A Sense of the Common

Throughout all of Michel Foucault’s work there is an uncompromising, albeit tacit, refusal to posit “society” as an object of knowledge and control. Rather, there emerges in various texts a thought of the common as the object of sense rather than of cognition. This essay attempts to elaborate that sense of the common, to note some of the more obvious consequences for the epistemological claims of the social sciences, and to suggest something of the consequences for political thought and practice.