Noam Chomsky · Politics
The 1971 television debate in which Chomsky and Michel Foucault clashed over the deepest question in politics: is there a real human nature that can ground a universal ideal of justice to fight for (Chomsky), or are ‘human nature’ and ‘justice’ themselves products of society and instruments of power (Foucault)?
In November 1971, Dutch television broadcast an encounter that has been called the most illuminating intellectual debate of the century. On one side sat Noam Chomsky, the American linguist and anarchist; on the other, Michel Foucault, the French historian of madness, punishment, and power, then becoming the most influential thinker in Europe. The moderator, the philosopher Fons Elders, set them a single question: is there such a thing as an innate human nature, independent of our experience and our history? The first half of the exchange was about knowledge - whether the mind has a fixed inner structure (Chomsky) or is shaped by historically shifting systems of thought (Foucault). But it was the second half, on justice and power, that produced the fireworks and made the debate famous. There, two visions of what politics even is collided head-on - and the fault line they exposed still runs through political thought today.
Chomsky came to the debate with the position we traced in the last lesson. A just society, he argued, is one that realizes the fundamental human need for free, creative, self-directed activity; and our task, as people who want a better world, is to articulate a vision of such a society, drawn from our best understanding of human nature, and then to struggle toward it. He freely admitted that our knowledge of human nature is limited and partly shaped by our own culture. But he insisted we must nonetheless act on our best understanding of it - because without some concept of what human beings are and need, we would have no ground whatever for calling one social order better or worse, more or less just, than another. To fight for a better world, you must have some idea of what ‘better’ means, and that idea, Chomsky argued, can only rest on a conception of human nature.
Behind that shocking claim lay Foucault’s whole way of thinking. Concepts like justice, reason, madness, and human nature are not neutral truths hovering above history; they are produced by particular societies and serve particular arrangements of power. His histories had shown how radically they shift: what counts as madness, as crime, as normal sexuality, as ‘human’ itself, is defined differently in each era by the play of what he called power/knowledge. So when Chomsky appeals to a fixed human nature as the ground of justice, Foucault hears exactly the move that power always makes - dressing up a historical, contingent, changeable arrangement as the eternal truth of ‘man,’ and thereby placing it beyond question. Foucault’s aim is not to found a just order on human nature but to unmask the power hidden inside our most cherished universals. Every time someone says ‘this is simply human nature,’ or ‘this is what justice requires,’ Foucault wants to ask: produced by whom, and in whose interest?
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that in 1971 Chomsky and Foucault debated whether justice is grounded in a universal human nature (Chomsky) or is a historical construct that serves power (Foucault), with Foucault claiming the proletariat fights not because its cause is just but because it wants to take power. Explain the clash and what e…
Leads to Michel Foucault.
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