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Social Exclusion/Inclusion: Foucault's analytics of

exclusion, the political ecology of social inclusion
and the legitimation of inclusive education

Michael A. Peters & Tina A.C. Besley

To cite this article: Michael A. Peters & Tina A.C. Besley (2014) Social Exclusion/
Inclusion: Foucault's analytics of exclusion, the political ecology of social inclusion and the
legitimation of inclusive education, Open Review of Educational Research, 1:1, 99-115, DOI:
10.1080/23265507.2014.972439

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2014.972439

© 2014 The Author(s). Published by Published online: 06 Dec 2014.

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Open Review of Educational Research, 2014
Vol. 1, No. 1, 99–115, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2014.972439

Social Exclusion/Inclusion: Foucault’s

analytics of exclusion, the political ecology
of social inclusion and the legitimation of
inclusive education
MICHAEL A. PETERSa & TINA A.C. BESLEYb
a
WMIER, University of Waikato; bCentre for Global Studies in Education, University of
Waikato

Abstract

This article offers a broad philosophical and historical background to the dyad of social exclusion/
inclusion by examining the analytics and politics of exclusion first by reference to Michel Foucault
who studies the modern history of exclusion and makes it central to his approach in understanding
the development of modern institutions of emerging liberal societies. Second, it traces the political
ecology (and etiology) of ‘social inclusion’ as a response to the crisis of the welfare state and the
French Republican tradition of social solidarity initiated in France by Rene Lenoir and
subsequently adopted as a fundamental principle for the European social model. Third, it
provides a philosophical discussion of inclusive education that draws the distinction between the
legal and moral legitimation of rights and questions the moral justifications (or the lack of
them) offered for the right to inclusive education.

Keywords: social inclusion, exclusion, Foucault, inclusive education, children’s

rights

In the Middle ages, exclusion hit the leper, the heretic. Classical culture
excluded by means of the General Hospital, the Zuchthaus, the Workhouse,
all institutions which were derived from the leper colony. I wanted to describe
the modification of a structure of exclusion. (Foucault, 1996, p. 8)

Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a distant
memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion would be
played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar fashion two or
three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played by the poor and
© 2014 The Author(s). Published by Routledge.
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the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.
100 Michael A. Peters & Tina A.C. Besley

by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the ‘alienated’, and the sort of salvation at
stake for both parties in this game of exclusion is the matter of this study. The
forms this exclusion took would continue, in a radically different culture and
with a new meaning, but remaining essentially the major form of a rigorous
division, at the same time social exclusion and spiritual reintegration. (Foucault,
2006, p. 6)

Foucault and the Analytics of Exclusion

Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (2006), first published in 1961 as Folie et Déraison:
Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique1 revolved around one central concept and brutal historical
fact: social exclusion, a theme which dominated his work and political activities during the
1960s and 1970s when he campaigned both for homosexuals and prisoners as margina-
lized and excluded in French society. The book was initially rejected by Gallimard and
was later published in 1961 by renowned historian, Philippe Ariès at Librairie Plon. It
was immediately hailed as a masterpiece by a number of French luminaries including
Fernand Braudel who described it as ‘magnificent’. The History of Madness examined
the history and means of exclusion, a history of those ostracized and confined on the
basis of a dividing line between sanity and insanity, reason and unreason that led to the
birth of the great asylums in the seventeenth century where madness and unreason were
tamed and put under constraints. Re-reading the text today one realizes that it is, as
Jean Khalfa comments in his Introduction to the English edition
an analysis of the history of madness considered as a cultural, legal, political,
philosophical and then medical construct, from the Renaissance to the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. But it is also a reflection on the notion of
history and on the methodology of the historian, a reflection influenced by
Nietzsche’s criticism of historical teleologies. The book, from this point of
view, shows how a non-teleological approach to historical phenomena can dena-
turalise what is to us most familiar by unearthing its long forgotten and often
unpalatable origins through the study of forgotten archives, traces of a reality
often very removed from what was to become the dominant narrative. From a
philosophical point of view, this book is the moment when Foucault’s thought
starts to look beyond phenomenology and towards structuralism, moving
from a theory of forms of consciousness to a description of historical systems
of thoughts. (Foucault, 2006, p. xiv)
What often goes unnoticed in Foucault’s early work is not only the fundamental change in
historical methodology that is charged with Nietzsche’s ‘genealogical history’ but an
altered perspective no longer dominated by Marxist notions of class and the sociological
analysis of society through stratification studies—a kind of vertical slice through society.
Foucault begins an analysis based on the complex couplet and binary of ‘exclusion/
inclusion’, rather more a horizontal segmentalization that intimates spatial metaphors
detailing marginalization, segregation, confinement and scientification or the production
of scientific objectivity through architectures of the gaze, including the model of the
 Social Exclusion/Inclusion 101

panopticon. What accompanied this philosophical shift, from phenomenology to structur-

alism, and eventually to genealogy, is also a realization of processes of naturalization and
social construction that discursively created human beings as subjects or non-subjects, as
human or something less than human, as abnormal.
Foucault thus was teaching us not just that ‘madness’ had several different historical
constructions of meaning but that the scientific construction of social phenomena can
also be undone and theorized differently. This observation would apply as much to the
history of social inclusion as to social exclusion, and in turn, to the modern history of inclus-
ive education. There is a strict homology between the moment madness became a disease
and thus an object of medical and scientific inquiry and the moment when educational
exclusion was outlawed and inclusive education was prescribed. Such prescription
occurred through the easy adoption of legal statute and international law under a
human rights framework by jurists and educators during and after the 1980s. This
process might be described as a juridification of education as ‘inclusive’ on the model of
mainstreaming disabled students. In a general sense, philosophically speaking, we can
also describe this major shift as one that tried to escape the clutches of Hegel’s teleological
and eschatological (world) history to one that recognized a Nietzschean ‘genealogy of
morals’.
We turn again to Jean Khalfa’s Introduction to indicate the significance of this shift that
results in a different mode of production where society reproduces itself through difference
systems of exclusion.
The main thesis of the book, as a work of history, is that the passage from one
phase to the other is not a progression from obscure or inhuman conceptions
to a final understanding of the truth about madness (as a disease, the object
of a medicine of the soul, a ‘psychiatry’). In fact each phase reflects for Foucault
a different mode of production of society itself through a different system of
exclusion. Thus, for him, the modern medical positivism which developed
from the end of the eighteenth century is based on an attempt at objectifying
madness which, when looked at in detail, in particular in the institutions it
accompanies, is a new mode of social control. This is not to say that for Foucault
the construction of modern Western society could be conceived simply as based
on an exclusion of madness. He will later on consider many other types of rup-
tures and exclusions. But studying madness allows one to recognise deeper and
much larger transformations. (Foucault, 2006, p. xvi)
Foucault established the Prison Information Group (GIP) in 1971 with the writer Jean
Domenach and the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet to allow the inmates to speak. Prisons
are zones of exclusions within society. They foster exclusionary practices based on archi-
tecture—the cell and spaces of punishment suspend the application of the law for people
who have been suspending the law for themselves. Rather than punishment, prisoners were
confined and subjected to the scientific dynamic of one-way surveillance and observation
that lead to coercive objectification of the self in exclusionary and disciplinary practices.
The GIP attempted to make the borders between societal space and the zones of prison
exclusions more porous. Members of the collective would try to develop an information
interface between the wide and outside by bringing radio and newspapers within
102 Michael A. Peters & Tina A.C. Besley

prisons, or to stand outside with megaphones. This short-lived experiment attempted to

reverse the dynamics of panopticism through counter-surveillance tactics designed
to turn the prison inside out to publicly expose the harsh conditions of confinement and
to watch the watchers making prison administrators accountable for their unjust policies
and practices (Welch, 2011).
It was the GIP that bought Sartre and Foucault together, if only briefly, and led to
Foucault writing Discipline and Punish (1977). In the GIP manifesto, read by Foucault
in the presence of Sartre, they write:
None of us is sure to escape prison. Today less than ever. Police control over
day-to-day life is tightening: in city streets and roads; over foreigners and
young people; it is once more an offence to express opinions; anti-drug
measures increase arbitrarily. We are kept under ‘close observation’. They
tell us that the system of justice is overwhelmed. We can see that. But what
if it is the police that have overwhelmed it? They tell us that prisons are over-
populated. But what if it was the population that was being over-imprisoned?
Little information is published on prisons. It is one of the hidden regions of
our social system, one of the dark zones of our life. We have the right to
know; we want to know. This is why, with magistrates/legal officers, lawyers,
journalists, doctors, psychologists, we have formed a Groupe d’Information sur
les Prisons.
We propose to make known what the prison is: who goes there, how and why
they go there, what happens there, and what the life of the prisoners is, and that,
equally, of the surveillance personnel; what the buildings, the food, and hygiene
are like; how the internal regulations, medical control, and the workshops func-
tion; how one gets out and what it is to be, in our society, one of those who came
out.2
Foucault studied the emergence of a new power in Discipline and Punish (1977) and the
profound change from the torments of the Ancien Régime to the construction of the
great prisons of the eighteenth century, forms of imprisonment where rather than punish-
ment, prisoners were confined and subjected to the scientific dynamic of one-way surveil-
lance and observation that lead to coercive objectification of the self in exclusionary and
disciplinary practices. For Foucault the notion of exclusion operates spatially in the devel-
opment of all-seeing architectures that permit continual surveillance and separates through
dividing practices a series of others who represent a danger to the body of society and must
be excluded, studied, observed and treated if and before they can be readmitted to society
as normalized citizens. This spatial exclusionary and sanitary or social hygienic model for
the health of society at large provides Foucault with a powerful philosophy and method-
ology to analyse the production of society through exclusion that is very different from
Marxist accounts. It is also prescient to understanding problems of today’s cybernetic
society and the surveillance technologies that make use of Internet platforms to spy on
one’s own citizens as well as allies and enemies. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange,
acting somewhat like Foucault’s GIP in turning the system against itself, have alerted us
to the capture of mass data or strategic intelligence. In the US Prism has given the National
Security Agency (NSA) access to the servers of companies such as Google and Facebook.
 Social Exclusion/Inclusion 103

The State does not need to bug phones manually to listen in it merely targets the ‘selector’
to get access to all your communications. We are moving towards a new kind of society
historically the most monitored and observed democratic society there has ever been.
For Foucault the notion of exclusion operates spatially, not just in prisons, but in other
institutions such as the factory and the school. The concept of exclusion is also present in
the production of scientific discourse that accompanies the rise of exclusionary insti-
tutions. In ‘The Order of Discourse’ (1981), Foucault talks of exclusion and exclusionary
procedures:
in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected,
organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is
to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to
evade its ponderous, formidable materiality. (Foucault, 1981, p. 210)
He details what he calls the ‘procedures of exclusion’ (p. 210) noting that the prohibition
of discussing certain topics including sexuality and politics ‘very soon reveal [discourse’s]
link with desire and with power’ (p. 211) indicating ‘discourse is not simply that which
translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which
there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized’ (p. 211). And in this
context he discusses exclusive procedure inherent in the reason/madness binary where
terms are defined in an arbitrary manner. Later in the text he talks of the third system
of exclusion of true and false that might also vary according to historical period, and the
‘will to truth’ which he calls ‘that prodigious machinery designed to exclude’ (p. 214).
He turns his attention to ‘internal procedures … which function rather as principles of
classification, of ordering, of distribution, as if this time another dimension of discourse
had to be mastered: that of events and chance’ (p. 214) around concepts of commentary,
the author and discipline.
The theme of exclusion is also explored by Foucault (2003) in his work Abnormal, a
series of lectures he gave during 1974–1975 at the Collège de France from that start by
examining the role of psychiatry in the modern criminal justice system and how it categor-
izes individuals who ‘resemble their crime before they commit it.’ Foucault thematizes the
figure of the monster that lies between the madman and the prisoner as an excluded other.
These lectures examine the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice and its method of
categorizing individuals who ‘resemble their crime before they commit it.’ Foucault inves-
tigates how and why defining the normal and the pathological and how these categories
invested with power/knowledge shaping nineteenth century institutions—from the
prison system to the family—meant to deal in particular with ‘monstrosity,’ whether
sexual, physical, or spiritual.
Three figures constitute the domain of abnormality: the human monster, the individual
to be corrected, and the masturbating child (the sexual monster brings together the mon-
strous individual and the sexual deviant) (Lecture 3). Foucault investigates the moral and
political monster in Jacobin (and anti-Jacobin) literature and the pathological nature of
criminality (Lecture 4) before examining the transition from the monster to the abnormal
and the constitution of the abnormal as a vast domain of intervention where through rituals
of exclusion there is a steady epistemological and scientific tendency to study, record, clas-
sify and treat the body. In particular, the masturbating child becomes the subject for the
104 Michael A. Peters & Tina A.C. Besley

pathological responsibility of childhood that accompanies a new organization of the family,

its involution and its medicalization, and its secularization of confession in relation to the
family doctor based on the restraint of child masturbation. The responsibility of the life
and body of the child becomes the preserve of natural and State education once again pro-
duced and harmonized by State theory through spatial exclusion of children in schools and
or campuses. Childhood, then, becomes the historical condition for the generalization of
psychiatric power and knowledge that extend to infantilism and constitutes the growing
science of normal and abnormal conduct. The family becomes plunged into total
system of control and power focusing on limiting the dangers that spring from the over-
flowing sexual desire of the child. The discovery of the child and of childhood by psychiatry
where the child’s infantilism becomes one of the markers and criteria for the analysis and
treatment of deformed behaviour in terms of a juridical-biological paradigm.
By studying Western culture, Foucault wants to make visible what is not hidden, but is
visible, near and immediate, even though we do not perceive it. Foucault becomes a
Nietzschean diagnostician who turns the institutions inside out to examine the forensics
of power to reveal the entanglements between science and law that become exposed his-
torically as contingent and arbitrary and that could have been and could be characterized
differently. It does not need much imagination to see the application of Foucault’s ana-
lytics of exclusion to the history of exclusion in education and inclusive education.
Already there is a fast and growing literature that uses Foucault to talk about the education
in general and inclusive education in particular.3

The Political Ecology of Social Inclusion—the Fight against Exclusion

Any approach to the philosophy of inclusive education must also bear witness to a range of
related concepts such as social exclusion, social inclusion, and social justice in the modern
context with its changing policy formulation and its relation to the larger history of the
concept of equality from which these more recent concepts flowed.
The idea of social exclusion originated in the French context in the 1970s with the pub-
lication of Rene Lenoir’s (1974) Les Exclus: Un Francais Sur Dix (trans. Excluded: One in
Ten French). Lenoir is a French politician who served as Secretary of State for Social
Action in Valéry Giscard d’Estaing government from 8 June 1974 to 31 March 1978.
He was also Director of L’École nationale d’administration (ENA) between 1988 and
1992. The ENA was established in 1945 to create democratized access to senior public ser-
vants and provides education in public administration and management. In a 1995 inter-
view with Liberation,4 he says that in the early 1970s he conducted field surveys with an
emphasis on the welfare of children. France at the end of the ‘thirty glorious years’ every-
one started to experience the comfort and well-being of the post-war period with the excep-
tion of three categories: the elderly, the disabled and social misfits [‘inadaptés sociaux’] who
were a much more heterogeneous grouping. Giscard d’Estaing had read Lenoir’s Excluded
and on winning the election he immediately asked Lenoir to serve as his Minister of Social
Action. For Lenoir, the excluded are those citizens who are separated from mainstream
society because of factors like disability, mental illness and poverty. Together these
groups constituted as much as 10% of the population suffering from social exclusion.
Focusing on social and economic conditions rather than personal responsibility to
 Social Exclusion/Inclusion 105

explain social problems, Lenoir defined social exclusion very broadly viewing it as a threat
to France’s Republican model of integration based on the ideas of citizenship and social
solidarity. He became convinced that France was witnessing the advent of a divided
society that betrayed the egalitarian model of citizenship and social integration at the
centre of the French Republican tradition.
To an extent, Lenoir was responding to Jules Klanfer’s (1965) L’Exclusion sociale: Étude
de la marginalité dans les sociétés occidentales [Social Exclusion: The Study of Marginality in
Western Societies] who, sharing a similar moralizing of individual responsibility with the
neoliberals a generation later, defined social exclusion in terms of personal responsibility
referring to people who cannot enjoy the positive consequences of economic progress due
to irresponsible behaviour. While the meaning of the term ‘exclusion’ has changed since
the mid-1970s, Cédric Frétigné (1999, p. 63) in his Sociologie de l’exclusion regards
Lenoir’s book as the ‘founding document’ of the modern discourse about exclusion in
French society. During the late 1980s and 1990s it became the blueprint for policy
change as governments first in France and then more widely in Europe became to
design policies of social inclusion where the growing emphasis on social exclusion
shifted the debate away from class inequality and income redistribution at large.
Under François Mitterrand’s first presidential term (1981–1987) France like other
European powers had seen the effects of an increase of long-term and structural unem-
ployment and also the growing public concern about racism in French society. In this
political climate even in France with a socialist president, the Keynesian welfare state
had given away to a form of economic liberalism tempered by a programme of social
and economic reform centred on nationalization of the banks and job creation. The Social-
ists lost their majority in the National Assembly in 1986 and Mitterrand was forced to work
with Jacques Chirac. Mitterrand was re-elected president in 1988, becoming the first
French politician to twice win election by popular vote in the country’s history. Yet with
the growing influence of the political right and the continued stagnation and decline of
the French economy, policy-makers and elected officials found reason to work with the
notion of social exclusion as a political means to consolidate the Republican model of
integration while simultaneously demonstrating their concern for the unemployed.
The discourse of social exclusion became central for construction of the ‘need to reform’
based on designing policies of social inclusion that at one and the same time provide the
rationale and the normative political discourse that allowed politicians to reform the prin-
ciples of the welfare state redesigning it for an era facing greater austerity all in the name of
‘national solidarity’ and socially inclusive citizenship. The discourse of social inclusion
thus had become the dominant motif in French political life and the centre of gravity
for centre-left policies that permitted a more targeted (and allegedly fiscally efficient)
approach to those truly in need, neglecting other forms of inequality and repudiating prin-
ciples of universal social insurance. This was to encourage some critics to accuse the social-
ists of cuddling up to the neoliberals and even if the policy focus was different and
underwritten by a different political motivation, social inclusion was easily harmonized
with neoliberal policies especially in the move away from universalist social provision.
While France was the home of the discourse and policy paradigm of social exclusion
and the set of policies known as social inclusion that were developed to address problems
of exclusion, separation and segregation, during the 1980s this discourse and paradigm
106 Michael A. Peters & Tina A.C. Besley

was adopted throughout Europe. Dan Allman (2013) in ‘The Sociology of Social Inclusion’
suggests that the birth of the modern rhetoric of l’inclusion sociale began in French thought
with Lenoir to seek ‘a means to reintegrate the large numbers of ex-industrial workers
and a growing number of young people excluded from opportunities to join the labor
force in the new economies of the 1970s and beyond’ (p. 8). He argues, ‘Within French
Republican thought in particular, social exclusion was seen to reflect ruptures in solidarity
and the social bond (lien social), something essentially tantamount to heresy within the
French social contract’ (p. 8). By 1998 the movement was so strong ‘the French posited
legal codification to prevent and combat social exclusions (note the plural) as a means to
foster universal access to fundamental human rights’ (p. 8). It was this notion that struck
a chord with the European Union (EU) the notion underwent both an extension and expan-
sion, always linked with the legitimation of fundamental human rights and the rights of the
citizen.
As Daniel Béland (2007) writes:
Social exclusion as a paradigm, a blueprint and a political discourse has been
dispersed throughout Europe and beyond. This diffusion process began in the
mid-1980s, when Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission,
stressed the need for a strong ‘social dimension’ to the European project. From
this perspective, the fight against social exclusion gradually became a European
policy paradigm and justification discourse. Following this logic, during the
1990s, ‘the third EU “poverty programme” was gradually transformed into a
fight against social exclusion’ (Silver and Miller, 2003, p. 5). The 2000
Lisbon and Nice European Councils reinforced this commitment in the struggle
against exclusion, which had gradually become a major feature of the European
blueprint about social welfare, especially employment policy (e.g. Begg and
Berghman, 2002; van Berkel and Hornemann Møller, 2002). (p. 132)
The concept of social inclusion became the flagship of the European Commission (EC),
the EU and other European organizations both as a means of tackling poverty but also
as an ‘open method of coordination’ for economic and social policies.5 Even today these
organizations sport policies crafted around the notion of social inclusion and social protec-
tion. The EC’s Europe 2020 Strategy6 that is the EU’s growth strategy for the coming
decade is based on building an inclusive economy that aims to achieve five ambitious
objectives—on employment, innovation, education, social inclusion and climate/energy
signalling seven flagship initiatives favouring smart growth, sustainable growth and inclusive
growth that include a platform against poverty and social exclusion designed to assist 20
million people by 2020.7
A major Communication issued in 2010 from the EC to the European Parliament, the
Council, the European Economic and Social Committee, and The Committee of the
Regions was entitled ‘The European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion: A
European framework for social and territorial cohesion’.8 In this document the EC
acknowledges ‘The most vulnerable people in our societies have borne much of the
impact of the economic crisis.’ It focuses on employment, training and education for
young people, migrants and the low skilled and pays heed to core objectives of the EU
for combating social exclusion, including the promotion of social justice and fundamental
 Social Exclusion/Inclusion 107

rights founded on the values of respect for human dignity and solidarity. The Platform is
set as a dynamic framework for action with poverty-reduction targets and social objectives.
The challenges are identified as the multiple dimensions of poverty and exclusion, addres-
sing poverty throughout the life cycle, and recognizing severe exclusion, new vulnerabil-
ities and specific disadvantages. Under the last head the document mentions Roma
people who suffer multiple deprivation and
People with disabilities or who suffer from severe chronic illness are frequently
confronted with major economic and social difficulties, which often involve the
whole household on which they depend: some 6.5 million of the people at-risk-
of poverty or exclusion declare some form of disability.
Besides access to employment and active inclusion labour market policies, the EC is pro-
moting social protection and access to essential services. These include education and
youth policies, migration and integration of migrants, social inclusion and antidiscrimina-
tion policies for gender equality, a new European Disability Strategy 2010–2020,9 assist-
ance for people with mental health problems, and certain ethnic minorities who suffer
poverty and marginalization.
The transmission and insertion of the concept of social exclusion/inclusion into English-
speaking social policies occurred with the advent of Third Way politics in the UK with its
emphasis on the renewal of social democracy (Giddens, 1998). With the election of New
Labour in 1997 the issue of social exclusion became the centre of the policy agenda. Tony
Blair spoke of Third Way socialism being different from old socialism that was reduced to a
form of economic determinism, whereas the new social-ism was based around the notion
of social justice and it recognized the responsibility of socially interdependent individuals
and an agenda based on social inclusion and integration and the equality of opportunity.
New Labour’s thinking on the welfare state inaugurated a paradigm shift from a concern
with equality to a focus on social inclusion and equality of opportunity, together with an
emphasis on social obligations rather than social rights (Lister, 1998). John Hills and
Kitty Stewart (2008) in their Introduction to A More Equal Society? New Labour,
Poverty, Inequality and Exclusion explain the rapidity with which social inclusion became
the key policy concept in Tony Blair’s first-term government:
Within months social exclusion had become a central government concept. In
August 1997 Peter Mandelson announced the creation of the Social Exclusion
Unit [SEU], denouncing the ‘scourge and waste of social exclusion’ as ‘the
greatest social crisis of our times’ (Mandelson, 1997). Social exclusion would
never receive a clear definition, but it was clear from the series of attempts to
define it that the government’s concern was with multiple deprivation. At the
SEU launch in December Blair described it as ‘ … about income but … about
more. It is about prospects and networks and life-chances. It’s a very modern
problem, and one that is more harmful to the individual, more damaging to
self-esteem, more corrosive for society as a whole, more likely to be passed
down from generation to generation, than material poverty’ (quoted in
Fairclough, 2000, p. 52). Later, he would define it as: ‘a short-hand label for
what can happen when individuals or areas suffer from a combination of
108 Michael A. Peters & Tina A.C. Besley

linked problems such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing,
high crime environments, bad health and family breakdown’ (DSS, 1999,
p. 23). The SEU was seen as important precisely because of the interrelations
between these different problems: it would ‘improve understanding of the key
characteristics of social exclusion’ and co-ordinate policy across departments
and with local authority and voluntary organisations, to provide ‘joined-up gov-
ernment for joined-up problems’. (Hills & Stewart, 2008, p. 11)
In a lecture in memory of William Beveridge in 1999 this changed political context saw
Blair committing himself to the elimination of child poverty within 20 years (Hills &
Stewart, 2008, p. 14; see also Peters & Besley, 2014).
Hills and Stewart (2008, p. 20) follow Levitas (1998) identification of three different
approaches to social exclusion each with its own implications for policy solutions.
The first, which Levitas labels the redistributionist discourse (RED), sees social
exclusion as a consequence of poverty: it is income that the excluded lack, so
raising benefit levels would be one effective policy response. The second, the
social integrationist discourse (SID), sees inclusion primarily in terms of
labour market attachment. The excluded are those who are workless, leading
to a focus on policies which encourage and enable people to enter paid work.
The third approach is labelled by Levitas as the moral underclass discourse
(MUD) and places responsibility for social exclusion on the ‘moral and behav-
ioural delinquency’ of the excluded themselves. (Hills & Stewart, 2008, p. 21)
The term ‘social inclusion’ has changed since its inception under Rene Lenoir in the early
1970s. As a definition in law in 1975 to help disabled people it has become a broad spectrum
policy organizing and action concept that encompasses all forms of social exclusion and mar-
ginalization with a strong poverty-reduction and youth employment focus. Inclusive edu-
cation thereby becomes only one piece of the social integration policy jigsaw. In this
process the terms ‘social inclusion’ and ‘inclusive education’ have achieved both internatio-
nalization and global institutionalization to become dominant policy concepts that are seen
as self-evident and part of the common-sense acceptance of the human rights framework.

The Legitimation of Inclusive Education

Inclusive education is based on the child’s right to participate and the school’s responsibil-
ity to accept all children. This notion of right and access has its positive statement in
international law including the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child
(CRC) (1989) ratified in 1990 by every country in the world except Somalia, South
Sudan and the United States. The CRC is supported by the Convention against Discrimi-
nation in Education (1960), UNESCO’s Salamanca Statement (1994) and the Conven-
tion on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), all of which support principles of
inclusive education at all levels.10
Nicholas Burnett, Assistant Director-General for Education UNESCO, in his Foreword
to Policy Guidelines on Inclusion in Education (2009) acknowledges in clear and simple
terms:
 Social Exclusion/Inclusion 109

The concept and practice of inclusive education have gained importance in recent
years. Internationally, the term is increasingly understood more broadly as a
reform that supports and welcomes diversity amongst all learners. (p. 4)
Burnett then goes on to lay out the case for social inclusion as a policy and strategy for
coping with diversity, for achieving social equity and promoting lifelong learning. He
explains that inclusive education is a strategy and process involving the transformation
of schools to cater for all children—‘including boys and girls, students from ethnic and
linguistic minorities, rural populations, those affected by HIV and AIDS, and those
with disabilities and difficulties in learning and to provide learning opportunities for all
youth and adults as well.’ He asserts ‘Its aim is to eliminate exclusion that is a consequence
of negative attitudes and a lack of response to diversity in race, economic status, social
class, ethnicity, language, religion, gender, sexual orientation and ability’ (p. 4).
Burnett ties the concept and strategy of inclusion to a means for tackling exclusion and
to the United Nation’s (UN’s) Millennium Development Goals (MDG) given the 75
million children still out of school and 775 million adults who lack basic literacy skills.
The MDG has eight goals; the first being to ‘eliminate extreme poverty and hunger’,
the second, ‘achieve universal primary education’ by 2015 for boys and girls alike, and
as part of achieving goal 3, ‘promote gender equality and empower women’, target 3a
aims to ‘eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by
2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015’.11
Inclusive education is one of the main platforms for the reform of education globally. It
is a central plank in the UN’s push for ‘Education for All’, based on increased participation
and learning of marginalized pupils. While inclusive education is generally thought of as
an approach to serving children with disabilities and where it often gets termed, ‘special
education’, within the international context it is seen more broadly as a reform that
supports the diversity among all learners, with the aim of eliminating social exclusion.
Such exclusion is a consequence of attitudes and responses to diversity in race, social
class, ethnicity, religion, gender and ability.
There is now a massive amount of literature describing the history of special education
and inclusive education both in principle and practice.12 Clearly, the notion and founding
principles of inclusive education are firmly established within international human rights
law as belonging to the right to education in and of itself and as a fundamental right on
which other rights depend. It has also been considered a right in domestic law regimes
ever since the historic Brown v Board of Education 1954 decision in the US Supreme
Court. Much of the legal legitimation of inclusive education and disability rights is
buried in statues in law cases or rests on larger statements of international law and declara-
tions. Rarely is the distinction between the legal and moral legitimation of rights drawn or
made use of in the literature of inclusive education. As Elizabeth Dickson (2012, p. 1093)
remarks:
Although there is international recognition of the right to an inclusive education,
there remains very little clearly developed and articulated theory available to
underpin that right. Rizvi and Lingard (1996, p. 23), after claiming that the
field of ‘special education’ is ‘largely devoid of any discussion of the moral pre-
mises upon which it is based’, attempted to fill the vacuum.
110 Michael A. Peters & Tina A.C. Besley

Dickson (2012) criticizes Rizvi and Lingard (1996) as attempting to fill the vacuum by pro-
viding ‘a melange of sometimes incompatible ideals’ within a broadly conceived redistri-
butive framework combining elements of communitarianism, cultural recognition
theory and liberalism. She is correct to observe that ‘any statement of rights rings out as
hollow rhetoric unsupported by sound reason and moral rectitude’ and by contrast to
Rizvi and Lingard, she postulates a communitarian theory of the education rights of
people with disabilities based on the role of education in democratic society which
demands that the communitarian school, like the community within which it nests, be
inclusive.
It is worth noting that the disability rights movement and the disability studies discourse
has effectively challenged the way that ‘Disability has historically played a central role sig-
nifying otherness and justifying discrimination and segregation among other subordinate
groups’. Fitch (2009, p. 168) elaborates:
Grounded in the socio-political model of disability it understands disability not
as a private matter or medical condition but as a central cultural signifier of
inferiority. Its goal is to unmask how disability functions as such within litera-
ture, history, social policy, popular culture, education, and philosophy. In
doing so it draws upon critical and postmodern discourse in cultural studies,
feminism, as well as race, ethnic, and gay and lesbian studies. It often takes
the form of literary and cultural criticism as it examines cultural attitudes, antag-
onisms, and insecurities that are based in disability.
There is a real question concerning the relationship of theories of human rights to inclusive
education. Political theory on its own will not do the job of recognizing the need for accept-
ing the distinction between legal and moral legitimation of rights or for accepting the
historic weight of a human rights framework as a subterranean moral infrastructure,
despite its strategic and declarative moral force. In some ways what Fitch calls ‘the
socio-political model of disability’ also calls into question the very concept of right as a
universal category (Peters, 2012). Fitch himself draws on the work of Peter Singer
(1994) and Jeff McMahan (1996, 2002) to illustrate the claim that species membership
by itself does not determine the moral status of personhood. He draws on the work of a
range of theorists to counter this claim by embracing a relational view of the self, anchored
in Hegel, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Vygotsky, Young and Butler, that supports the same
communitarian view as Dickson. He then extends the argument by appealing to Alasdair
MacIntyre’s (1999) argument in Dependent Rational Animals: Why human beings need the
virtues to locate ‘dependency and disability at the center of human life and defines them
as the very preconditions of rationality’ (p. 172).
So with inclusive education there is significant diversity at the level of moral theory that
requires educational philosophers and others to defend their claims. We might say that
besides the theory of human rights, itself the basis of competing theories—for example,
are they self-evident that is natural rights based on natural law or are they the product
of human invention? (Peters, 2012)—there are communitarian theories (in the plural),
and the ‘socio-political model of disability’, and, of course, the genealogical approach of
Michel Foucault, as we have seen, who represents a challenge to traditional Hegelian
 Social Exclusion/Inclusion 111

accounts of human rights as a progressive and historically inevitable linear process tied to
the cultural evolution of human beings.13
Bronagh Byrne (2014) writes of the hidden contradictions and conditionality embedded
in conceptualizations of inclusive education in international human rights law and differ-
ent approaches to inclusion in international human rights law to question its success
because she argues:
the burden of change continues to be placed upon children with disabilities,
their ‘ability’ to adjust to naturalised pedagogies, to ‘cope’ and overcome their
impairment to become ‘one of us’ as opposed to a somewhat burdensome ‘min-
ority of one’. (pp. 235–236)
She continues:
That children with disabilities have a general right to education is beyond
dispute. What is called into question is the parameters of that right; specifically,
the extent to which this has been suitably clarified and consistently applied by
the international human rights framework. (Byrne, 2014, p. 242)
Her work is principally directed at the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabil-
ities in order to assist them in conceptual clarification with the task of monitoring the right
to inclusive education. While this is certainly helpful it does not recognize the distinction
between legal and moral legitimation and it takes for granted the question of moral
legitimation.
John-Stewart Gordon (2013) in an article that asks the question ‘Is Inclusive Education a
Human Right?’ concludes:
that the widespread view in disability studies — that there is a moral human right
to inclusive education — can be reasonably called into question by virtue of the
cumulative efficacy of the proposed counter arguments, but without denying
that inclusive education is of utmost importance. Practically speaking, the
legal human right to inclusive education is of great practical value for impaired
students, and for their basic right to be free from discrimination in education,
since their concern thereby gains great legal and moral force. But, theoretically
speaking, this particular human right lacks an attainable consensus concerning
proper moral justification. (p. 765)
Very properly, he suggests that from the philosophical view the legitimation of inclusive
education remains a problem and that it is unsatisfactory (and we would add a substantial
embarrassment) ‘to internationally endorse far-reaching legal commitments without being
able to provide a proper moral justification’ (Gordon, 2013, p.765). But then this might
simply be to recognize the contestable character of moral theory that despite the lack of
certainty in the moral realm we must yet still act strategically. In any event we cannot
simply assume the self-evident nature of the right to inclusive education. We must try to
understand its genealogy in the analytics of exclusion, the embedded historical nature of
its emergence, and the moral legitimations offered for its justification because its very
history, its political ecology—its internationalization, universalization, and definition—
and its moral legitimation all have implications for the way in which we historically
112 Michael A. Peters & Tina A.C. Besley

conceive of inclusive education and the strategies and policy solutions we devise in order to
accomplish the elimination of exclusion and the positivity of inclusion as a social principle
that goes to the heart of the constitution of society.

Notes
1. Madness and Civilisation (Foucault, 1965) was an abridged version of the full work only later
translated into English as History of Madness (Foucault, 2006).
2. The full text of the Manifesto, together with a photograph of Foucault reading it, can be found at
http://www.critical-theory.com/43-years-ago-today-foucaults-statement-on-french-prisons/
which is taken from Stuart Elden’s site at http://progressivegeographies.com/2013/08/02/
manifesto-of-the-groupe-dinformation-sur-les-prisons-a-full-translation/
3. See, for instance, the bibliography on Foucault and education provided by Clare O’Farrell
(2014) and for a selection of works on inclusive education: Tremain (2005), Graham and
Slee (2006, 2008), Graham (2006), Dunne (2008), Allan (2008), McSherry (2013), Peters
(2004), Slee (2009).
4. See http://www.liberation.fr/evenement/1995/04/08/rene-lenoir-il-ne-suffit-pas-de-legiferer_130819
5. The EC specifies: ‘The Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is used by Member States to
support the definition, implementation and evaluation of their social policies and to develop
their mutual cooperation. A tool of governance based on common objectives and indicators,
the method supplements the legislative and financial instruments of social policy. It is part of
the implementation of the process of coordination of social policies, particularly in the context
of the renewed Lisbon Strategy’, http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/employment_and_
social_policy/social_inclusion_fight_against_poverty/em0011_en.htm
6. See http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/index_en.htm
7. See http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=961&langId=en
8. See European Commission (EC) 2010: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=
CELEX:52010DC0758
9. The strategy emphasizes ‘One in six people in the European Union (EU) has a disability that
ranges from mild to severe making around 80 million who are often prevented from taking
part fully in society and the economy because of environmental and attitudinal barriers. For
people with disabilities the rate of poverty is 70% higher than the average partly due to
limited access to employment’. See the full Strategy document at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/
LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:0636:FIN:EN:PDF. Education and training is
one of eight main areas for action also including Accessibility, Participation, Equality, Employ-
ment, Social Protection, Health, and External Action. The bottom line is that the EU will
‘Promote inclusive education and lifelong learning for pupils and students with disabilities’.
10. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) which sets out children’s rights in respect
of freedom from discrimination and in respect of the representation of their views; The Conven-
tion against Discrimination in Education of UNESCO prohibits any discrimination, exclusion or
segregation in education; The UNESCO Salamanca Statement (1994) calls on all governments to
give the highest priority to inclusive education; The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities (2006) calls on all States Parties to ensure an inclusive education system at all levels.
11. For the MDG—see http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
12. For a selection see: Ainscow (1999), Ainscow et al. (2006), Farrell (2004), OECD (1994),
Peters (2003), Davis and Florian (2004), Rose and Howley (2007) UNESCO (1998).
13. See, in particular, Norberto Bobbio’s (1991) The Age of Rights.

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Notes on Contributors
Michael A. Peters is Professor of Education at the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research
(WMIER), University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. He held a Personal Chair at University
of Auckland, was Professor at University of Glasgow and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(now Emeritus Professor). Michael is an international scholar with interests in education, philosophy
and social policy, who has published over 65 books and is Editor-in-Chief of Educational Philosophy
and Theory (EPAT), editor of Policy Futures in Education, Open Review of Educational Research, and
co-editor of E-Learning and Digital Media. Some recent books: Education Philosophy and Politics:
Selected Works of Michael A. Peters (2011); Education, Cognitive Capitalism and Digital Labour
(2011), with Ergin Bulut; Neoliberalism and After? Education, Social Policy and the Crisis of Capitalism
 Social Exclusion/Inclusion 115

(2011); The Last Book of Postmodernism: Apocalyptic Thinking, Philosophy and Education in the Twenty-
First Century (2011); The Virtues of Openness: Education, Science and Scholarship in a Digital Age (2011),
with Peter Roberts; Education in the Creative Economy (2010), with D. Araya; A Trilogy on Creativity All,
with Simon Marginson and Peter Murphy (2009–2010); Subjectivity and Truth: Foucault, Education and
the Culture of the Self (2008) (AESA Critics Book Award 2009), and Building Knowledge Cultures: Edu-
cation and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (2006), The Creative University, Re-imagining
the Creative University in 21st Century, with Tina Besley. Email: mpeters@waikato.ac.nz

Tina Besley is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Global Studies in Education,
University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. She has held academic posts at University of
Glasgow, California State University San Bernardino and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
where she remains Adjunct Professor. Tina’s research wide interests encompass philosophy of
education, school counselling, educational policy, subjectivity, youth studies, interculturalism and
global knowledge economy. Tina has written some 10 books and monographs and is Associate
Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT), Policy Futures in Education and Open Review of
Educational Research, co-editor of E-Learning and Digital Media, and is on many editorial boards.
Tina is Vice-President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA), a longstanding
member of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors (MNZAC) and member of several other pro-
fessional associations. Her recent books include: Interculturalism, Education and Dialogue (2012), The
Creative University, Re-imagining the Creative University in 21st Century (2013).