Foucault challenges the myth of the angelic oppressed and evil oppressor. Overthrowing an existing power does not guarantee that a better way of living will result. Revolution does equal justice; it merely takes on another form of power that can be just as bloody and vicious as the previous system.
Chomsky’s optimism is met with Foucault’s skepticism: Chomsky stresses the need for action, even with incomplete knowledge while Foucault questions the progressive path that Chomsky has laid out for man
What Chomsky perceives as progress and the expectation of future progress is for Foucault a power struggle between various discourses; when one theory becomes more popular or accepted, it appears as the correct understanding of man: his true nature. But Foucault doubts that human nature has been or can be defined. And the labeling of human nature is dangerous and has the potential of locking humans into definitive forms.
Foucault, however, questions the motives of the oppressed (or proletarian), asserting that people go to war to win, not because it is just, and that the proletarian, after finally securing power, will be capable of the same brutality and oppression that once debilitated them.
Foucault is essentially has given up hope of progress he has a pessimistic view of human nature (reoccurance of tragedy). and hence advocates the maintenance of the status quo which supports him.. Chomsky is an optimist, he believe it is systems that are the causes of oppression
Foucault, however, questions the motives of the oppressed (or proletarian), asserting that people go to war to win, not because it is just, and that the proletarian, after finally securing power, will be capable of the same brutality and oppression that once debilitated them.
Foucault is essentially has given up hope of progress he has a pessimistic view of human nature (reoccurance of tragedy). and hence advocates the maintenance of the status quo which supports him.. Chomsky is an optimist, he believe it is systems that are the causes of oppression
When Habermas was asked directly by Nancy Fraser in a conference on the occasion of the publication of the English translation of his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, whether the “condition for the possibility of a public sphere,” that is, the basic condition for communicative rationality, is not a utopian society with “economic equality--the end of class structure and the end of gender inequality,”89 Habermas replied that he would “have to get over the shock to answer such a question"
Teaching Contingencies Deleuze, Creativity Discourses, and Art
by Soodabeh Salehi PHd Thesis
Possibly because many of those those who are in positions of power in the institutions have not much interest in attempting to enable this, they choose to believe in their superiority they can turn to those pessimists such as Foucault who claim progress is impossible... and get on with their (tactical- machiavellian?pursuits(1).?
(1)From the perspective of the history of philosophy and political theory, the difference between Foucault and Habermas lies in the fact that Foucault works within a particularistic and contextualist tradition that focuses on conflict and has its roots with Aristotle via Machiavelli and Nietzsche.100 Foucault is one of the more important twentieth century exponents of this tradition.
Habermas is a prominent exponent of a universalistic and theorizing tradition that focuses on consensus and derives via Kant from Plato. In power terms, we are speaking of “strategic” versus “constitution” thinking, about struggle versus control, conflict versus consensus.
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