ABSTRACT
Foucault is closer to Arendt than to Habermas as a thinker, in that he has no desire to found a new critical theory as such. Instead, the majority of Foucault's published work consists of histories of madness, medicine, knowledge, prisons and finally sexuality. These are, however, always histories with a difference; they are critical histories, archaeologies or genealogies. What characterizes all of these critical histories is that they challenge the received wisdoms of the historians of psychiatry, medicine and penal reform. Implicit in this challenge, moreover, is a critique of standard assumptions in philosophy, social theory and politics. It is the latter critical aspect of Foucault's work that leads Habermas to accuse him of ‘cryptonormativism’ (Habermas, 1987b:294); because Foucault himself is very careful to avoid endorsing specific alternative values or principles on the basis of which contemporary theory and practice can be condemned. for some commentators it is Foucault's strength, for others his weakness, that he seems to be a critical theorist without a theory. 1 Foucault's own view, explicit in his late work but implicit throughout, is that critique relies not on substantive theory, but on working with a critical attitude.
