Xander Veridaze Updated on May 20, 2025 4 min read

How Foucault changed the way we see power

Foucault’s influence runs deeper than academia. His radical view of power now shapes how we talk about race, gender, truth, and oppression. But has this lens distorted more than it revealed?

Power is everywhere. That’s the claim — repeated so often in modern discourse it’s passed from insight to incantation. Everything, we are told, is power. Power in language. Power in silence. Power in gaze, gesture, structure, system. The oppressor class needn’t be identified by violence or law. It may simply reside in the norms we inherit or the pronouns we use. Even kindness can be suspect — a velvet glove over a colonial fist.

This is not just theory. It’s now the default framework through which much of the cultural left interprets the world. From gender debates to postcolonial studies to campus policies and corporate HR departments, the language of power saturates everything. It sounds critical, even liberatory — until you try to disagree with it.

The fingerprints of Michel Foucault — the French philosopher and historian born in 1926 — are all over this worldview. Though he didn’t invent the obsession with power, he gave it intellectual form. In his work, power is not held or possessed but flows through discourse and institutions. It is not something that can be seized and redistributed so much as something that constitutes reality itself. Even truth, for Foucault, is not discovered but produced by regimes of power.

This was not a conspiracy theory. It was something more ambitious: a philosophical dismantling of objectivity itself. Where the Enlightenment once stood — with its promises of reason, universality, and moral clarity — Foucault planted a different flag. Not a call to arms, but a method of suspicion. Look behind every claim of truth, he taught, and you’ll find a struggle for dominance. It’s a view that pairs neatly with moral relativism — the idea that no belief system can claim objective truth, only cultural or ideological preference. And once truth becomes just another weapon, dialogue gives way to power plays.

It’s hard to overstate how corrosive this has become. If all appeals to truth are masks for power, then persuasion becomes manipulation. Debate becomes unmasking. Dialogue is replaced by interrogation — who benefits? Who speaks? Who is silenced? In this framework, sincerity is irrelevant. A statement is judged not by its coherence or correspondence to reality, but by its position in the structure of power.

The effect is everywhere: in universities, where scholarly inquiry is subordinated to activism; in media, where reporting is reframed as complicity or resistance; in everyday conversation, where language is policed not for clarity but for ideological alignment. The moral centre of gravity has shifted from what is true to what is transgressive.

Roger Scruton saw this coming. To him, Foucault’s ideas were not merely flawed but fundamentally corrosive to the Western tradition. They undermined the very idea of shared meaning, of a moral community rooted in something beyond self-interest and struggle. In treating power as omnipresent, Foucault offered not liberation but a kind of intellectual paranoia — a lens that cannot admit the good, only the strategic.

None of this is to deny that power exists or that it shapes societies. But when power is the only story, everything else — truth, beauty, virtue, love — becomes suspect. What begins as critique ends in cynicism. What begins as emancipation ends in alienation. We don’t understand each other better; we just learn to accuse more fluently.

Foucault taught us to mistrust the surface. Perhaps it’s time we mistrusted the method.