The New Histories in France

Abstract

Few commentators have failed to notice the fact that Annales historiography and the historical epistemology of Bachelard and Canguilhem figure centrally in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Indeed, this fact is somewhat hard to overlook since the book mentions both schools repeatedly. What I regard as the main shortcoming of existing commentaries is rather that they focus on one of the two schools at the expense of the other, and that they do not pay sufficient attention to parallels in the concerns, theories and problems of the two. To set the record straight seems to be of some interest, not only as far as Foucault is concerned. Now that historians and philosophers of science have begun to study science from a more anthropological-cultural perspective, the work of Annales historians and of the epistemological school has to loom large; after all, in these fields of scholarship these allegedly new topics have been among the central preoccupations for the last fifty years.