Arendt, Foucault: critique of political philosophy and archaeology of action

Abstract

The foundation of political philosophy, which means, according to Arendt, the attempt of producing an escape from politics altogether, can be understood as a moment of what Foucault called the history of Western’s will to knowledge. According to this hypothesis, we examine Arendt’s analysis of the transformation from action to rulership in Plato and Foucault’s reading of the exclusion of sophism by Aristotle. We show the differences between the archaeology of a pre-political philosophy world that Arendt reconstructs, based on an ambiguous restitution of Socrates, and the strategic theory of discourse which Foucault discovers in sophistic. We finally examine the political consequences of this difference, specially concerning a reconsideration of the traditional relations between thinking and acting.