Light Dawns on Marble Head

6 July 2005, 0151 EDT

I’ve already made myself look stupid once today, so I figure: why not have another go?

When I was a PhD student at Columbia, I taught in the Contemporary Civilization program. Teaching in CC was, without a doubt, the best experience of my educational career. Not only was it just generally a good time – getting to know students, getting to watch them develop over an entire year, teaching the “classics” – but it gave me an excuse to reread important works in social and political theory every year. Now I mostly teach “intro to IR” and the occasional IR theory class, so it is extremely rare that I actually have the time to, say, read The Origin of the Species with a fresh eye.

This summer, though, I’ve been giving a tutorial in basic political theory, so I’ve gotten some (limited) opportunity to look at some classics again. We’re currently wrapping up the course with The Genealogy of Morals. Thus, my “duh, Barbie” moment….

I had totally forgotten just how much Discipline and Punish is, in essence, an extended riff on the second essay of Genealogy. I certainly got Foucault’s evocation of Nietzsche’s “genealogical method,” but I can’t believe how much I missed the substantive similarities.

I’m sure someone is now going to point out numerous places where Foucault draws the parallels himself, leaving me doubly chagrined.

Filed as: Nietzsche and Foucault

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.