This article examines the methodological significance of Foucault’s relationship to transcendental philosophy. While Foucault presents his work as a historicist transformation of Kant’s critical project, some commentators question whether he succeeds in eradicating the transcendental dimension of critique. In this way, they raise doubts over whether he can sustain his methodological commitment to radical historicism. In response, I argue that Foucault can reflexively account for his use of transcendental motifs while remaining faithful to his historicist methodology. More specifically, I show (...) how the concept of sedimentation can give coherence to the supposedly paradoxical notion of the historical a priori. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Foucault’s ostensibly transcendental assumptions about power and subjectivity are best understood as contingent features of his analytical framework rather than earnest metaphysical claims. (shrink)

According to the received view, Marxian (ideology) critique and Foucaultian (genealogical) critique constitute two divergent approaches of critical theory that have remarkably different goals and little in common. In this article, however, we identify a guiding thread that connects the Marxian and Foucaultian traditions and motivates a distinctive approach within critical theory we call the ‘critique of constitution’. The problem of restricted consciousness, we show, is the core problem in common between Michel Foucault's critical history of thought and Georg Lukács's (...) theory of reification which underlies the tradition of Western Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory. The problem concerns the limits of intelligibility and, by the same token, the apparent inevitability of the given social ontology. Our sense of what is possible depends on what we are able to think. But we know from the history of sciences that the limits of intelligibility change, thereby also altering our sense of what is possible. This becomes a political problem in connection with the intelligibility of social reality, because our restricted consciousness limits the alternatives we can so much as consider and seek to bring about. The critique of constitution, then, aims to expand the scope of possibility by revealing the contingent formation of the given limits of intelligibility. We argue that this is the paramount political task for Foucault and Lukács alike, other important differences notwithstanding. (shrink)

The normative status of Michel Foucault’s critical method of genealogy has been the topic of much debate in secondary scholarship. Against the criticisms forwarded by Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Haberm...

This paper discusses the explanatory power of discourse analysis, an approach to typically considered one of the main qualitative methods for data analysis. Although discourse analysis is typically not used to develop explanatory models, some have claimed that discourse models can causally explain social phenomena, such as institutional change. I analyze a case of institutional change to discuss and provide arguments for two claims. First, discourse analysis cannot generate causal explanations of social phenomena. Secondly, discourse analysis can generate non-causal explanations, (...) specifically constitutive explanations of social phenomena. I conclude the paper by discussing possible implications for social research. (shrink)

This article offers a novel reconstruction of Foucault’s methodology that emphasises his respect for the natural sciences. Foucault’s work has long been suspected of reducing knowledge to power, and thus collapsing into unconstrained relativism and methodological incoherence. These concerns are predicated on a misunderstanding of Foucault’s overall approach, which takes the form of a historico-critical project rather than a normative epistemology. However, Foucault does sometimes make normative epistemological judgements, especially about the human sciences. Furthermore, there are outstanding questions about what (...) secures the descriptive rigour of the genealogical method. To address these issues, I develop two claims that will significantly enrich our understanding of Foucault’s methodology. The first is that Foucault’s respect for the natural sciences is crucial in making sense of his normative epistemological judgements. The second is that the descriptive rigour of his genealogical method derives from the fact it is modelled on empirical inquiry. (shrink)