Foucault and History

Foucault and History: The Lessons of a Disillusion
Author(s): Gérard Noiriel

Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 547-568
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Review Article
Foucault and History: The Lessons of a Disillusion*
Gerard Noiriel
Ecole Normale Superieure and tcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris)
The current interest in Foucault's work in American historical research' is remi

of the situation in France during the 1970s, at a time when projects (which unfort
failed) had been envisioned between philosophers and a certain number of historians.
In analyzing the causes of this failure, I would like not only to uncover the misun-
derstandings that hampered this partnership but also to contribute to the discussion
that has arisen in the last few years on both sides of the Atlantic regarding the cufrent
trends of historical research and the crisis of "interdisciplinarity."2
I. THE IMPOSSIBLE PRISON AND THE IMPOSSIBLE DIALOGUE
Immediately after the publication of Discipline and Punish,3 the dialogue between
Foucault and French historians reached its height in the debate on the history of
* A first version of this study was presented recently at a conference organized by Olivier Zunz
at the University of Virginia History Department. This study is also greatly indebted to the
critiques of Allan Megill and Jacques Revel. It was translated by Alex Dracobly and James
Petterson.
' His works were introduced into the mainstream of American historical research thanks to the
studies of A. Megill, "Foucault, Structuralism and the Ends of History," Journal of Modern
History 51 (1979): 451-503; and M. Poster, "Foucault and History," Social Research 49 (1982):
116-42. Interest in Foucault has increased over the past few years, as shown by American
historians' embrace of the "linguistic turn"; see A. Megill, "The Reception of Foucault by
Historians," Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 117-41; the collective works edited by
Arthur Still and Irving Volody, Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault's "Histoire
de la Folie" (London, 1991); and the recent colloquium "Foucault and the Writing of History
Today," held at the University of Chicago, October 1991.
2 In France, the Annales editorial committee recently launched a debate regarding the relatio
between history and the social sciences. The initial results of this debate were published in the
journal's sixtieth anniversary issue; see the editorial "Tentons l'experience," Annales: Econo-
mies, societes, civilisations 44 (1989): 1317-23. In the United States the extensive and lively
discussions borne of P. Novick's book, That Noble Dream, the "Objectivity Question" and the
American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), demonstrates similar preoccupations; see
AHR forum, "The Old History and the New" (with T. S. Hamerow, G. Himmelfarb, L. W.
Levine, J. W. Scott, and J. E. Toews), American Historical Review 94 (1989): 654-98: and the
critiques delivered at the 1989 annual meeting of the American Historical Association published
as "Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the Future of the Historical
Profession," American Historical Review 96 (1991): 675-708.
3 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (1974; English trans., New York,
1977).
[Journal of Modern History 66 (September 1994): 547-568]

? 1994 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/94/6603-0005$01.00
All rights reserved.
548 Noiriel
prisons. The most important articles of this debate were published in a collective
work which will serve as a guideline for my own study.4 The basis for the
encounter between Foucault and French historians had already been established by
a series of earlier convergences. In the first place, Foucault's concerns differed
from those of other philosophers with regard to the central role he assigned to
history. Previous philosophers had certainly adopted a historical perspective-in
particular, Foucault's thesis director, the philosopher Georges Canguilhem, a
specialist in the field of the history of science.S But the rupture Foucault brought
about in philosophical thought and practice-which constitutes the fundamental
reason for his interest to historians-was created by his refusal to privilege the
canonical texts of the discipline by undertaking his own work of historical
documentation. Foucault himself recognized the stakes inherent in this choice:
" 'Theoretical' or 'speculative' reflection has long had a rather distant and perhaps
somewhat disdainful relationship with history. One read historical works, which
were often of very high quality, in search of raw material that was considered
'accurate'. Then all that was required was to reflect upon it, to provide it with a
meaning and truth that it did not have on its own. Free use of others' work was
permitted-to the extent that no one even thought of hiding the fact that one was
elaborating on work already done; that work was cited shamelessly."6 Foucault
added that this division of labor had become problematic. On the one hand, it
assumed a hierarchy between those who "think" and those who "go to the
archives." On the other hand, through an uncritical use of the material produced
by historians, philosophers ran the risk of unwittingly adopting a number of the
underlying assumptions of history. In reaction to this problem Foucault developed
a method which consisted of "a way of testing thought with work in history." This
required that the philosopher himself go "to the bottom of the mine."7 In addition
to his own work, Foucault organized long-term cooperative projects with
historians which resulted in the publication of several annotated archival docu-
ments;8 his work in turn immediately received favorable attention from historians
with an interest in the social sciences. It was thanks to Philippe Aries that Foucault
found a publisher for his dissertation.9 In the Annales, Robert Mandrou wrote that
it was a "decisive thesis . .. , 700 pages of rare beauty that will be crucial to our
4 M. Perrot, ed., L'impossible prison (Paris, 1980). Aside several historical studies of prisons,
this work assembles the elements of a debate between Foucault and historians that arose from a
meeting sponsored by the "Societ6 d'Histoire de la Revolution de 1848."
5 See G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (1965; English trans., New York,
1989). This work concerns a study in the "longue duree" of the evolution of biological norms.
6 Interview in the French newspaper Liberation, January 21, 1983, cited in D. Eribon, Michel
Foucault (1989; English trans., Cambridge, 1991), p. 274.
7 Ibid.
8 M. Foucault, I, Pierre RiviWre, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother
A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (1973; English trans., New York, 1975); also M. Foucault
and A. Farge, Le desordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des archives de la Bastille (Paris, 1982).
9 M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961;
English trans., New York, 1965).
Foucault and History: The Lessons of a Disillusion 549
understanding of the classical period."'0 Foucault was likewise generous in his

praise, devoting the entire first chapter of The Archeology of Knowledge to an
attempt to demonstrate that Braudel's "new history" and the concept of the
"longue duree" were compatible with a philosophy of the "epistemological
break."" Braudel would in fact play an important role in Foucault's election,
several months after the publication of The Archeology of Knowledge, to the
College de France. After the publication of Discipline and Punish, Foucault
interacted not so much with the "historiens des mentalites" (like Mandrou) as
with specialists in the history of the working classes. Besides their common
interests, the main reason for this rapprochement was of a political nature. Most
social historians found themselves involved in the "anti-institutional" militancy in
vogue after May 1968, with the theme of the "prison" constituting the central axis
around which militant politics and historical preoccupations converged.12
Despite this favorable context, the dialogue was rapidly cut short. In the
introduction to L'impossible prison, Maurice Agulhon expressed disapproval of
the "epistemological" tone which the debate had all too rapidly acquired, arguing
that the notion of collective research remained mere wishful thinking. Foucault
likewise acknowledged the divergent points of view.13 Several years later, Arlette
Farge expressed her astonishment at the misunderstandings that continued to pit
Foucault against historians and deplored the "strange" situation of a perpetual
standoff and a "debate that was begun but never finished." 14
As emphasized by Jacques Revel, the fundamental reason for this failure was
that the dialogue between Foucault and French historians rested on a misunder-
standing: historians underestimated the fundamentally philosophical nature of
Foucault's work,'5 a characteristic that Foucault himself had never hidden: "From
its inception my project differed from that of historians. For better or for worse,
they posit 'society' as the general horizon of their analysis and the background in
relation to which they must situate a given object ('society, economy, civilisa-
tion'). My general theme is not society but the discourse of the true and the
false."'6 He subsequently added that ever since his earliest works it was the
problem of truth-"the very question of philosophy"-that had remained his
constant preoccupation. It is in fact necessary to remember that, contrary to the
impression that might be created by the leftist appropriations of Foucault linked to
10 See R. Mandrou, "Trois cles pour comprendre la folie a l'epoque classique," Annales:
Economies, societes, civilisations 17 (1962): 771-72.
" M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; English trans., New York, 1976).
12 The historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet was, along with Foucault, responsible for the 1971
creation of the "Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons," in which a number of Foucauldian
historians were regrouped.
13 Perrot, ed. (note 4 above), pp. 6 and 318.
14 A. Farge, "Face a l'histoire," Magazine litteraire 207 (1984): 40.
15 J. Revel, "Foucault Michel, 1926-1984," in Dictionnaire des sciences historiques, ed. A.
Burguiere (Paris, 1986), pp. 290-92.
16 Perrot, ed. (n. 4 above), p. 55. The subtitle of the Annales is Economies, societes,
civilisations.
550 Noiriel
the conditions of his reception after 1968, his first major work, on madness in the
classical period, was actually a scholarly response to questions raised by French
university philosophers.17 This work originated in a thesis written in the tradit
of the philosophy of science, as defined by the major works of Brunschwig,
Bachelard, and Canguilhem. Foucault's work was heavily influenced by the
philosophical education he had received, most notably at the Ecole Normale
Superieure immediately following World War II. At that time, existentialism and
phenomenology were at the peak of their renown, yet they remained contested by
their principal enemy, conceptual philosophy. Structuralism's triumph in the late
1950s signaled both the rallying of a new generation of intellectuals-the
existence of which depended upon a forceful break with past masters-and the
emergence of an unexpected ally for a previously subordinate philosophy of
science. In allying themselves with the structuralists, philosophers of science
obtained their revenge against the princes of French philosophy. The Order of
Things effectively represented a settling of accounts with Sartre,'8 and its
archeological method was a virtual "war machine" against hermeneutics. As
Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow have shown, it was for reasons internal to
philosophy-the methodological failure of The Archeology of Knowledge-that
Foucault thoroughly reworked his project during the 1970s, emphasizing the
genealogical method based on Nietzsche and, contradictorily, on Merleau-Ponty
(who had also projected a "genealogy of truth").'9
In insisting on the unity of the Foucauldian project Gilles Deleuze has expressed,
in more radical fashion, the notion that the entirety of Foucault's work is subject
to requirements proper only to the field of philosophy. According to Deleuze's
reading of Foucault, any historical formation consists of the articulation of a
"voir" and a "parler," with speaking and seeing understood as pure elements, a
priori conditions from which all ideas are formulated. Due to the radical difference
separating the "enunciable" and the "visible," the fundamental problem that
Foucault progressively sought to resolve through his theory of power-which
could also be related to the central question that confronted Kant20-was that of
a coadaptation of these two mutually irreducible forms. This is why Foucault
conceptualized power relations as diagrams detached from any specific use, whose
function was to actualize "voir" and "parler," thereby bringing about their
synchronization. The prison, in the nineteenth century, was a new way of "seeing"
crime, and delinquency (penal law) a new way of "saying" it. The prison,
'7 See R. Castel, "Les aventures de la pratique," Le debat 41 (1986): 42-43.

18 See G. Lebrun, "Note sur la phenomenologie dans Les mots et les choses" (paper delivered
at the "Foucault philosophe" colloquium, January 9-11, 1988, Paris), cited in Eribon (n. 6
above), p. 157. The manuscript of Les mots et les choses (The order of things) contained
numerous direct attacks on Sartre, attacks which were deleted only upon preparing the book for
publication.
'9 H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics:
With an Afterword by Michel Foucault (Chicago, 1982, French ed., 1984).
20 "If the 'I think' is not directed toward an indeterminate ('I am') as Descartes believed, but
toward a purely determinable 'space-time', how could these two irreducible forms be coadapted?"
See G. Deleuze, Foucault (1986; English trans., Minneapolis, 1988), p. 61.
nevertheless, derived not from penal law but from discipline. It was panoptism, as
a diagram or as a category of power detached from any specific use, that brought
about their synchronization. Under such circumstances we can only agree with
Deleuze's conclusion. Foucault's work is
historical research and not the work of a historian. He does not write a history of
mentalities but of the conditions governing everything that has a mental existence,
namely statements and the system of language. He does not write a history of behavior
but of the conditions governing everything that has a visible existence, namely a
system of light. He does not write a history of institutions but of the conditions
governing their integration of different relations between forces, at the limits of a social
field. He does not write a history of private life but of the conditions governing the way
in which the relation to oneself constitutes a private life. He does not write a history
of subjects but of processes of subjectivation, governed by the foldings operating in the
ontological as much as the social field.2'
By underscoring the "interdisciplinary" qualities of Foucault's first major

work-Madness and Civilization22 -Fernand Braudel was the first to accredit the
idea that Foucault and historians were addressing the same subject, thus giving
rise to misunderstandings which have continued to develop ever since and which
were in full evidence during the 1970s prison debate.23 The arguments Foucault
developed during this period demonstrate, I believe, the inescapable contradiction
inherent in the philosophical nature of his project. His desire to establish a genuine
cooperation with historians explains both his rejection of the traditional division
of labor between those "who think" and those "who go to the archives" and his
numerous precautionary remarks aimed at showing that he did not question the
legitimacy of historical practice.24 But later, in returning to the philosophical
question of the true and the false within his own work, he reestablished the break
he claimed to have abolished by presenting himself as the judge and arbiter of
historical work. When Foucault explained that his problem lay in distinguishing
"historical knowledge from a history that produces the true/false division upon
which this knowledge is founded,"25 he was in fact questioning the foundations
of historical knowledge. In The Order of Things, the theme of the "death of man"
represented an implicit, yet virulent, critique of the object of history as defined by
the founders of the Annales.26 In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault used the
21 Ibid., p. 116.
22 Foucault, Madness and Civilization (note 9 above).
23 In a complementary note to Robert Mandrou's account, Braudel wrote: "This requires a
mind capable of being, alternately and not solely, a philosopher, psychologist, historian"; see
Fernand Braudel's postscript to Mandrou's article, Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations 17
(1962): 772.
24 He thus notes that "any historian has the right to remain indifferent" to his philosophica
preoccupations and that the difference between his work and that of other historians reflects two
"means of production," both equally legitimate; Perrot, ed., pp. 56 and 32.
25 Ibid., p. 51.
26 "The object of history is, by nature, man. Let us say, men." See M. Bloch, The Historian's
Craft (1947; English trans., New York, 1953), p. 25.
552 Noiriel
same argument to distinguish between "good" and "bad" historians, opposing

structuralist "new history," adorned with all possible virtues, to the "old"
history-dated history, one might say-bogged down in its obsession with the
clues, memory, and mentalities.27 But Foucault then went on to challenge
structural history in the name of the "genealogical" method, reproaching it for not
questioning the arbitrariness and historicity of the categories it employed.28 Short
of converting to philosophy, historians could not have followed Foucault into this
domain for, as Max Weber so often insisted, "All scientific work presupposes that
the rules of logic and method are valid.... Furthermore, the nature of the
relationship of scientific work and its presuppositions varies widely according to
their structure."29 For this reason, historians perceived Foucault's propositions as
"theories" that did not take "reality" into account and that relied upon superficial
documentation, arbitrarily gathered, for the sole purpose of illustrating theses
which only an "army of historians" would be able to verify. According to
Leonard, Foucault's superficial knowledge of sources explained why he was not
familiar with the facts he studied; he "[did] not perceive them from within."
Agulhon stated that his lack of objectivity was also evident in his refusal to
recognize that, thanks to progress in the "rights of man," today's prisoners are
treated more "humanely" than under the ancien regime.30 For Foucault, these
arguments betrayed a perspective inherent to historical practice: an antitheoretical
empiricism rooted in the belief that there exists an accessible "reality" indepen-
dent of the researcher's preliminary constructions. Foucault asserted that by
confusing the "social" and the "real" historians sequestered themselves in the
delusion of total history. They confused the analysis of a problem with the study
of a period, which prevented them from understanding that he chose his material
solely in terms of his object of research. In his analysis, moreover, he retained only
those elements that allowed him to establish the explanatory relations proper to the
object, thus rendering absurd the requirement of wanting "to say everything."
Once the dialogue between philosophers and historians had effectively begun,
the illusion of a "common language" was quick to dissipate. Both sides
discovered that issues that had appeared to be "common points of interest" were
actually motivated by problems specific to their respective disciplines. History had
been at the center of the philosophical polemic between Foucault and Sartre, who
believed that the archeological method denied history. In response, Foucault
stated: "No historian has ever reproached me for this. There is a sort of myth of
27 This "subjective" conception of history was defended by the first generation of the Annales;
see L. Febvre, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre (1953; English trans., New
York, 1973).
28 In an article on Nietzsche, Foucault affirms that "the historian's history finds its support
outside of time and pretends to base its judgments on an apocalyptic objectivity"; see M.
Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in his Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews (1971; English trans., Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), p. 152. Thus, in a certain sense,
Foucault's strategy, vis-a-vis history, has been first to use Braudel against Febvre, then Febvre
against Braudel; with regard to the opposing conceptions of history of these two authors, see G.
Noiriel, "Pour une approche subjectiviste du social," Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations
44 (1989): 1435-59.
29 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958), p. 143.
30 Perrot, ed. (n. 4 above), pp. 10 and 315-16.
History that philosophers have.... In fact it has been quite some time since people
as important as Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, the English historians, and others put
an end to this myth of History.",31 Historians, however, interpreted Foucault's
work in terms of their own preoccupations. For Fernand Braudel, the primary
interest of The History of Madness lay in its study of "collective psychology." He
thus emphasized concessions made to phenomenology, context, and meaning, the
very issues that Foucault, later in his book, incessantly criticized. During the
following decade, historians interested in Foucault's work on the prison privileged
the notion of "confinement," attempting to illustrate it through studies of the
reality of penal servitude, factories, and hospitals, instead of recognizing that it
was in fact a philosophical concept.
At this point the "dialogue" led to a dispute over "misreadings." Robert
Mandrou, who had been the first to point out the interest of Foucault's work for
historians, became more critical when Foucault rejected the history of mentalities,
to which Mandrou had devoted his life's work.32 Conversely, philosophers
repeatedly denounced "misinterpretations" of Foucault's work. Deleuze criticized
those who "reproach Foucault for sticking to confinement, or congratulate him for
having analysed it so well." He denounced the "new fools" who invoked "a
universal and eternal consciousness of the rights of man which must not be
subjected to analysis. This is not the first time an idea has been called eternal in
order to mask the fact that it is actually weak or summary and is not even aware
of those elements that might sustain it (such as the changes that have taken place
in modern law since the nineteenth century)."33 In response to Deleuze, Jacques
Leonard spoke ironically of the philosopher's stature compared to the "needy
artisans of historical labor"; he later wondered about theories "which leave the
business of tidying up to the jobbers."34 Among historians less well disposed
toward Foucault, the debate took a more aggressive turn. Charles Carbonnel
justified his thesis topic on nineteenth-century French historians by saying that he
wanted to "deny to the outrageous imperialism of metaphysicians, logicians, and
other epistemologists a domain which they had only obscured through the
deforming and destructive effect of esoteric language and systematic a priorism."
His conclusion was an orthodox critique of Foucault's "received ideas"-a
critique which Foucault would of course ignore, given "the use philosophers make
of that which disrupts the systems on which their fragile reputations rest."35
II. THE FORCE OF DISCIPLINARY TRADITIONS
One of the essential reasons for the failure of the dialogue between Foucault and
historians was that the various disciplines had thought it possible to establish a
31 La quinzaine litte'raire (March 1968), cited in Eribon (n. 6 above), pp. 164-65.
32 See R. Mandrou, "Le statut scientifique de l'histoire," Encyclope'die universalis (Paris,
1968): Foucault, "in his Archaeology, comes to the point of asserting the uselessness of historical
discourse, at least as he knows it" (8:429).
3 Deleuze (n. 20 above), pp. 50 and 90.
34 J. Leonard, "L'historien et le philosophe" in Perrot, ed., pp. 9-28.
35 C. 0. Carbonnel, Histoire et historiens (Toulouse, 1976), pp. 7 and 575.
554 Noiriel
"spontaneous" cooperation, relying mainly on the goodwill of those involved. Yet

they were unwitting prisoners of their respective disciplinary traditions. This is
suggested by the fact that the very same polemic between philosophers and
historians had taken place at the beginning of the century in France. Contesting the
imperialism of "positivist" historians who had established their supremacy in the
university in the name of a historical science founded on the cult of the fact,
Durkheimian philosophers attempted to impose a "social science" (sociology)
founded on the epistemological principles of Kant and Auguste Comte. Kant's
works furnished the arguments that furthered.the dispute over the foundations of
science: reality is not given, it is fabricated by the researcher, and this explains
why all empirical work must be subordinated to the theoretical construction of the
object. Comtism reinforced the Kantian position by assigning to philosophy the
power of judging science's criteria in terms of a universal model of the natural
sciences. Comte established a hierarchy of the sciences, contrasting those which
are more "concrete" situated at the bottom of the ladder, to those which are more
"abstract" placed at the top. Armed with these principles, the Durkheimians began
a lengthy polemic against historians, whom they accused of being incapable of
constructing the object of their research. Whereas the goal of any scientific
endeavor, for the Durkheimians, was to discover universal laws, historians sought
to restore the past by means of an empiricist approach which confused the "real"
with the object of knowledge.36
If Foucauldian philosophy rejected Auguste Comte's scientism, it nevertheless
remained, as we have seen, deeply influenced by the Kantian principles that
assigned philosophy the role of supreme arbiter in the dispute over truth and
falsehood. The arguments developed by historians also illustrate the tenacity of the
antitheoretical empiricism that characterized the profession. It should be pointed
out that Foucault's interlocutors did not belong to the current of "histoire
evenementielle" fustigated by Durkheim. For the most part they were identified
with the Annales, the historiographical movement that arose in the 1930s and
embraced the Durkheimian critique of the "empiricism" of "positivist" historians
in order to promote a "new history."37 By adopting philosophical arguments, the
proponents of "new history," persuaded that they were now speaking a language
common to philosophy, had forgotten that the relations between disciplines are not
merely a question of words: they also involve professional practices which are far
more constraining than their discourses.
In the case of France, the conditions under which the new universities were
created at the end of the nineteenth century were decisive. The 1880-90 reforms
(which mark the true beginnings of the professionalization of the "social
sciences") took place in the context of the political struggles that the republicans
36 For an account of this debate, see P. Besnard, ed., The Sociological Domain, the
Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology (Cambridge and Paris, 1983).
37 The harshest indictment at the beginning of the century by Durkheimian philosopher-
sociologists against historians has become a sort of manifesto for the new history, republished by
the Annales; see F. Simiand, "Methode historique et science sociale," Revue de synthese
historique, vol. 6 (1903), and reprinted in Annales: Economies, socie'te's, civilisations 15 (1969):
1-22.
carried out against the conservative parties (Royalists and Bonapartists) backed by
the Church and the aristocracy. These circumstances explain, to this day, the
particularities of the "rules of the game" in the French university: Parisian
centralization, state control, and the cult of science (as opposed to religious
"prejudices").38 For historians, these innovations resulted in a fundamental
contradiction. Most of the historians in the universities, who were from the lower
or middle classes, struggled against the aristocratic-amateur historians-who had
until then dominated the discipline, which they considered a simple extension of
the cult of ancestry-on the basis of both their specialized skills, borne of a long
technical apprenticeship, and their refusal to compromise with the social world
and the powers that be in the name of the demands of scientific knowledge. But
they were also backed by the republican powers, which had need of a new
"collective memory" capable of securing national reconciliation based on the
values of the French Revolution and the cult of the fatherland. This is why the
Republic required historians to assume educational functions in secondary schools
and universities (teacher training, establishment of programs, etc.)39 and to work
within society on the vulgarization of the founding myths of the Republic. In
return the State acknowledged its debt, honoring the most eminent representatives
of the new profession: election to the Academie Fran,aise was considered the
apotheosis of a historian's career. In other words, if the republican historian was
expected to be a "scholar," he was also obliged to be a "professor" and a
"writer," accomplishing tasks (preparing lessons, writing school manuals and
books for the general public) which had nothing to do with the norms of scientific
work as defined by the profession at the end of the century.40 This contradiction
within the historical profession between knowledge and power explains the vigor
of the polemics that subsequently set the partisans of scientific history in
opposition to those of narrative history. But the debate was even more acute in that
the main disciplines of the new university were pitted against one another. Prior
to the 1880s, students of literature had received only a general education, which
explains why major historians, such as Michelet or Taine, were also philosophers
and writers. The republican reforms brought about disciplinary specialization,
which resulted in three distinct university positions: the literature professor, the
philosopher, and the historian. In terms of both the number of university positions
and public prestige, historians especially benefited from these transformations.
The disciplines that were adversely affected attempted to discredit history by
mobilizing opposing arguments. On the one hand, there were the "lettres" who
regretted the days when literature reigned in the salons and the university was
38 Paris is the site of the most prestigious and most numerous posts, and it is Parisian professors
who retain the greatest amount of institutional power (control of publications and nominations).
Most professors are civil servants on the payroll of the Ministry of National Education. Since
1945 the pay scale (based on seniority and position) is the same for all French universities.
39 In rejecting any clear distinction between secondary and university education, the Third
Republic merely followed the Napoleonic tradition. The "agregation," a competitive examina-
tion, leads to positions in both areas, and most university professors are first employed in
secondary education.
40 See G. Noiriel, "Naissance du metier d'historien," Geneses 1 (1990): 58-85.
556 Noiriel
simply one of the privileged sites of high society. According to them, history, in
its attempt to imitate science, denied its own strengths by mutilating "human
realities" and severing itself from the people. On the other hand, history was
confronted by the new generation of Durkheimian philosophers who, as we have
seen, combated history in the name of sociology, on the very terrain of
"science."41
From the inception of the modem university, history and philosophy occupied
antagonistic institutional positions which brought their divergences to light.
Durkheim and his students represented a discipline situated on the margins of the
university, and they affirmed their marginality as the condition of true knowledge.
Their perspective also reflected the limited social experience of an intellectual
community "cut off from the world," whose essentially literary education led its
members to overestimate the importance of theoretical reflection and the power of
words. The marginal status of these intellectuals, whether suffered or willed, also
helps explain their "revolutionary" epistemology-an expression of their dissat-
isfaction with the world and of their desire to overturn its foundations, at least in
thought. This idealization of rupture manifested itself in a refusal of any
compromise with "common sense"; this explains the importance for the Durkheim-
ians of abstract language, inaccessible to simple mortals, and their manifest
disdain for the vulgarization of knowledge. That refusal also translated into a
conception of "interdisciplinarity" that prohibited all "conversation" with other
disciplines, previous or concurrent philosophies included. Since knowledge was
"nonnegotiable," all intellectual production was evaluated in terms of a given
theoretical scaffolding, and only those elements that suited the model were
retained.42
History's institutional position likewise explains the main characteristics of its
epistemological discourse. As clearly illustrated in Charles Seignobos's reasoning,
in the first comprehensive defense of history against philosophical critiques,43
historians had to reconcile the contradictory demands of the "centrist" situation of
their discipline which, as we have seen, was split between the poles of knowledge
and power. History has always represented an essential dimension in the life of
societies. This is undoubtedly why, in most languages, the term "history"
designates both the reality to be known (history as "past") and the discipline
responsible for elaborating this knowledge. This confusion has predisposed
historians to consider that what is important in history is limited to those events
which the powers that be and public opinion consider "historical."
The privilege Seignobos and other Sorbonne historians accorded political
history is thus understandable. By definition, historians evolved in the social world
41 Regarding the relations between social identity and logical identity, see the analyses of J. C.
Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique: L'espace non-Poppe'rien du raisonnement naturel
(Paris, 1991), pp. 57-88.
42 The notion of philosophy as the production of concepts that exclude any possibility o
"conversation" was also recently developed by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la
philosophie? (Paris, 1991).
43 These principles are shown in C. Langlois and C. Seignobos, Introduction aux etudes
historiques (Paris, 1898); C. Seignobos, La methode historique appliquie aux sciences sociales
(Paris, 1901), ttudes de politique et d'histoire (Paris, 1934).
like fish in water and were thus hardly inclined to question the theoretical
foundations of their discipline. For these historians, history was above all a
"practical activity" which, as with physics or zoology, did not depend on
philosophy for its progress.44 Reflection on history was limited to a small min
who acted as the profession's spokespersons, most often in response to attacks
from the "outside"-that is, from other disciplines.45
Defining historical knowledge in terms of analysis and synthesis was a way of
reconciling contradictions inherent to the discipline. Analysis allowed for the
development of a "historical method" based on source criticism and presupposed,
in accordance with the exigencies of professionalization, a division of labor and
consequently a portioning and a "crumbling" of knowledge. The importance of
synthesis derived from this situation since it alone allowed for the restoration of
the whole of the "past" within the framework of a total history (in most cases a
"history of France") satisfying the expectations of the public and the powers that
be. But this also reflected the profession's ideal of community since synthesis was
the moment when all the "producers" were supposed to gather together for the sake
of erecting the commoti "masterpiece." These principles revealed historians' con-
ception of interdisciplinarity. Just as historians rejected any questioning of the
foundations of knowledge, they also refused to enter into quarrels of legitimacy.46
Yet if they so readily accepted the existence of other disciplines, it was only because
they perceived history to be the point of convergence for all knowledge. The
discipline had in fact been entirely constructed on the basis of this all-encompassing
definition of interdisciplinarity since the "historical method" was only a revival of
techniques perfected at the beginning of the nineteenth century by philology and
hermeneutics. This was Seignobos's position when he defined sociology as one of
history's "auxiliary sciences" and when he asserted that the historical method was
necessary to all disciplines that use documentary evidence.47
III. THE PERSISTANCE OF EMPIRICISM AMONG ANNALES HISTORIANS
After the upheavals of the late nineteenth century, the university experienced no
major changes until World War II. This stability explains why the same conflicts
would recur during the second developmental phase of French universities, during
44 As Seignobos remarks in his debate with Simiand: "I want to remain on a practical level,
inasmuch as this is possible in a theoretical discussion, by investigating how the practical
problems of historical work come into existence, for it is precisely these practical conditions tha
Simiand overlooks" (Seignobos, ttudes de politique et d'histoire, p. 32).
45 This explains why French historians from Charles Seignobos to Fernand Braudel have
delivered their reflections on history in articles or conferences which were subsequently published
in collective works.
46 Rather violently attacked by the leader of Durkheim's successors, Seignobos nevertheles
replied: "The difference between us is not that which exists between two generations: it is the
natural divergence between a philosopher and a historian" (ttudes de politique et d'histoire
p. 30).
47 The logic of "inclusion" also explains the relation to preceding generations or other currents
of historical research in terms of "complementarity," as opposed to a rupture or transcendence.
In its development, social history is thus considered as "a fragment of the total history of
societies" (Seignobos, La methode historique appliquee aux sciences sociales, p. 313).
558 Noiriel
the 1950s and 1960s.48 One of the main stakes of these conflicts was the creation
of the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. The social sciences
hoped to use this new institution to free themselves from the tutelage of history.
But the participants of the Annales also wished to control and transform it into the
main instrument of their struggle against the Sorbonne's penchant for political
history. The new conception of "interdisciplinarity" proposed by the Annales
remained faithful to Seignobos's "all-encompassing" logic. Once he had acknowl-
edged the sociological critiques of the Sorbonne's "empiricism," Lucien Febvre
was unable to present the historical "method" as the basis for the establishment
of an interdisciplinary domain. If, for Febvre, the new history was the point of
convergence for all knowledge, it was because it represented the culmination of
the "human sciences." According to Febvre, the other disciplines were merely
able to clarify a single dimension of human existence; only history was able to
restore it in its totality.
The success of the Annales allowed historians to take control of the Sixth
Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes to the detriment of other
disciplines, which subsequently began to question history's "imperialism." In the
1950s, though, it was no longer Comtism but structuralism that furnished the
ammunition to be directed against history.49 In preaching his archeological method
and in announcing the "death of man," Foucault also took part in this battle, even
though historians were not his only adversaries.50 Femand Braudel's reelaboration
of the Annales project integrated structuralist critiques, all the while remaining
faithful to historians' notion of interdisciplinarity. With the concept of the "longue
duree" it was no longer man but time that became the common reference point for
all the disciplines.5' For Braudel, all disciplines had a stake in the problem of
duration, but only history could be considered, in its essence, the science of time,
thus justifying its claims to hegemony over the other human sciences. Two
quotations from his On History will suffice to illustrate this point: "History is' a
dialectic of the time span; through it, and thanks to it, history is a study of society,
of the whole of society and thus of the past and thus equally of the present, past
and present being inseparable." This is why history "has got a finger in every pie
on the table" since it is "a synthesizer by vocation"; it "will always wish to grasp
the whole, the totality of social life."52 The series of equivalences that provided
the basis for new empirical assumptions is clear: time = history = the social = the
real. The other essential principles of historical research followed from these
48 Pierre Bourdieu showed how the university crisis which culminated in May 1968 was based
on disciplinary differences similar to those that arose at the end of the nineteenth century. See P.
Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (1984; English trans., Stanford, Calif., 1988).
49 See J. Revel, "Histoire et sciences sociales: Le paradigme des Annales," Annales:
Economies, socie'te's, civilisations 34 (1979): 1360-76.
50 In contrast to Durkheim, Foucault also had to protect philosophy from the emerging social
sciences. Immediately following World War II Maurice Merleau-Ponty had advocated coopera-
tion between the social sciences and philosophy, the latter playing the role of "conductor" and
producing the concepts required by the empirical disciplines. But structuralism furnished the
necessary theoretical foundations, which allowed the social sciences to dispense with philosophy.
5' See F. Braudel, On History (1969; English trans., Chicago, 1980).
52 Ibid., pp. 69-70 and 76.
equivalences: above all, Braudel's distrust vis-'a-vis "theories" put forth by

economists or sociologists and his understanding of the progress of historical
research in terms of continuity and complementarity-the most successful history
being, for him, the sum of all possible histories.
This rapid overview of the relations between history and philosophy in France
during the last century demonstrates the power of disciplinary conditioning. This
is also illustrated, a contrario, by the failure of those projects that aimed to
introduce philosophical questions into historical thought. The attempt by Paul
Veyne (a specialist in Roman history) was significant in this regard. Whereas Marc
Bloch-in an ironic portrayal of theoreticians who spend their time tracing rigid
borders between science and nonscience asserted that to think about the study of
history is to "explain how and why a historian practices his trade,"53 Veyne
produced a lengthy argument in an attempt to situate history theoretically in
relation to the sciences, thus taking into account, but inversely, the legitimacy
debate Durkheim had sought to initiate with historians.54 Several years later, in an
essay devoted to Foucault, Veyne asked his colleagues to consider the philosopher
as a "pure historian" for the good reason that Foucault, through his works, had
displaced the "boundaries between history and philosophy."55 Unfortunately, the
displacement of these limits in thought was not sufficient to transform concrete
research practices. This explains why Paul Veynes's call received so little response
among historians.56 More generally, those who had hoped to develop a truly
philosophical historical practice (whether based on Foucault, Marx, or others)
failed because, by importing a new "language" into the domain of history, they
condemned themselves to a marginality that explains the discouragement into
which many of them have finally fallen.
IV. RELATIONS OF POWER AND THE REPRODUCTION OF PROFESSIONAL NORMS
The permanence of the positions occupied by French history and philosophy

within the university does not, in itself, explain the continuity of thelr epistemo-
logical frameworks. The institutionalization of these disciplines has also played a
part in structuring the power relations that contribute significantly to the
reproduction of professional norms. In spite of their differences, the discourses of
philosophy and of history have until recently shared a refusal to examine the
5 Bloch (n. 26 above), p. 12.

54 P. Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (1971; English trans., Middletown, Conn.,
1984). According to Veyne, if history were to be fully realized, sociology would have no reason
for being.
55 P. Veyne, "Foucault revolutionne l'histoire," in Comment on ecrit i'histoire (Paris, 1978),
pp. 201-42.
56 Even Jacques Le Goff (who is more predisposed to theoretical reflection than most Fre
historians), all the while admitting that "this work presents Paul Veyne as one of the rare
examples of epistemological historians," considers that Veyne's work is based on "conceptual-
izing history which risks dragging history away from its proper sphere, whether toward Marxist
finalities, Weberian abstractions or structural atemporalities" (J. Le Goff, "Introduction," in his
Faire de i'histoire [Brussels, 1988]): xi and 34.
560 Noiriel
problem of power within the institution. Foucault's work, however, provides

valuable tools for such an analysis-in particular, his assertion that power is
inherent in social relations because it constitutes an essential element in the
structuring of any community. What is at issue is not so much the "denunciation"
of power as a means of its "suppression" but, rather, the understanding of power
in order to manage it and make it more bearable.57
Paradoxically, Foucault never applied these rules to his own world of power
relations, which he understood in terms of the logic of "denunciation" character-
istic of the "revolutionary" tradition of French philosophy. The establishment of
a specialized philosophical knowledge, however, is a consequence of its institu-
tionalization, for the latter guarantees the transmission of disciplinary norms,
primarily by controlling the labor market and the training of students. Because
only institutionalization can ensure the existence of an audience capable of
competently judging academic work, the routine and arbitrariness that character
bureaucratic power seem to be the necessary price for the maintenance of this
specialized knowledge. In his attempt to escape the yoke of disciplinary power,
Foucault sought allies outside of philosophy by targeting a broader audience; this
is, moreover, one of the reasons for his dialogue with historians. But by adapting
this "authorial" tactic he discovered another kind of dependence, that of
fashionability. At times of "revolutionary" political conjunctures in France (the
beginning of the century, the 1950s, May 1968), "radical" philosophers have
attracted popular interest. But during periods of disillusionment philosophers have
always had much less success. Foucault became increasingly aware that the
general impact of his work was not necessarily related to its philosophical value.
That is why, at the end of his life, he devoted himself to a desperate project that
aimed at reconstituting a world of specialists.58
Among historians, the accepted conception of the "community" explains why
the question of institutional power has always been taboo. Braudel, however,
occasionally referred to this problem. Interdisciplinarity encounters difficulties,
according to Braudel, because of the conservative practices that receive "the
support of aged scholars and because of the institutions which open their
embracing arms to us when we ourselves cease to be dangerous revolutionaries
and become good bourgeois-for there is a terrible bourgeoisie of the intellect."59
By saying "us" (instead of "them," in accordance with the logic of denunciation,
which only apprehends the power.of others), Braudel suggested that he too was
ensnared in the web of power relations60 and thus opened the way for an
57 See M. Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell

Gordon, and P. Miller (Chicago, 1991).
58 At the beginning of the 1980s, Foucault thought that "the moment a book went beyond the
circle of those to whom it was really addressed, that is, those scholars who knew the problems
which it dealt and the theoretical traditions to which it referred, it no longer produced 'effects of
knowledge,' but 'effects of opinion' "; his attempts to found a series of books for specialists arose
from this idea; see Eribon (n. 6 above), p. 292.
59 Braudel, On History, p. 57.
60 Braudel was- almost sixty years old when he wrote these lines. He was editor of the Annales
and the leader of the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Twenty years later,
after a long "resistance," he entered the French Academy.
"objective" analysis of a problem which he presents as inherent in the functioning

of any institution. Although this analysis has not yet been undertaken, we can
hypothesize that the opposition between the "younger" and the "older" genera-
tions, between "revolutionaries" and the "bourgeois at heart," points to the
power/knowledge contradiction which, in the historical profession, takes the form
of an opposition between "synthesis" and "thesis.",61
In order to understand the meaning of this opposition, we must remember that
within the university, as it emerged in the late nineteenth century, those who hoped
to acquire the official title of "historian" were dependent on those who controlled
the labor market. They were required to prove themselves through the writing of
a thesis, the preparation of which, until the recent reform of the "these d'etat," could
last for more than ten years. A solitary, thankless, and financially burdensome task,
the thesis is usually a monograph that demonstrates the candidate's perfect com-
mand of historical methods and complete knowledge of the archival sources.
Because the doctorate is a prerequisite for professional recognition and admission
to the world of "synthesis," these hardships are accepted. But once the doctorate
is acquired, being a historian no longer involves "going to the archives" so much
as exercising power (participation on thesis committees, recruitment committees,
etc.) and acquiring a reputation (by publishing works less specialized than a thesis,
on subjects which interest a larger audience and which, consequently, are more
readily published by major presses). Because of the competition for academic posts,
potential candidates must submit to the norms of the discipline as well as dem-
onstrate their originality in relation to the competition. Hence, young scholars tend
to emphasize the "scientific" criteria of historical work (valorizing the number of
publications, specialized works, original research, and so on). Newcomers are
judged according to principles that the judges themselves no longer respect since
these rules do not apply to their work of synthesis. This tension is one of the forces
that drive generational conflict; recognizing that fact allows for a sociological
understanding of the rise of new historical paradigms. Because of their position
within the discipline, young scholars are more receptive to innovations from other
fields of knowledge, above all when these techniques claim to be "scientific."
Nevertheless, success requires that these innovations be adapted to professional
norms, primarily by the work of translation.62 The history of the journal Annales
offers an example of the importance of this process.63
In 1929 Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the founders of the Annales, although
neither young nor marginal (they taught at the highly respected University of
Strasbourg), nevertheless remained distanced from the most prestigious positions
61 This is one of the reasons for the lengthy battle against the thesis on the part of the historians
of the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique.
62 The concept of translation is here employed in the sense Thomas S. Kuhn gives it when he
compares various professional communities to differing linguistic groups which may intercom-
municate only if there is a certain number of researchers who accept the task of translating one
group's innovations into another's language; see T. Kuhn, The Structures of Scientific Revolutions,
2d ed. (Chicago, 1970).
63 This explains why the periods when the center of gravity of the discipline shifts towa
"scientific history" are those of rejuvenation of the profession and high recruitment (end of the
nineteenth century, the 1950s and 1960s).
562 Noiriel
in Paris, the center of academic power. This situation explains, in part, their
intellectual motivation, an attribute that was missing among those who, like
Seignobos, had already accumulated status and power. Provincial life, moreover,
allowed them the time necessary for research-time that was lacking for Parisian
academics encumbered with administrative tasks and the social life of the capital.
Francois Simiand, a former philosophy student of Durkheim who had converted
over to economics, was the inspiration for the economic and social history that
Bloch and Febvre opposed to the political history of their elders. As a participant
in the first great debate between philosophy and history at the turn of the century,
Simiand had developed a radical critique of the "traditional" history of the
Sorbonne. In requesting Simiand's collaboration, Bloch and Febvre wanted to give
the impression that the Annales continued the tradition of the Durkheimian
challenge to "empiricist" history. Lucien Febvre asked Simiand for permission to
publish extracts from a nearly finished book on salaries,64 intending to place
Simiand's research within the framework of a larger study of the economic history
of France. From the outset, however, Febvre presented an interpretation of
Simiand's work adapted to the needs of the historical community-so much so
that Simiand considered this interpretation to be "perfectly contrary" to his own
analyses. Simiand thus refused Febvre's offer.65
This process of translation, the aim of which was to familiarize historians with
a work whose abstract character was completely foreign to them and which
required a lengthy series of mediations, was to last twenty years. The first decisive
intermediary was Ernest Labrousse, an economist and student of Simiand who
"converted" to historical research. In two classic works,66 Labrousse introduced
the fundamental principles that would increasingly become the paradigm for
economic and social history. Labrousse retained Simiand's methodology (quanti-
tative techniques), long-term analysis, and his articulation of two economic cycles
(prosperity and recession), but he adapted them to the exigencies of history by
using a less abstract language, emphasizing true archival research, and, above all,
refusing to obscure the role of "man" (historians' main criticism of Simiand). In
practice this meant that price and salary cycles were correlated with social and
political transformations. In spite of these efforts, Labrousse would be recognized
by the profession thanks only to the tireless efforts of a historian's historian,
Georges Lefebvre, a friend of Lucien Febvre and an early contributor to the
Annales. His reviews of Labrousse's books and the discussions he led at the
Societe d'Histoire Modeme completed, after the Second World War, the process
of assimilation begun fifteen years earlier. With the establishment of a chair of
economic and social history at the Sorbonne and of the Sixth Section of the Ecole
Pratique, entitled the "Section Economique et Sociale," the institutional condi-
64 F. Simiand, Le salaire, 1'evolution sociale et la monnaie (Paris, 1932).

65 See "Une correspondance entre Lucien Febvre et Francois Simiand a I'aube des 'Annales,'"
Vingtieme siecle, revue d'histoire 24 (1989): 109- 10.
66 C. E. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siecle,
2 vols. (Geneva, 1933), and La crise de l'economie francaise a la fin de l'ancien regime et au
debut de la Revolution (Paris, 1944).
tions necessary for the success of the enterprise were assembled. Nevertheless,
success only became definitive with the recruitment, in the 1950s and 1960s, of a
new generation of historians who found that the new paradigm met their need for
innovation without transgressing the norms of the profession. On the basis of a
vague Marxist ideology (which gave these young recruits, who were still
outsiders, Left-leaning arguments to criticize those who held power at the top of
the profession), a matrix constructed from the triad economy/society/politics was
put into place.67 This offered both a convenient "plan" for the many dissertations
produced by this movement (mostly regional monographs) and a framework for a
total history (the history of France) which remained the highest stake in the
competition between the various "historical schools." The former paradigm was
thus challenged in every aspect: the principal explanatory factor is not politics but
economics; history is not made by great men but by classes, hence the substitution
of "quantitative" methods, such as statistical analysis, for the traditional "quali-
tative" method.68 The economic and social paradigm (social history) simulta-
neously satisfied two central requirements of historical work: the exhaustive
examination of archives, thanks to a perspective that left nothing untouched, and
the organization of a collective research project which, in the 1950s and 1960s,
allowed Labrousse to launch large-scale surveys of European social classes.
Journals such as the Annales and the Mouvement social, colloquia, and research
organizations popularized this work and established networks between the
members of the new community. In addition, as the sole chair of economic and
social history in France from 1945 to 1967, Labrousse controlled a position that
enabled him to train several generations of historians, including almost all of the
leading proponents of the "new social history" of the 1970s.
Do these reflections, based on the French case, have a more general application?
This question can be adequately addressed only through a systematic comparison
of universities in a number of countries. I will limit myself to a few observations
in order to show that the problems raised here are not peculiar to France. The
institutionalization of the disciplines has certainly contributed to the maintenance
of so-called national traditions throughout the academic world. Durkheim, for
example, vigorously fought the philosophical pragmatism of William James in
defense of "French culture."69 Pragmatism, in acquiring its dominant status in th
United States, greatly contributed to the establishment of calmer relations between
disciplines because contrary to the French case, where philosophy was long
dominated by the influence of positivism, in the U.S. pragmatism never concerned
itself with the definition of hierarchy of the sciences. In Germany, a reading of
Kant significantly different from that in France led philosophers from Max Weber
67 This structural framework allowed for the development of a number of variations: in

Braudel's work geography takes the place of economics, while for other authors mentalities or
civilization is substituted for politics.
68 This process is described in J. Y. Grenier and B. Lepetit, "L'experience historique: A propos
de C. E. Labrousse," Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations 44 (1989): 1337-60. For
Simiand's and Labrousse's role in the new economic history, see also E. Le Roy Ladurie, The
Mind and Method of the Historian (1973; English trans., Chicago, 1981).
69 E. Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology (1955; English trans., Cambridge, 1983).
564 Noiriel
to Cassirer, by way of Husserl and Dilthey, to reject "naturalist monism" and the
hierarchy of the sciences in favor of the specificity of the "human sciences." In
the United States and Germany, the decentralization of academic power and the
professional autonomy of history (which is much greater in those countries than
in France) have favored a "peaceful coexistence" between disciplines and the
establishment of professional networks very different from those in France. Nev-
ertheless, the similarity of the problems being debated by historians of different
countries-the examination of the identity of history, its fragmentation, its relations
with other fields and with the public at large-is striking. These convergences
certainly reflect the effect of the intemationalization of research over the past twent
years,70 but they are primarily due to the fact that historians everywhere are
confronting the same contradictions. Relying on the American example, Carl
Schorske has shown that the current splintering of historical research is due to its
empiricist foundations, which require it to borrow its concepts from other social
sciences. The paradox of history, then, is that it has a precise identity only if it
privileges an outside discipline as partner, thus condemning itself to an ever greater
degree of diversification as the social sciences themselves develop.7' Nonetheless,
it is necessary to specify that behind this growing diversification of historical
research are hidden two very different conceptions of interdisciplinarity. The first
emphasizes the renewal of research methods and themes without contesting the
empiricist foundations of history. The best example of this is the social history
developed after the Second World War by Edward P. Thompson and Eric J.
Hobsbawm, which achieved immense success throughout the world.72 The second
conception of interdisciplinarity rejects empiricism and extols a history that is truly
theoretical. From the 1970s onward, this tendency is encountered in many coun-
tries, notably in Great Britain, where Gareth Stedman Jones, one of the "founding
fathers" of the "History Workshop," militates for history to free itself from the
supervision of the social sciences by producing, thanks to Marxism, its own
theoretical instruments.73 In Germany, the historians of the "Bielefeld school"
(H. U. Wehler, J. Kocka, and others) rely on Marx and Max Weber in opposing
"social-scientific history" (historische Sozialwissenschaft) to traditional history.74
The same theoretical exigencies have also appeared in the United States with the
70 Undoubtedly because one always desires what one does not possess, French philosophy
very much in style today in the United States, while on the banks of the Seine Anglo-Saxon
pragmatism is highly valued.
7 1C. Schorske, "History and the Study of Culture," New Literary History 21 (1990): 407 - 20.
72 See the fundamental book by E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class,
(London, 1964); and E. J. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," Daedalus
100 (1971): 20-45.
73 G. S. Jones, "The Poverty of Empiricism," in Ideology in Social Sciences: Readings in
Critical Social Theory, ed. R. Blackburn (London, 1972), pp. 96-115; and Languages of Class:
Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983).
74 See H. U. Wehler, "Geschichtswissenschaft heute," in Stichworte zur "Geistigen Situation
der Zeit," ed. J. Habermas (Frankfurt, 1979), 2:709-53; J. Kocka, Sozialgeschichte: Begriff,
Entwicklung, Probleme (Gottingen, 1986).
emergence of "new social history."75 The impact of this contestation of classical

historical discourse will be much larger in these countries, where the power of the
university is less centralized than in France. This explains why for about fifteen
years now theoretical questions have become, for the first time in the history of the
discipline, genuine internal stakes: an important element in the competition among
researchers for jobs and academic prestige. Contrary to what Stedman Jones hoped
for, however, this evolution certainly did not suppress the dependency of historians
on social sciences and philosophy. In fact, that dependency continued to grow since
in the new currents of historical research criticism is no longer based principally
on archival questions or on fields of research (economic and social history vs.
political history) but on the legitimacy of the theories used. More and more today,
in order to be admired by his colleagues, the new interdisciplinary historian must
appeal to a new theoretical model. Thus, there is an increasingly rapid circulation
(and "consumption") of these models which prevents them from being truly
assimilated by the community of historians, and one is obliged to draw from the
stock of concepts fabricated by disciplines for which it is the natural vocation
(notably philosophy). The British provide a significant example of this evolution.
After having himself rejected the Marxist model in favor of a theory of language,
Stedman Jones is today considered outdated by more radical authors who rely on
Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction.76 Likewise, in Germany, social
scientific history is now being challenged by the partisans of Alltagsgeschichte, who
mobilize the anthropology of Clifford Geertz in a bitter epistemological debate. In
the name of an alternative global conception of history, which explicitly seeks a
"histoire totale de 1'homme, " Hans Medick argues that only anthropological history
is able to respond to the questions asked of social history, whether it "likes it or
not" ("ob sie will oder nicht").77 The current adoption of Foucauldian philosophy
by American historians illustrates the same logic as they repudiate the theories that
inspired social history to promote new models stemming from the "linguistic turn."
Here one discovers "misunderstandings" similar to those we discussed in the
French case. In her introduction to the seminal volume she edited on the new
Cultural History, Lynn Hunt clearly analyzes how cultural history has drawn on the
Foucauldian concept of "discursive practice" in order to free itself from the long
tutelage of social history and to establish itself as a fully developed and now
autonomous field of research.78 However, her analyses still revolve around em-
piricist concerns that Foucault had repudiated. This is apparent in passages such
75 See, e.g., D. Landes and C. Tilly, eds., History as Social Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1971). This evolution is encountered in many other countries, notably in Italy; see, e.g., L.
Masella, Passato e presente nel dibattito storiografico: Storici marxisti e mutamenti della societa
italiana (1955-1970) (Bari, 1979).
76 On this question, see G. Eley, "De l'histoire sociale au 'tournant linguistique' dans
l'historiographie anglo-americaine des annees 1980," Geneses 7 (1992): 163-93.
77 See H. Medick, "Missionare im Ruderboot? Ethnologische Erkenntnisweisen als Heraus-
forderung and die Sozialgeschichte," in Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer
Erfahrungen und Lebenweisen, ed. A. Ludtke (Frankfurt, 1989), pp. 48-136.
78 L. Hunt, "Introduction: History, Culture, and Text," in The New Cultural History, ed. L.
Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 1-22.
566 Noiriel
as this one: "Where will we be when every practice, be it economic, intellectual,

social, or political, has been shown to be culturally conditioned? To put it another
way, can a history of culture work if it is shorn of all theoretical assumptions about
culture's relationship to the social world-if, indeed, its agenda is conceived as the
undermining of all assumptions about the relationship between culture and the
social world?"79 These considerations implicitly refer to a historical totality, a
"past" that exists independently of an intellectual construction of the object and
is the same for everyone. The historian's task, in this instance, is to unveil those
aspects of the past considered most important. For Foucault, on the contrary, just
as the concept of sugar is not itself sweet, history as an intellectual discipline must
not be confused with history as the past. According to Foucault, it is not the social
or cultural realities of the "past" that define social or cultural history. Rather,
historians develop their own conceptualization of the past, constructing the "so-
cial" and the "cultural" as objects of history. But because these paradigms do not
refer to the same "past," they are in fact "incommensurable." That is why Foucault
did not deny the possibility of explaining discursive practices by social determi-
nations. This question, he said, was not one that he wanted to study, but it was a
problem "connected" to his own.80 He simply wanted historians to recognize that
the object of research that he had defined, the analysis of discursive practices, was
as "real" as the "social" that historians constantly criticized him for ignoring and
that its elucidation required its own hypotheses, concepts, and method and not the
application of the putatively universal, master-key concepts of social history.8'
Misunderstanding of this position has further fueled the polemics among historians
because proponents of the "linguistic turn" have often used the concept of dis-
cursive practice to discredit and challenge the very legitimacy of social history,
when what is at issue is more a question of its primacy.
These examples show that the major problem currently confronting interdisci-
plinary history is not the "fragmentation" of research (since every scientific
domain in development necessarily fragments itself) but the fact that the
researchers at the center of a single professional community no longer speak the
same language.82 By taking up external theoretical models on their own account,
historians have imported into the heart of their discipline forms of thought that
characterize "revolutionary" epistemology (a rejection of relativism and a claim
to totalizing explanations). Yet the increasing dependency of history on external
79 Ibid., p. 10. My point here is not to attack empiricism, which is inherent in a historical
approach, but to show that it is at work even in the thinking of those historians who denounce
positivism.
80 In Perrot (n. 4 above), pp. 29-39.
81 P. O'Brien, all the while relying on Foucault's work, criticizes him "for having left human
actors out of his history of power" ("Michel Foucault's History of Culture," in Hunt, ed.,
pp. 45-46). This criticism is correct, however, as Gilles Deleuze has emphasized, only if one
departs from the Foucauldian problematic, limited to an analysis of discourse, and places oneself
at the level of social relations; see G. Deleuze, "On the Death of Man and Superman," in
Foucault (n. 20 above), pp. 124-32.
82 On the two types of "conversation" which divide philosophers and historians, see A. M
"Fragmentation and the Future of Historiography," AHR forum, American Historical Review 96
(1991): 695.
theories and the fact that these theories are often poorly understood by the
historians who claim them shows that, in all the countries we have examined here,
the "normal science" of history has remained firmly attached to its empiricist
foundations. The French example suggests that the principal cause of this
steadfastness is not to be found in discursive strategies but in the central position
occupied by history at the heart of the institution of the university and, more
widely, at the heart of the social world.83
V. RETHINKING INTERDISCIPLINARITY
What lessons can be drawn from this analysis concerning interdisciplinarity? If,
following Michel Foucault, one defines each discipline as a particular form of the
knowledge/power relation, every strategy of scientific innovation must necessarily
take into account both knowledge and power, in order to transform both the forms
of knowledge and the relations of power that prevailed in the discipline. In other
words, in order to understand each other, researchers who are engaged in the same
relations of power must speak the same language. Under these conditions, though,
how can the exigencies of communication between researchers and the necessities
of opening up to other disciplines be reconciled? In my opinion, there are only two
solutions to this problem.
The first resides in what the sociologists of science term "hybridization."
Segments of two or more disciplines join together to form a new field of
knowledge which progressively obtains its own institutional autonomy, ranging
from the control of pedagogy to the recruitment of researchers.84 During the
debate on the history of the prison, Foucault himself had envisaged a solution of
this sort, proposing to philosophers and historians a "historico-philosophical"
study of the Enlightenment, which would, he said, test the solidity of their
relations. To be viable such a project would have required the establishment of a
new field of knowledge-the institutionalization of either a "historical philoso-
phy" or a "philosophical history" practiced by philosophers with a knowledge of
historical methods or by historians with training in philosophy. Hybridization,
however, depends on the relative proximity of the disciplines in question, which
hardly favors an encounter between history and philosophy, whose languages are
to this day difficult to reconcile.
The other solution has been practiced for quite some time now by historians, but
it has never been studied in detail. It concerns the process of "translation"
mentioned earlier with regard to the "economic and social history" of the Annales,
by which the historian adapts innovations from other disciplines to the necessities
and preoccupations of his own. That is, in order for the community of historians
83 According to the national traditions, the factors that contribute to this centrist position of
course can vary extensively. It seems, e.g., that in the United States it is the professional
associations especially and not the state, as in France, that structure and reproduce the forms of
knowledge and the relations of power.
84 M. Dogan and R. Pahre, Creative Marginality: Innovation at the Intersections of Social
Sciences (Boulder, Colo., 1990).
568 Noiriel
to "seize" Foucault's work, as Paul Veyne wished, it would have been necessary
for his partisans not only to read and cite him but also to translate him into the
language of historians. Undoubtedly, though, the passage of time was needed in
order to arrive at this point.85
85 I have tried to show how historians might benefit from the Foucauldian concept of the "state
appropriation of relations of power" in my latest book; see G. Noiriel, La tyrannie du national,
le droit d'asile en Europe (1793-1993) (Paris, 1991).

Foucault and History

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Foucault and History

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Foucault and History: The Lessons of a Disillusion

Author(s): Gérard Noiriel

Foucault and History: The Lessons of a Disillusion*

The current interest in Foucault's work in American historical research' is remi

I. THE IMPOSSIBLE PRISON AND THE IMPOSSIBLE DIALOGUE

[Journal of Modern History 66 (September 1994): 547-568]

understanding of the classical period."'0 Foucault was likewise generous in his

'7 See R. Castel, "Les aventures de la pratique," Le debat 41 (1986): 42-43.

By underscoring the "interdisciplinary" qualities of Foucault's first major

same argument to distinguish between "good" and "bad" historians, opposing

II. THE FORCE OF DISCIPLINARY TRADITIONS

"spontaneous" cooperation, relying mainly on the goodwill of those involved. Yet

III. THE PERSISTANCE OF EMPIRICISM AMONG ANNALES HISTORIANS

equivalences: above all, Braudel's distrust vis-'a-vis "theories" put forth by

IV. RELATIONS OF POWER AND THE REPRODUCTION OF PROFESSIONAL NORMS

The permanence of the positions occupied by French history and philosophy

5 Bloch (n. 26 above), p. 12.

problem of power within the institution. Foucault's work, however, provides

57 See M. Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell

"objective" analysis of a problem which he presents as inherent in the functioning

64 F. Simiand, Le salaire, 1'evolution sociale et la monnaie (Paris, 1932).

67 This structural framework allowed for the development of a number of variations: in

emergence of "new social history."75 The impact of this contestation of classical

as this one: "Where will we be when every practice, be it economic, intellectual,

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