Vincent Descombes has pointed out that attempts to appropriate Foucault's work have given us an American Foucault and a French Foucault. The American Foucault, he says, “sought to define autonomy in purely human terms,” without the Kantian notion of a universal law. This Foucault can be read, I have argued, as an up-to-date version of John Dewey. Like Dewey, this Foucault tells us that liberal democracies might work better if they stopped trying to give universalistic self-justifications, stopped appealing to notions like “rationality” and “human nature” and instead viewed themselves simply as promising social experiments.

But, as Descombes says, the American Foucault is Foucault with most of the Nietzscheanism drained away. The French Foucault is the fully Nietzschean one. For this Foucault, Descombes says, the project of autonomy requires us to have “inhuman thoughts,” to have no “worries about sharing our beliefs with our fellow citizens.” Insofar as the French Foucault has any politics, they are anarchist rather than liberal.

I think that the contrast Descombes draws catches a real tension between two of Foucault's mixed and complicated motives. This tension is one characteristic of the Romantic intellectual who is also a citizen of a democratic society. Such an intellectual finds her moral identity – her sense of her relations to most other human beings – in the democratic institutions which she inhabits. But she does not think that her moral identity exhausts her self-description. For she does not think her conduct toward other human beings is the most important thing about her.