The Blindness of the Left -- Foucault in Iran

Wesley Yang has a devastating piece on Foucault's enthusiasm for the Iranian theocracy in the Boston Globe.

Foucault's Iranian adventure was a "tragic and farcical error" that fits into a long tradition of ill-informed French intellectuals spouting off about distant revolutions, says James Miller, whose 1993 biography "The Passion of Michel Foucault" contains one of the few previous English-language accounts of the episode. Indeed, Foucault's search for an alternative that was absolutely other to liberal democracy seems peculiarly reckless in light of political Islam's subsequent career, and makes for odd reading now as observers search for traditions in Islam that are compatible with liberal democracy. But at a time when religion is resurgent in politics and Western liberals are divided between interventionists and anti-imperialists, Foucault's peculiar blend of blindness and insight about the Islamists remains instructive.

Read the whole thing here. Despite all the hoopla about finding an alternative to bourgeois tyranny, Foucault was just another befuddled intellectual prostrate at the altar of authoritarianism.