The most influential postmodern thinker for the discipline of history was the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In several bestselling publications of the 1960/70s Foucault suggested a radical new way of thinking about ‘power’ and its relationship to the production of knowledge. His famous 'power/knowledge' nexus opened new ways to conceptualise the human subject and its history. According to Foucault, the aim of history writing was not to produce moral lessons for the present, nor to identify the origin of contemporary ideas and practices. For him history writing was a means to 'critque' the present.

‘It (history writing) consists in uncovering ... thought and trying to change it: showing that things are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted. To practice criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy... [A]s soon as people begin to no longer be able to think things the way they have been thinking them, transformation becomes at the same time very urgent, very difficult and entirely possible.’

(M. Foucault, ‘So, is it important to think?’ in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. by P. Rabinow and N Rose (New York, 1994).

Essential Reading

Foucault, Michel, ‘Body/PowerLink opens in a new window’ (1975), in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, trans. and ed. by Colin Gordon et al. (London, 1980), pp. 55-62.

Foucault, Michel, ‘Truth and PowerLink opens in a new window’ (1977), in in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, trans. and ed. by Coling Gordon et al. (London, 1980), pp. 109-133.

Foucault, Michel, ‘The Eye of PowerLink opens in a new window', in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, trans. and ed. by Colin Gordon et al. (London, 1980), pp. 146-165.

Foucault, Michel, ‘The history of SexualityLink opens in a new window’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, trans. and ed. by Colin Gordon et al. (London, 1980), pp. 183-193.

See also

Watch the video ‘Foucault/ChomskyLink opens in a new window’, utterly brilliant to see the difference in the understanding of knowledge and power between Foucault and Chomsky in the early 1970s. Also great for 1970s hairstyle and clothing! The perfect retro-experience!

Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005). Best intro on the market for very low price. Library has copies!

Seminar Questions

'All human experience – including emotions – are not natural.’ Discuss.
How useful is the Foucauldian insight of ‘knowledge/power to historians?
Why was ‘the body’ so central to Foucault’s work?
Do you think that Foucault’s work is still a ‘threat’ to academic history as it was perceived between the 1960s-1990?
Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge has become reality in today' world? What do you think?
'There is no universal Truth. Truth is always restricted to a particular social-cultural context at a particular moment in time.' Discuss.
'History writing does not stand outside the knowledge/power nexus. History is central to it to analyse contemporary power strategies’. Discuss.

 

Further reading

Davidson, Arnold, ‘The Emergence of Sexuality’, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 30-65.

Chartier, R., ‘The Chimera of the Origin: Archeaology, Cultural History, and the French Revolution’, in ed. by Goldstein, J., Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford, 1994), pp. 167-186.

Goldstein, J. (ed.), Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford, 1994).

Gutting, G. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge, 1994) (one of the best writers on Foucault, lucid and, most importantly, it is not a misinterpretation of his ideas!)

Jones, C., & Porter, R. (eds), Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body (London, 1994).

Megill, A., ‘The Reception of Foucault by Historians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987): 117-41.

Mitchell, D., Critical and Effective Histories. Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (London, 1994).

O’Brien, P., ‘Crime and Punishment as Historical Problems’, Journal of Social History, 11:4 (1978), 508-520.

O’Brien, P., ‘Michel Foucault's History of Culture', in L. Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 25-46.

Poster, M., Foucault, Marxism and History: Modes of Production, Modes of Information (Cambridge, 1984).

Mark Poster, ’Foucault and History’, Social Research 49,1 (1982): 116-142.

Weeks, J., ‘Foucault for Historians’, History Workshop Journal 14 (1982), 106-119.