Editing Philosophy of history (section)

=== Michel Foucault ===
{{Unreferenced section|date=November 2019}}

The historico-political [[discourse]] analyzed by [[Michel Foucault]] in ''Society Must Be Defended'' (1975–76) considers [[truth]] as the fragile product of a historical struggle, first conceptualized as [[race struggle]]—understood not in the modern sense of [[biological race]] but closer to that of a [[people]] or [[nation]]. [[Henri de Boulainvilliers|Boulainvilliers]], for example, was an exponent of nobility rights. He claimed that the French nobility were the racial descendants of the Franks who invaded France (while the Third Estate was descended from the conquered Gauls), and had right to power by virtue of [[right of conquest]]. He used this approach to formulate a historical thesis of the course of French political history—a critique of both the monarchy and the Third Estate. Foucault regards him as the founder of the historico-political discourse as political weapon.

In Great Britain, this historico-political discourse was used by the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a means of struggle against the monarchy—cf. [[Edward Coke]] or [[John Lilburne]]. In France, [[Henri de Boulainvilliers|Boulainvilliers]], [[Nicolas Fréret]], and then [[Sieyès]], [[Augustin Thierry]], and [[Antoine Augustin Cournot|Cournot]] reappropriated this form of discourse. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, this discourse was incorporated by [[scientific racism|racialist biologists]] and [[eugenicists]], who gave it the modern sense of race and, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a [[state racism]] in [[Nazism]]. Foucault also presents that [[Marxist]]s too seized this discourse and took it in a different direction, transforming the [[essentialist]] notion of race into the historical notion of [[class struggle]], defined by socially structured position. This displacement of discourse constitutes one of the bases of Foucault's thought—that discourse is not tied to the [[subject (philosophy)|subject]], rather the subject is a construction of discourse. Moreover, discourse is not the simple [[ideological]] and mirror reflexion of an economic [[infrastructure]], but is a product and the battlefield of multiples forces—which may not be reduced to the simple dualist [[contradiction]] of two energies.

Foucault shows that what specifies this discourse from the juridical and philosophical discourse is its conception of truth—that truth is no longer absolute, it is the product of race struggle. History itself, which was traditionally the sovereign's science, the [[legend]] of his glorious feats and monument building, ultimately became the discourse of the people, thus a political stake. The subject is not any more a neutral [[arbitrator]], judge, or [[legislator]], as in [[Solon]]'s or Kant's conceptions. Therefore, what became the historical subject must search in history's furor, under the "juridical code's dried blood", the multiple [[Contingency (philosophy)|contingencies]] from which a fragile [[rationality]] temporarily finally emerged. This may be, perhaps, compared to the [[sophist]] discourse in Ancient Greece. Foucault warns that it has nothing to do with [[Machiavelli]]'s or [[Hobbes]]'s discourse on war, for to this popular discourse, the sovereign is nothing more than "an illusion, an instrument, or, at the best, an enemy. It is a discourse that beheads the king, anyway that dispenses itself from the sovereign and that denounces it".