Foucault’s Critical Historicism

Abstract

The nature of Foucault’s historicism, however, can hardly be taken for granted. What Jurgen Habermas rejected as ‘presentistic, relativist and crypto-normative pseudo-science’ (Habermas, 1985, 324) was hailed by Paul Veyne as a ‘Copernican reversal’ and revolution in the writing of history (Veyne, 1997, 150; 2003). Gilles Deleuze praised Foucault as a pioneer of a ‘properly philosophical form of interrogation which is itself new and which revives History’ (Deleuze, 1999, 42), Oswyn Murray saw in him the ‘greatest modern philosophical historian’ (Murray, 1992, viii) and Mitchell Dean ‘a kind of touchstone for many … in the humanities and social sciences’ (Dean, 1994, 2). Indeed, to a growing number of historical theorists today Foucault epitomises the idea of ‘history writing as critique’ which ‘opens up new ways of imagining the future’ (Scott, 2006). In one of the most meticulous studies of Foucault in recent years, Ulrich Brieler embraces the ‘relentless historicity’ of his work as the most radical attempt in contemporary historical thought to overcome the ostensible objectivity of history and its multifarious rationalisations.