Author Functions and Freedom: “Michel Foucault” and “Ayn Rand” in the Anglophone “Culture Wars”

Freedom was a core theme of Michel Foucault’s later writings, as well the central tenet of the work of pro-capitalist writer Ayn Rand. This article demonstrates strikingly similar arguments made in the œuvres of these unlikely bedfellows regarding how care for the self/ holding the self as one’s highest value (in Foucault’s and Rand’s respective lexicons) can lead to an ethic of freedom. This article has the dual aims of, firstly, placing Rand into dialogue with Foucault to reveal their surprising closeness on the crucial question of individual freedom, and, secondly, examining the ways in which both author names have recently been deployed in political discourse to stand in for caricatured versions of the “freedoms” of right-wing greed and left-wing moral relativism, respectively, in the so-called “culture wars” of the 2020s. Foucault, in fact, is doubly slurred since, as well as becoming a metonym for the perceived dangers of identity politics in universities, according to UK cabinet minister Liz Truss, his ambivalent and ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism and individualism proves a problem to many scholars who wish to fit him squarely into a left-wing continental canon. Tracing the contiguity between Rand’s and Foucault’s versions of freedom offers a warning against simplistic retroactive readings that sacrifice critical nuance for a tribal politics of purity.