In the previous chapter we saw that social and political thinking becomes problematic if it does not contain a well-developed conception of power. We also saw that for the public sphere to make a real contribution to democracy, one would have to link it to conflict, power, and partisanship. In forging this link, we will continue in the present chapter our focus on Michel Foucault's analysis of power as a means of developing a more adequate and contemporary conception of phronesis.

I wish to emphasize at the outset that the discussion of Foucault's work that follows cannot be seen as a universal explication of Foucault's method, but only as one pragmatic reading of it. I engage in Foucault's work in order to better understand the special problems presented by a specific area of research, that is, power in relation to phronesis; it is a strategy which is entirely in the Foucauldian spirit. As Paul Rabinow has observed, Foucault gave us tools to use not an agenda to follow.

Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Foucault

“[P]hilosophy begins with Aristotle,” Foucault says provocatively, not with Socrates and Plato as the canon has it. Foucault never speaks of any relationship between his own work and Aristotelian phronesis, however.