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Subject Area: Political Theory

Foucault's History: Power/Knowledge - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Summer 1982, vol. 5, No. 2 [1982]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Foucault's History: Power/Knowledge

Michael S. Roth

“Foucault's History of the Present.” History and Theory 20 (1981): 32–46.

In The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes a “history of the present” by showing the connections between the “archaeology of knowledge” and criticism.

In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault is principally concerned with the changes in human perception evident at the end of the eighteenth century and the relation of these changes to the fundamental “structures” of experience. Underlying the history of medicine is the moral and political attempt to link the development of science with the development of bourgeois freedom.

In The Order of Things, he cites “archaeology” as a method of uncovering the fundamental paradigms of cultures and their systems of thought.

Finally, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault considers discourse a domain of power relations and thus establishes a link between knowledge and power. A “history of the present” is a self-conscious field of power relations and political struggle.