G'day Angela, 'Truth is, I allow myself dips in PEN-L's healing waters only when I've knackered meself on the wheel of telecommunications policy - so I sometimes write even worse crap than is my usual standard. What I meant (as opposed to what I might have said) was that historians have more options available to them than 'the patient construction of discourses about discourses', which was Foucault's rather limiting, depressing and ungenerous take on their craft. Just as Freud might have gone a little overboard in recounting his own brave battle against inert complacency (he was actually more generally feted than ostracised), so do I think Foucault goes out of his way to oppose his stuff to what other historians were doing - and this he does by making a monolithic strawman of an institution that had EP Thompsons, AJP Taylors and Hugh Trevor Ropers in it (that actually representing some considerable spectrum). His attack on reason in *History of Madness* is actually not sufficient if intended as a rebuttal of reason as such. All he does is attack the reason of the reasoners who reason others into asylums. He says elsewhere that Marxism resides within the same epistemic field ('episteme') as this lot. But Marx *historicises* reasoning - making the very point that a reasonable act is reasonable only in the context of the act's perpetration. And Marx is precisely interested in social contexts within which reason does not infringe human freedom. When I read EP Thompson (whom I love), I read one who goes to the artefacts and understands the reasoning of the mill owner as much as the artisan. Both make all the sense in the world, but the former's reasoning points the artisan at the gallows, and the latter's points the mill owner at bankruptcy. Taken together, their reasoning inhibits forces of production - the former embracing a nascent but doomed factory capitalism, and the latter just as doomed an attempt to reverse time's arrow. Thompson sees an answer to this: socialism. Foucault does not. In a grand extrapolation (as befits a French theorist du jour), he concludes *all* reason is ultimately folly. Foucault has *no* faith in history really. Not really. Caught in a sudden need to be consistent, he once called his whole corpus 'little fictions'. Foucault takes us nowhere, imho. This is what I thought had so got to Doug a couple of weeks ago, when he morosely told us he had little faith left in reason. I told him then what I still think is importantly true: 'Tis all we have ... although I do sympathise with his suspicion that not a few Marxists (elsewhere) seem to be trying to get by without it. Cheers, Rob. You'd written: >rob wrote: > >(we need not follow >>Foucault, who seemed to think history is nought but an accumulation >of >>documents written by victors with the future in mind - history has >left >>plenty that wasn't particularly meant to tell stories years or >centuries >>later > >well, i think foucault agrees. as would walter benjamin. i think >maybe you are confusing what foucault (and benjamin) see as official >history and the possibility of a history which breaks with such >'stories from the point of view of the victors'. > >angela > >