Why I Find Foucault Useless
People periodically try to convince me that I should pay attention to the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, because it will enrich archaeological interpretations of the past. Maybe. But here is why I remain dubious, after reading various books and articles by and about Foucault. Highly abstract theories and concepts—such as Foucault’s governmentality, power and discipline (things archaeologists have mentioned)—describe the operation of the world on a very general level. This kind of approach, termed “grand theory” by C. Wright Mills, is “so general that its practitioners cannot logically get down to observation. They never, as grand theorists, get down from the higher generalities to problems in their historical and structural contexts” (Mills 1959:33) . This is pretty basic stuff in social science epistemology: grand theory is so abstract that it cannot explain individual cases or variation among cases (Abbott 2004:218; Ellen 2010; Mjøset 2001; Smith 2011) . My post. "...