ABSTRACT
The sense in which Michel Foucault’s work functions as criticism has long been a source of puzzlement to his readers and the concept of power a focal point for their concern. His apparently neutral accounts of techniques of power lead to complaints that he is normatively confused or that he deprives himself of any basis for criticism of the social phenomena he describes. Charles Taylor claims that Foucault’s concept of power is incoherent, because he uses the term in a way which does not oppose it to freedom: He wants to discredit as somehow based on a misunderstanding the very idea of liberation from power. Taylor proceeds as though these were largely independent of any social context. While he mentions as examples such things as false consciousness or the inability to override less important but destructive feelings in a relationship, these are presented only as exhibits in an ahistorical moral psychology.
