Foucault’s Critique of the Human Sciences in the 1950s: Between Psychology and Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 026327642095082
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Basso

This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the manuscripts department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on the documents of the 1950s, in order to study the role of the reflection on anthropology and phenomenology at the beginning of Foucault’s philosophical path. This archival material allows us to discover the tremendous work that is at the basis of the relatively few works that Foucault published in the 1950s. The access to the 1950s documents enables us at last to investigate the reasons for the seemingly sharp break that divides these works from the works published by Foucault in the 1960s and the 1970s, in which emerges the archaeological refusal of phenomenology and anthropology, as well as the strong criticism against any form of psychopathological discourse.

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN WELSHMAN

Recent writing in social policy on the role of agency has made important assumptions about social administration in the post-war period. In particular it is suggested that interpretations of the causes of poverty, and the thinking of Richard Titmuss, were characterised by a ‘denial’ of agency and almost total emphasis on structural factors. The implications were that this left the Titmuss paradigm vulnerable to more individualistic interpretations in the 1980s. In this article we look more closely at Titmuss's work and thought in the three decades of the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, aiming to produce a fuller and more nuanced analysis. We argue that the distinctive position adopted by Titmuss was in large part his response to earlier and on-going debates about social pathology. What he was trying to do was to make others aware of the broader context in which behaviour had to be analysed. But Titmuss himself became constrained by the paradigm that he did more than anyone else to create. Thus debates about behaviour, structure, and poverty have been marked as much by continuity as by change.


INvoke ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Romanik ◽  
Marina Bartlett

“Life is Worth Living” was a well-received Catholic show that aired in 1950s America and was hosted by the venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen. The popularity of the show can be easily tied back to Sheen’s on-screen charisma and dramatic delivery of American Christian concepts. The show aired Tuesday nights at eight opposite the popular Milton Berle show and Fulton Sheen even won an Emmy for the Most Outstanding Television Personality for his performance in 1952. However, the show is representative of a brief era of normalcy before the change of the 1960s. The unification of Catholic morals and cultural values presented by Sheen in the show helped renew public interest in Catholicism through appealing to a common national identity during an era of an expanding religious marketplace. So through examining “Life is Worth Living,” the social values of faith and the changing religious views can be illuminated upon.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1185-1209 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIRGINIA BERRIDGE

A key current concern is how scientific knowledge may inform policy in relation to major environmental and health concerns. There are distinct schools of analysis about this relationship between science and policy. They stress rational relationships; denial and delay; or the role of networks. History is important in modifying such perspectives: smoking policy in the 1950s and 1960s is the case study here. The initial response in the 1950s to the link between smoking and lung cancer was in part conditioned by the role of the tobacco industry and the financial importance of tobacco: the British tobacco industry had closer relationships with government than the American one, and did not rely on public relations. Public health interests worked with the industry. But politicians were concerned also about the fluidity of the epidemiological evidence; the dangers of stirring up further pressure over air pollution; the financial and ideological implications of health education and its location; and the electoral dangers of intervening in a popular mass habit. In the 1960s the British and American medical reports stimulated the growth of a public health ‘policy community’. The initial political considerations began to weaken and these years marked the beginning of a new style of public health.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021(42) (1) ◽  
pp. 37-50
Author(s):  
Mirosław Tyl ◽  

The objective of the article is to outline the debates on the concept of Christian philosophy that took place in the Polish Catholic press at the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s, cove- ring issues related to the role of philosophy in shaping and formation of believers, or to theoretical matters. Over the years, the discussions became more mature. The dispute over Christian philosophy was primarily a dispute with Thomism, which was accused of being closed and focused on its her- metic internal issues, as well as its integralism towards contemporary philosophy and science. The opportunity for the first debates was created by the meeting of philosophers organised by the Club of Catholic Intelligentsia (KIK) in Warsaw in 1960. The second round began with A. Siemianowski's text in Więź, published in 1963, and the third resulted from J. Tischner's philosophical publications in the second half of the 1960s. These discussions anticipated J. Tischner's dispute with existential Thomism, which took place in the 1970s.


Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.


Author(s):  
Hilary Radner ◽  
Alistair Fox

In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.


Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch

This chapter traces the changes in federal and state protective policies from the New Deal through the 1950s. In contrast to the setbacks of the 1920s, the New Deal revived the prospects of protective laws and of their proponents. The victory of the minimum wage for women workers in federal court in 1937 and the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which extended labor standards to men, represented a peak of protectionist achievement. This achievement rested firmly on the precedent of single-sex labor laws for which social feminists—led by the NCL—had long campaigned. However, “equal rights” gained momentum in the postwar years, 1945–60. By the start of the 1960s, single-sex protective laws had resumed their role as a focus of contention in the women's movement.


Author(s):  
Timur Gimadeev

The article deals with the history of celebrating the Liberation Day in Czechoslovakia organised by the state. Various aspects of the history of the holiday have been considered with the extensive use of audiovisual documents (materials from Czechoslovak newsreels and TV archives), which allowed for a detailed analysis of the propaganda representation of the holiday. As a result, it has been possible to identify the main stages of the historical evolution of the celebrations of Liberation Day, to discover the close interdependence between these stages and the country’s political development. The establishment of the holiday itself — its concept and the military parade as the main ritual — took place in the first post-war years, simultaneously with the consolidation of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Later, until the end of the 1960s, the celebrations gradually evolved along the political regime, acquiring new ritual forms (ceremonial meetings, and “guards of memory”). In 1968, at the same time as there was an attempt to rethink the entire socialist regime and the historical experience connected with it, an attempt was made to reconstruct Liberation Day. However, political “normalisation” led to the normalisation of the celebration itself, which played an important role in legitimising the Soviet presence in the country. At this stage, the role of ceremonial meetings and “guards of memory” increased, while inventions released in time for 9 May appeared and “May TV” was specially produced. The fall of the Communist regime in 1989 led to the fall of the concept of Liberation Day on 9 May, resulting in changes of the title, date and paradigm of the holiday, which became Victory Day and has been since celebrated on 8 May.


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