Nightmares from 1971: oh shit!

The Foucault-Chomsky debate, "human nature: justice versus power," offers perhaps the most effective introduction to contemporary problems involved with the relationships, or lack there of, between human nature and social organization, namely: to what extent can the concept of human nature serve as the basis for social analysis?

The question immediately blossomed out to include how social systems operate and the role of individuals therein, with particular attention given to the nature of knowledge and social power. In so doing, the debate dealt substantially with the extent to which society and individuals are constructed and how this process occurs. This was the common ground between Chomsky, the founder biolinguistics and most cited living scholar, and Foucault, a post-structuralist philosopher and historian of power - most notably in his development of the concept of governmentality and biopower.

Here, the similarities end and the intellectual cracked-out Olympics began: Chomsky holding that knowledge and values, focusing especially on language and justice, consist in a biological view human nature, which power represses or enables in the context of class struggle, whereas Foucault attempts to identify the nature of knowledge and power as distinct aspects of social systems which construct society and individuals, including our modern notions of human nature and justice, thereby making them as concepts irreducidble to biology, itself concept invented within the modern era.

The two clips below are not the complete debate.




A full transcript of the debate is also available. Read more about Chomsky and Foucault. A more mature version of Foucault's perspective may be found in Omnes et Singulatim: towards a critique of political reason