Foucault and the French tradition of historical epistemology

Abstract

Michel Foucault is perhaps best known for, and has exercised most influence through, his historical analyses of the human sciences as forms of power and social control, developed during the 1970s in books such as Discipline andPunish and The History of Sexuality: Volume I.’ However, these analyses of ‘regimes of truth’ were only made possible by the approach to the history of knowledge, under the title of ‘archaeology’, which Foucault had developed from the early 1960s onwards, and this in turn relied upon a fundamental relativist commitment. Foucault always believed that in order to describe the formation and transformation of the discursive systems of the human sciences it was necessary to ‘bracket’ all epistemological considerations, to put aside the question of truth and falsehood. Despite the assumptions of some of Foucault’s commentators, this was not-and could never have been-a merely methodological manceuvre. For to assume that transformations in the structure of scientific discourses must be accounted for in social terms, or even in terms of internal ‘rules of formation’ of discourse, interpreted in a quasi-structuralist sense, is to exclude on a priori grounds the possibility of a ration&motivation for the transition from one discursive system to another, and therefore any notion of scientific advance. In discussion with Chomsky dating from the early 197Os, Foucault stated unequivocally: