Idea and Phenomenon: On Intellectual History, Foucault and Various Other Things

Abstract

This essay addresses the still contentious status of Michel Foucault as intellectual historian. Making a set of larger classifications for intellectual history as a field, the essay argues that the basic problem of intellectual history remains an engagement with ‘ideas’ and, moreover, with the notion that ‘ideas’ are most meaningful when addressed in their historicity. By these criteria, Foucault is accepted as an intellectual historian. However, this essay also suggests that such a view of intellectual history demands a specific phenomenological and hermeneutic epistemology. The paper thus concludes with the suggestion that a tying‐together of intellectual history and phenomenological and hermeneutic epistemology may bear fruit for future research.

Notes

¹ Good references for entering into this debate, however, include Dean (2004); LaCapra (2004); Megill (2004); Kelley (2002); Kelley, Padgen, et al. (1996); Jacoby (1992); LaCapra (1992); Harlan (1989); Toews (1987); Kelley (1987); Stern (1985); LaCapra (1983); LaCapra and Kaplan (1982); Bouwsma (1981); Krieger (1973); Skinner (1969).

² To make more complete the connection of this category of intellectual to cultural history, I think it is important note that, with ‘social/political/cultural history of ideas’, we are on by far the largest terrain in intellectual history. This success has a great deal to do with its connection with methods in social history (see, for example, Hunt 1989). Moreover, it should also be noted that historical works whose primary focus might be characterised as ‘discursive’, or pursuing symbolic, aesthetic and communicative systems, have a connection to what I am calling ‘social/political/cultural history of ideas’ via semiotic conceptions of culture such as Clifford Geertz’s (1973). Examples of historical works employing such conceptions of culture are Lynn Hunt’s Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (1984), Mona Ozouf’s Festivals and the French Revolution (1988) and William Sewell’s Work & Revolution in France (1980). Nonetheless, although not always falling neatly into what I have offered as its chief subdivisions, the ideas of socio‐political and cultural contexts for important ideas and the notion of a ‘popular’ or ‘non‐elite’ mind as potentially delineable unto itself form the poles of what I am terming ‘social/political/cultural history of ideas’.

³ It should be pointed out that a great number of the debates referred to in this section are encapsulated well in Jenkins (1997), especially in the excerpts from Roland Barthes, Hans Kellner, Joyce Appleby, et al., Gabrielle Spiegel, Lawrence Stone and Patrick Joyce.

⁴ It should be acknowledged that doing this would be debatable in terms of Foucault scholarship, since his interest in ‘orders of discourse’ should be viewed as ultimately superseded by an interest in institutions and social ‘discipline’. This would be exemplified in such books as from his early Madness and Civilization (1973) to his later History of Sexuality (1978–86). Nonetheless, there is also a good argument to be made that there is a shared project across Foucault’s oeuvre by which The Order of Things becomes, if not a primary example of his approach to intellectual history, than at least his most significant contribution to the field. See Flynn (1997–2002); Goldstein (1994).

⁵ Regarding cognitive science, see, for example, Ross (2004); Thagard (2005); Lakoff and Johnson (1999). Another interesting text in this regard is Ricoeur and Changeux (2000).