it was none other than habermas that would refer to foucault as a "young conservative", as thinker after thinker then struggled to grapple with him in a left-wing context, while being aware that he didn't quite fit.

i've argued repeatedly that he's essentially a vulgar burkean, in the sense that he takes conservative assumptions at face value, and then attempts to co-opt them - in contrast to the vulgar marxists that defined high finance and industrial capital in the middle of the twentieth century, and sought to rule by taking marxist assumptions at face value, and co-opting them. and, so, as was once remarked, that makes him "some kind of leftist", but one that has a fundamentally right-wing worldview. if the fords & rockefellers knew that marx was right, and sought to undermine him for their self-interest, foucault likewise knows burke is right and seeks to find some away around it - which means that either foucault is wrong (and marx is right), or the fords & rockefellers are (and burke is right). of course, that's quite simplistic, but necessarily so.

leftists used to take the much simpler approach of simply arguing that marx was right and burke was wrong. that's not necessary, i suppose - i suppose you can believe burke was right, and yet wish he wasn't. i'm just not sure why you'd identify on the left, if that's the case. but, whatever the case may be, and whatever you may believe, i must insist that it's disingenuous to suggest that rejecting burke is somehow an obscure position on the left, even if we're in a point of backwardsness, as of today.