being fully comprehensive. This represents a stabilising element and facilitates the formation of an overlapping consensus. The standard case is the gradual advance of religious toleration in the aftermath of the wars of religion in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hence, ‘reasonable and effective political conception may bend comprehensive doctrines toward itself, shaping them if need be from unreasonable to reasonable’ (Rawls 1993: 246; see also 168, 194, 203; 1995: 145-7).

The operational matrix of public reason is a political battleground of where to draw the line between public and non-public concerns. The principle of reasonableness are laid


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down in the limits towards arguments and practices that attempt to exclude interests, opinions, values and ways of life on bases other than a political one. This asserts a principle of mutual political acceptance within these limits. Exclusions that are not grounded in this principle cannot be justified democratically as they violate the principle of political equality.

PARRHESIA AND PUBLIC REASON: COMPLEMENTARY DIFFERENCES

In the political realm inequalities due to social status, gender, religion, ethnicity, and so on, have been put between brackets. Citizenship entails legal and political equality. This implies laterality, meaning that people who engage in agonistic encounters interact as symmetrical opposites, and it is this principle that lies at the basis of and ought to govern vertical relations between citizens and authorities. What does it take for citizens to become authorities who govern others? Parrhesia addresses this issue. It deals with rightful ascendance and with the dangers of speaking freely and courageously. In so doing, it also deals with building political trust. Trust goes hand in hand with turning the fact of pluralism into a reasonable one that cultivates political capital. Parrhesia and public reason are key elements. ‘It is the modality of a rational being’, says Foucault (1990: 91), ‘and not the qualification of a status that establishes and ought to determine … relations between the governors and the governed’. To speak freely and truthfully means that this rational being is bound by what is reasonable. How to create fair terms of political cooperation, which accept plurality and do not strain government? Parrhesia is an answer to this kind of problem: it is a showing of trust as well as a creation of trust among people whose interests and values differ considerably.

Parrhesia is an approach to political reasonability and trustworthiness, which, analogous to the original position, suspends expert knowledge and certainty to be able to face up to the political imperative of making and implementing decisions, to grasp the right moment, and to act with resolve. These are among the qualities, which those who engage in politics need the most: a good sense of judgement and the ability to take action at the right moment. This is to suggest that parrhesia is an exercise of political reason and action, which, although it is open to everybody, requires training and must be learned by those who wield political authority.

To govern others in the right way, leadership requires that one is able to govern oneself. This is an attempt to specify the nature and scope of political authority and what it takes to govern well, that is, how to exercise power. Foucault’s points concerning power as the conduct of conduct is that it is political by acting upon the actions of others, that it is


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not restricted to struggles over vested interests and that it might facilitate as well as repress. In speaking of democratic parrhesia, Foucault states that ‘one must be a citizen; in fact, one must be one of the best among the citizens, possessing those specific personal, moral, and social qualities which grant one the privilege to speak’ (Foucault 2001: 18, see also 30-1, 51). Elsewhere he asserts that parrhesia takes ‘[a] man of a certain age, who has a good reputation, and who possesses parrhesia are the three necessary and sufficient criteria for the person we need for us to have a relationship to self’ (Foucault 2010: 44; see also 2001: 31, 66-9). This means that parrhesia as a sign of truthfulness and trustworthiness is a virtue, which some people have learnt, but only some; that it is a duty that one has to demonstrate and that it is a technique, which only some are able to learn.

Parrhesia testifies the speaker’s guts and the sincerity to say what he/she has to say when he/she has something to say (Foucault 2010: 43; 2001: 15). The proof of the sincerity of the parrhesiast is his/her courage: ‘it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the “game” of life or death.’ (Foucault 2001: 16). And, he goes on, ‘the danger always comes from the fact that the said truth is capable of hurting or angering the interlocutor. Parrhesia is thus always a “game” between the one who speaks the truth and the interlocutor’ (Foucault 2001: 17). In addition, in his discussion of being able to conduct oneself, Foucault points out that ‘[i]t was the practice of superiority over oneself that guaranteed the moderate and reasonable use that one could and ought to make of the two other superiorities’, which are those of exercising authority over one’s family and society (Foucault 1990: 94-5; see also 1985: Ch. 4). The positive image of a political leader is thus freedom as self-control, moderation and even-handed judgment.

Foucault’s discussions of parrhesia have affinities to Rawls’s argument concerning public reason. Neither of them can be boiled down to democratic constitution (Foucault) or constitutional essentials (Rawls). But whereas Rawls emphasises the community aspect of building political capital bottom-up, Foucault is more interested in parrhesia as an event, which cannot be institutionalised and domesticated by rules since it must be able to act at the right time, seize the opportunity, run the risk and grasp political power (Foucault 2010: 159). However, one’s capacity to tell the truth and to be trustworthy requires extended and systematic education, and in this respect parrhesia forms part of a society’s political capital. In being truthful to oneself and to speak frankly, one has to have courage to speak up against prevalent opinions, laws, and customs (Foucault 2010: 372). As for Rawls’s public reason, it operates both in the political community and in the political regime, and it is concerned with sound judgments that draws on and reflects the political capital of democratic traditions.


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While this is the conditional feature of parrhesia in a democracy, there is also another aspect of parrhesia, which has to do with it being an event, and one that is related to output politics. It is, says Foucault (2010: 277), ‘a discourse of circumstance and conjuncture’, which underscores chance and contingency. It is a guide supplementing even the most efficient government of the state and the most rational order of the laws, as they cannot themselves ensure order. To govern properly, citizens ‘will still need a supplementary discourse of truth, and someone will be needed to address them in complete frankness, using the language of reason and truth to persuade them’ (Foucault 2010: 206). This underlines the necessity of political authorities, which must be kept in a short leach by an informed and engaged citizenry who approaches those in power with a vigilant and critical attitude.

It should thus be clear that in spite of the difference between parrhesia and public reason, they complement one another: they link up with the political capital of democratic traditions and with framing decisions and actions, and they stress the integrity of the person vis-à-vis the autonomy of politics, which are essential for modern democracy.

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Bang, Henrik P. (2014). ‘Rethinking Foucault: The Political circle of Parrhesia and Democracy’, unpublished manuscript, Institute of Governance and Policy Analysis, The University of Canberra.

Dyrberg, Torben Bech (2016). ‘A Foucauldian approach to discussing the autonomy of politics and democracy’, Political Theory, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 265-88.

Easton, David, A Systems Analysis of Political Life, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965.

Foucault, Michel (1980a). ‘Prison Talk’, in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.), New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 37-54.

Foucault, Michel (1980b). ‘The History of Sexuality’, Interview with Lucette Finas in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.), New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 183-93.

Foucault, Michel (1984a). ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 239-56.


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Foucault, Michel (1984b). ‘Politics and Ethics: An Interview’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 373-80.

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Foucault, Michel (1991a). ‘The Subject, Knowledge, and the “History of Truth”’, in Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx, Conservations with Druccio Trombadori, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 43-82.

Foucault, Michel (2000a). ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, in Michel Foucault (2000), Power, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 3, James D. Faubion (ed.), New York: The New Press, pp. 1-89.

Foucault, Michel (2001). Fearless Speech, Joseph Pearson (ed.), Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

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Rawls, John (1993), Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Rawls, John (1997). ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, The University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 64, No. 3, pp. 765-807.

Rawls, John (2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press

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