Self-Cultivation and the Practices of Peace: Foucault on the Stoics and Peacemaking in the Modern World

Abstract

In The Care of the Self, the third volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault turns to the Roman Stoics and their influence, acknowledged and unacknowledged, on the modern world. His focus is on the emergent notion of the “‘private’ aspects of existence” and how they relate to the public: domestic, political, and social frameworks.¹ Foucault’s work here continues the postmodern interest in the classical world and its notions of virtue, but also, as he says in “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” the interest in where Christian technologies of the self came from and how they have been distorted.² In The Care of the Self, Foucault, as always, is interested in both power and pleasure. He asks how “taking care of oneself,” that is, self-cultivation, relates to the larger issues of domestic and political life, specifically issues of control of sexuality and power politics.