of liberal theorists like Richard Rorty call -- and I mean I can't believe that they ever called it this -- Richard Rorty once described philosophy as "the conversation of mankind"; borrowing a phrase from Michael Oakeshott . Well that's very nice, except certain people didn't get to talk in the history of Western Civilisation. They were excluded from the conversation. The deviant were excluded -- and I am naming some now that have been studied by Foucault -- deviants, criminals, the mad, and of course the more normal exclusions. Up until very recently women, the young, the old, the infirm, and so on; excluded in a certain way from this conversation, and I am not afraid to say along with Marx that we really don't notice many working class or lower class people in the early great literature of the West. In all the works of Homer , only one common foot soldier appears and he has one line, basically he says to Nestor , you know, the wise old General the plan basically sucks and he walks out of the book and that's it [crowd laughter] And of course it does, and so it's kind of a little joke, I think Homer was aware that certain people weren't getting to talk. So when we talk about Athenian democracy we need to remember that just like early American democracy it excluded a lot of people. In fact, according to Foucault, the exclusions were a condition for the possibility of