Clare O’Farrell, Michel Foucault: The Unconscious of History and Culture. In Foot, S & Partner, N (Eds.) The SAGE handbook of historical theory. Sage Publications, 2013, pp. 162-182.
Open access at the link above
Extract
The French thinker, Michel Foucault (1926-84), is noted for his extensive and controversial forays into the historical disciplines. When his work first began to circulate in the 1950s and 1960s, historians did not quite know what to make of it and philosophers resented the appearance of what they saw as the importation of the tedium of concrete events into the pure untainted realm of ideas. If these responses to his work remain alive and well decades after Foucault’s death, the uptake of his work has become far more complex. To restrict ourselves to the discipline of history here: if one very visible and vocal camp of historians remains deeply ambivalent about his work, this merely disguises the fact that a far larger contingent of historians of all kinds – not just those located in history departments – use his ideas quite unremarkably as they go about their daily business. Further, in areas of specialist institutional history and the history of the professions, Foucault has had a wide-ranging impact. Indeed, he has made the very idea of a history possible in some of these domains – where previously they had existed in an ahistorical limbo. He has also done much to historicise the sciences and to throw into question their claim to an unchanging and superior truth which sets the benchmark for all other forms of knowledge.
[…]
Foucault News 