The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution

Foucault’s personal and political experimentation, its ambiguous legacy, and the rise of neoliberal politics

Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. One fateful day in May 1975, Foucault dropped acid in the southern California desert. In letters reproduced here, he described it as among the most important events of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. That trip helped redirect Foucault’s thought and contributed to a tectonic shift in the intellectual life of the era. He came to reinterpret the social movements of May ’68 and reposition himself politically in France, embracing anti-totalitarian currents and becoming a critic of the welfare state.

Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora examine the full historical context of the turn in Foucault’s thought, which included studies of the Iranian revolution and French socialist politics, through which he would come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the left nor the right: neoliberalism.

Mitchell Dean is Professor of Public Governance and Head of the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School. He is author of the best-selling Governmentality, a title that has been cited in the first edition of Foucault’s lectures and the Oxford English Dictionary.

Daniel Zamora is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is the co-editor of Foucault and Neoliberalism with Michael C. Behrent.