“Psychoanalysis and Ethnology” Revisited: Foucault's Historicization of History

This article re‐examines the closing sections of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things in order to address the longstanding question of whether he is best understood as a philosopher or a historian. My central argument is that this question misses the crucial point of Foucault's work, which is to historicize the notion of history (as it is traditionally understood, represented by History with a capital H), which Foucault takes to be central to...