Concept or Condition? Human Nature and the Politics of Foundations in the Chomsky–Foucault Debate

Freedom Without Foundations. Expressionism (AI Image)

Introduction

Political disagreements often appear to revolve around competing visions of justice, authority, or social organization. Yet some disputes unfold at a deeper level, before programs or principles enter the scene. The 1971 conversation between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault offers such a case. What emerges over the course of their exchange is not merely a conflict between libertarian socialism and genealogical critique, but a more fundamental divergence concerning the status of the concepts through which political thought becomes possible.

At stake is a prior question: must political reflection begin with an account of what human beings are, or should it instead examine the historical conditions that make such accounts intelligible? The debate reveals less a disagreement about society than a tension regarding whether politics requires foundations at all.

The Search for Ground

Chomsky’s interventions display a persistent concern with orientation. For critique to move beyond denunciation, it must be guided by some understanding of the capacities proper to human beings.

“One… task is to try to create the vision of a future just society… based, if possible, on some firm and humane concept of the human essence or human nature” (Chomsky & Foucault, 2006).

This appeal is continuous with his linguistic theory. Generative grammar assumes that the human mind possesses an innate ability to produce indefinitely many sentences from finite means. Creativity, in this sense, signals a relatively stable feature of the species. Political reasoning extends the implication: if humans share certain potentials, institutions ought to cultivate rather than inhibit them.

Chomsky’s argument is not simply normative but architectural. A political project requires a supporting anthropology. Without some account of what persons are capable of becoming, critique risks forfeiting direction and dissolving into reactive opposition.

Uncertainty does not, for him, justify suspension. Even partial knowledge can orient action. As he remarks elsewhere in the discussion, one must sometimes choose a course despite incomplete understanding. The alternative would be paralysis.

Diagnosis Before Prescription

Foucault approaches the matter from another angle. Rather than proposing an ideal order, he assigns priority to identifying the mechanisms through which societies regulate conduct.

“One of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent… is that we should indicate and show up… all the relationships of political power which actually control the social body” (Chomsky & Foucault, 2006).

Power, in this formulation, is not confined to visible authorities. It circulates through domains that present themselves as neutral — educational systems, medical institutions, family structures — whose apparent independence conceals their participation in broader strategies of control. The philosopher’s task is therefore diagnostic before it becomes prescriptive.

This shift in emphasis signals a deeper hesitation. Foucault does not merely decline to outline a future society; he questions the epistemic gesture that would make such a projection appear warranted.

The Risk Inside “Human Nature”

The exchange sharpens when Foucault raises a caution about the very notion invoked to ground political aspiration.

“If you say that a certain human nature exists… don’t you risk defining it… in terms borrowed from our society, from our civilisation, from our culture?” (Chomsky & Foucault, 2006).

The concern is not semantic but methodological. Concepts that present themselves as universal may silently incorporate the historical conditions from which they emerged. What appears foundational may therefore function as a conduit through which the present extends itself into the future.

His historical example is instructive. Certain strands of nineteenth-century socialism envisioned emancipation as the recovery of an authentic humanity supposedly suppressed by capitalism. Yet the features structuring this projected future — family arrangements, sexual norms, aesthetic expectations — bore a striking resemblance to bourgeois life. The revolution risked universalizing precisely what it sought to overcome.

The difficulty lies less in the accuracy of any single description than in the procedure through which descriptions acquire authority. Political projects often inherit their guiding categories from the very order they contest.

Concepts and Their Conditions

The disagreement can thus be reframed without recourse to the familiar opposition between humanism and anti-humanism. Chomsky theorizes within concepts; Foucault interrogates the field that allows concepts to emerge.

One begins by asking what humans are so that a just arrangement might be envisioned. The other asks how categories such as human, normal, or rational came to organize experience in the first place.

What divides them is not simply their political temperament but their understanding of what concepts are capable of doing.

For Chomsky, concepts provide orientation, they make judgment possible and prevent critique from drifting into relativism. Political thought requires some degree of stability if it is to distinguish emancipation from domination.

For Foucault, concepts are themselves historical formations. Before serving as guides, they must be examined as effects of practices, institutions, and relations of power. Poorly examined universals may reinstall familiar structures under the sign of reform.

The debate therefore exposes a paradox. Politics seems to require conceptual firmness, yet critique begins by unsettling the very terms that claim such authority.

Foundation and Suspicion

Neither posture dispels uncertainty. Chomsky readily concedes that speculation proceeds from incomplete knowledge, yet maintains that action cannot wait for intellectual security. Foucault does not deny the urgency of resistance; he warns instead that confidence in anthropological foundations may obscure the processes through which those foundations were formed.

Their exchange suggests that modern political reflection is pulled between two imperatives: the search for a normative horizon and the effort to examine the historical scaffolding behind every horizon. Excessive trust in foundations invites dogmatism; relentless suspicion risks rendering orientation impossible.

Seen from this perspective, the debate does not culminate in a synthesis. It reveals a structural tension that neither thinker can fully resolve, and perhaps none can avoid.

Political thought advances by projecting possibilities, it matures by questioning the assumptions that sustain those projections. The desire for ground and the impulse toward critique remain mutually unsettling partners.

If the conversation continues to command attention, it may be because it stages a difficulty internal to modern reflection itself: politics appears to demand foundations, while critique begins precisely where foundations grow uncertain.

References

Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky–Foucault debate: On human nature (J. Elders, Ed.). New Press. (Original debate held in 1971).

Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Routledge.