CRATIC LIBERALISMwould lead to ANARCHYand chaos. If
the slaves were freed, Fitzhugh argued, women would
demand equality, and the traditional family and soci-
ety would be destroyed. This reactionary attitude,
like Sir Robert FILMER’s, was premised on the patri-
archs of the Hebrew Bible, CLASSICAL Greek and
Roman civilization, and the CATHOLIC Middle Ages.
Like the British conservatives and ROMANTICS from
which Fitzhugh derived much of his philosophy, he
identified the problems of Modern society not with
insufficient FREEDOM, but with insufficient AUTHORITY.
From this hierarchical philosophy, Fitzhugh
claimed that southern slavery was more humane than
northern capitalism. The relationship of master to
slave in the South was open, honest authority; the
tyranny of capitalism over “wage slaves” was hidden
and hypocritical. Institutionalized slavery was pater-
nalistic and beneficent; free-market labor was cruel
and EXPLOITATIVE. The southern slaveholders accepted
their responsibility to take care of their workers;
heartless capitalism used workers and cast them aside.
The “freedom” of wage labor was an illusion, and dem-
ocratic liberty a deception. “The Negro slaves of the
South,” Fitzhugh wrote in Cannibals All! (1854), “are
the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in
the world.” By contrast, the workers in northern
industrial cities “must work or starve. He is more of a
slave than the Negro because he works longer and
harder for less allowance... .” Modern freedom then is
“an empty and delusive mockery.”
Fitzhugh was unique among proslavery southern
writers in not only defending his institution but going
on to attack northern society and hypocrisy. He saw the
tendency of democratic liberalism to rebel against any
authority, ending in equalitarian anarchy. “All modern
philosophy converges to a single point—the overthrow
of all government. .. .,” stated Fitzhugh. If black slav-
ery were abolished, feminism, socialism, and children’s
rights would follow.
Fitzhugh’s traditional hierarchical organic philoso-
phy was defeated with the Northern Union victory
over the South in the American Civil War, but it con-
tinued to influence radical conservative thought in the
United States.
Foucault, Michel (1926–1984) French philo-
sopher
Born in Poitiers and educated at the École Normale
Supérieure in Paris, Foucault became one of the lead-
ing French intellectuals of the 20th century. After serv-
ing in the philosophy departments at the University of
Clermont-Ferrand and the University of Vincennes in
the 1960s, Foucault was elected in 1970 to the highest
academic post in France, the Collège de France, where
he assumed the chair of professor of the history of sys-
tems of thought. During the 1970s and 1980s, his
international reputation flourished as he taught and
lectured all over the world. Foucault died from an
AIDS-related illness in 1984.
Foucault’s philosophy was greatly influenced by the
German philosopher Friedrich NIETZSCHE. As a histo-
rian of knowledge, Foucault sought to show that there
is no essential meaning to things. History does not
possess an inherent order by which it unfolds; rather
order is a product of the writing of history itself. To
write a history of the past is to view it from a particu-
lar perspective in the present and to interpret past
events in light of current concerns. Foucault referred
to this understanding of the historically changing
frameworks of knowledge as “genealogy.” Through
genealogical analyses, Foucault examined how
“regimes of practices” come to define the rules by
which certain ideas and beliefs are defined as true or
false at different times in history. He was especially
concerned with the ways in which POWERis employed
within a society to structure relationships of domina-
tion or exclusion as well as to affect the formation of
self-identities.
In his first major work, Madness and Civilization
(1961), Foucault analyzed the distinction between
reason and madness as defined during the early MOD-
ERN period. Prior to this period, madness was re-
garded as a form of experience with its own reason,
often associated with genius, art, and religion. In the
Modern era, however, madness came to be regarded as
the complete opposite of reason and as the sign of
antisocial tendencies that required medical treatment
for their elimination. Concomitant with the rise of
therapeutic practices in the 17th and 18th centuries
was the development of punitive institutions and
practices. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault
reviewed the “birth of the prison” in conjunction with
other “disciplinary” practices that deploy power
within assorted institutions—the army, the school,
and the factory—to train the bodies of individuals.
The modern prison (or school), for example, utilized
the technology of constant surveillance (either real or
perceived) to shape the embodied behavior of the
prisoner (or student) toward the goal of self-disci-Foucault, Michel 109