ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the intermeshed themes which are largely omitted within the social work’s academic literature. Michel Foucault is ‘generally accepted as having been the most influential social theorist of the twentieth century’. Foucault’s philosophy is anti-materialist and his ideas are ordinarily situated within the wider body of post-structuralist thinking about the world and knowledge creation. Foucault was critical of the Union of the Left, reflected in the Parti socialiste/Parti communiste francais (PCF) common programme, and was ‘among those intellectuals for whom the mobilization in favour of dissidence was a means of challenging the PCF’. Foucault’s political project is, therefore, to stress that the very idea of socialism is contaminated from the outset because of a biopolitical project to control, manage and repress. Foucault appears to have been particularly drawn to the conceptualisations of the ‘Second Left’ because, albeit in different ways to the neoliberals, they also aimed to alter the function of the state.
