ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault's approach extends the scope of Max Weber's understanding of the increasing growth of instrumental rationality as a crucial and perhaps even dominant component of modernity. While Foucault himself was quite cautious in his analysis and did not seek to construct a cut and dried power/knowledge formula that could be applied to all settings, however, some of his more enthusiastic interlocutors have purged the element of ambiguity and ambivalence that were significant elements of the distinction between formal and substantial rationality invoked by Weber, Mannheim, and Foucault himself. Some of the excesses of the starry-eyed disciples of Foucault have ironically and possibly unwittingly contributed to a totalizing conception of power that envelops individuals from all sides, constituting subjects that are little more than "docile bodies" who lack any capacity for resistance. One need not accept the strong shade of pessimism in Foucault's own formulations, as evident in the famous debate with Noam Chomsky, in order to appreciate the methodological and indeed substantive value of his perspective in making sense of the complexities of the emergence of specific disciplinary knowledge and their intersection with the exercise of power, domination, and regulation.
