Michel Foucault - The Historiography Page - Readings & Resources - R.A. Hatch

Foucault, Michel (1926-1984) - French writer, philosopher, and historian, Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers, France, where he undertook his early studies, he attended the Jesuit College of St. Stanislas. Thereafter, he studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (1946), where after many years of travel he spent most of his life. Foucault received degrees in philosophy, psychology, and his diploma in psycho-pathologie (1952) before accepting a position in Uppsala (1955-1958), Warsaw (1958), and Hamburg (1959). In 1964 he accepted a professorship in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, and in 1970 was appointed Chair in the "History of Systems of Thought" at the College de France. Appropriately, he invented the title himself. In the course of his career he lectured in a dozen countries, visited Attica Prison, and travelled in the far East. He was author of many books (see below), a number of which were both influential and controversial. He aimed, as one scholar suggested, to escape the demands of what others considered thought-worthy.

Foucault's life is difficult to summarize. Without doubt, his work was important and arguably difficult by design, provocative in its implications and perhaps intent. Foucault's hallmark is a characteristic melding of philosophical and historical approaches to carefully selected topics and themes. He took a personal pleasure in being different. He worked at being provocative in every sense. The influence of the Annales tradition is unmistakable, and his various debts -- to Hegel and Marx, to structuralist and post-structuralists -- has been much debated. All of Foucault's work reflects the post-war climate of his early education and experience with the relation between history and the history of thought, an obsession of sorts with the status of the human subject, and famously, with the problem of knowledge, particularly the relation of 'objective' or scientific knowledge, the wider representing culture, expert knowledge (particular of the 'professionals' whether scientists, doctors, or lawyers, and the individual knowing subject. Foucault had little patience with earlier all-encompassing theories that suggested a total picture across space or time, or views that maintained a clear, coherent trajectory or meaning. Foucault was particularly successful at exploring the relation between traditional claims to objective knowledge and claims to knowledge or knowing by the subject, particularly how subjects know themselves. Historians have been particularly influenced by Foucault's various assessments of knowledge of the body, human behavior, and what has traditionally been called mind and spirit. His concern for the sefl's relation to the self was continuing. He was interested in the self, truth, and desire. Social justice was not an alien concern. Power, influence, control, coercion, and traditional issues of boundary and constraint, are ubiquitous, physical, mental, and linguistic, reason and regulation. Good, true, and beautiful were in fact not jejune dismissives, along with freedom, justice, and equality. Foucault could play the sophisticated cynic. Here he is not to be entirely trusted. Central to the his enterprise was representation. Here Foucault served as critic of traditional historical notions about the world, persons, knowledge, completeness, certainty, linearity, and of course, theory and practice.

So, was Foucault an historian, a good historian? Who's to say? What seems clear is that he provoked much controversy, his influence is beyond question, but, dare I say, the value of his work remains delightful disputed. His interests were wide ranging across the usual historical filed of space, time, theme, and perhaps even method. Virtually all of his published works address ideas or concepts in various time frames, generally European from the early modern period to the present. His last publications, dealing with Greek and Roman antiquity, and his thematic interests, medicine, psychiatry, peneology, sexual practice, language, aime to address fundamental human issues. Here he seeks to approach the most pressing issues penetrated by moral constraint and shrouded by restrictions of human intimacy, and here he is arguably at his best and equally most challenged. He aims, perhaps like Freud at his best, to identify the limits of what humans can address, what is last considered, what is at the same time most central. He aims to deal with the unthinkable. Along the way, Foucault confronts standard concerns about tradition, consensus, and the normal, whether regarding questions of health or the sexually acceptable. Here Foucault plays a standard card, but with finesse, that all of the norms change, have always changed, often more often and more quickly than we assume. Our idendities are included in these changes, though they are tied to historical contexts, these laced with contingencies where meaning cannot be assumed and change cannot be predicted.

In this sense Foucault wrote histories of the present. Flush with moral and ethical implications, his topic selections are always charged with human complexity, and his chief innovation is to insist that human are not powerless or lacking in freedom to respond to circumstance. Our ability to respond, that power, is not inconsistent with freedom, and in turn, power is not an evil or a good. It is a simple fact of human experience, always embodied, enacted, situated. Power is not something situated in a building much less at the apex of an abstract triangle, and power is not divorced from knowledge, or reason, or the search for truth. At bottom, Foucault seems to suggest that age-old concerns for truth, knowledge, and freedom are not illusory or naive, rather, that the separation of knowledge and power is impossible, that human fulfillment involves critical understanding of those relations. History has moral and practical uses, and imagination and a willingness to think the unthinkable, and to act on those findings, are central to what it is we might be as individuals and perhaps as a species. But Foucault is seldom so straightforward. Seldom does he sound so sophomoric.

As an historian Foucault challenges traditional assumptions about progress, rationality, linearity, and the moral judgments associated with those on the margins of society and culture. His topics are evidence, as he emploies sexual deviancy, criminals, and madness to measure changes in historical opinion and practice. Here, a commonplace in discussion Foucault, his writings avoid issues of human agency. In approaching circumstance of human events, there are no clear symbols of evil, no obvious bad guys exercising abusive power, and equally clear, Foucault offers no clear remedies, no conclusions, but rather he offers to identify issues, he raises unnerving questions, and in his own way, he provides a method for exposing ways to consider them. In the end, it could be argued that Foucault was no historian at all. His failings with historical details and what have long been considered the 'facts of the matter' are manifest. He was not an empirical historian. For all that, he was unquestionably an influential writer who focused attention on a number of assumptions about how history is written, about truth, about objectivity, about the value of human beings as objects of the nation state, the institutions of modern science, the authority of expert knowledge, and burgeoning forms of representation often unsensed.

Michel Foucault died in Paris 25 June 1984.

RAH