ABSTRACT
What Patrick Shaw chiefly objects to be the author failure to credit Michel Foucault with a 'radically committed Nietzschean approach' to issues of truth, ethics, and political conduct. 'On this more radical view', as Shaw writes, 'liberalism is itself part of the framework which must be overcome in the task of self-invention'. After all, Shaw remarks, a fifth-century BC Athenian would scarcely have taken this low view of rhetoric or considered it merely a suasive technique deployed for self-interested ends and having no place in the public sphere of open participant debate. After all, as Shaw says, 'Foucault certainly engaged with public issues in his writings, presumably hoping to affect public outcomes; and this was not an unreasonable hope'. For it is hard to see how Foucault can hope to bridge this divide, given his redefinition of 'autonomy' in terms of aesthetic self-fashioning rather than in terms of a wider responsibility to interests transcending those of the isolated 'private' individual.
