ABSTRACT
French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84) was concerned with examining the past as a means of diagnosing the present. For Foucault there was no essential order or meaning behind things, and everything was therefore to be judged according to a framework of knowledge which was forever changing. Foucault referred to the broad changes in intellectual outlook as epistemes, periodizations of knowledge not dissimilar to Thomas Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’. History, for Foucault, had to be understood according to the epistemes and discourses of the past. It was through a ‘genealogical’ analysis of the past that we would inevitably gain some insight into the way in which the present had been ‘produced’. Foucault’s own intellectual project in some sense mirrored the shifting preoccupations of his time. Thus, for example, Foucault’s early work, The Order of Things, reflected the predominance of structuralism in the 1960s, while his later historical works, Discipline and Punish and, to a greater degree, The History of Sexuality, reflected the subsequent so-called ‘poststructuralist’ move away from the rigidities of structuralism.
