Among the hundreds of books and articles on Foucault, only a handful make for genuinely rewarding reading. Thomas L. Dumm's Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom is a welcome addition to that handful, for it treats Foucault with the subtlety his thought deserves and demands, but almost never receives. As Dumm shows, appreciating Foucault's accomplishments as a political theorist requires sustained attention to the difficult balancing act to which he devoted himself: on the one hand, Foucault's analyses, cool and impassioned at once, of the macabre inventiveness of power in our era; on the other, his likewise passionate and realistic imagination and appraisal of the resources our era offers for freedom, emancipation, liberation. Most interpretations of Foucault suffer from emphasizing one of these twinned concerns at the expense of the other; Dumm, by masterfully giving each its due, takes the measure of Foucault's original, provocative, unforgettable understanding of power and freedom. . . . This is a book that will enlighten those coming to Foucault for the first time, and provoke many who think they know his work well to read it again.
Frederick M. Dolan, University of California, Berkeley Dumm succeeds in showing the extent to which freedom for Foucault is always situated and situational, constrained by social relations and involving the mediations of external forces. Dumm's study will make an ideal introduction for anyone new to Foucault. It has been deftly constructed, it is written with care, precision, and passion, and it succeeds in enabling the reader to enbark upon a radical self-questioning concerning the notion of freedom.
Keith Ansell-Pearson, professor of philosophy and director of graduate research, University of Warwick, England
Political Theory