Early Critiques of Modernity: The Human Sciences Between Knowledge and Discipline

Abstract

Foucault’s first diagnosis of modernity appears in The Order of Things, also entitled “An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.” Modernity is characterized by the emergence of the human sciences as a new domain of knowledge, in which “man” is entrapped in the vicious circle of being both a transcendental subject and an object of knowledge. This chapter intends to show how that first understanding of the human sciences is modified by Foucault’s analyses of power as intertwining power and knowledge: sociology, psychology, and criminology now become instruments in the exercise of power, both created by and creating a new kind of power exercise, the disciplinary regime. While this diagnosis of power is most often cited in relation to Foucault, it leads however to a paradox that he cannot overcome without further adjustments to his understanding of power in modernity. The chapter’s last part deals with this paradox.