The purpose of this research is to examine the social science methodology of Foucault. The plan of the research will be to set forth the general constituents of his method, and then to discuss its details and praxis, including his use of the terms archeology and genealogy, the results of his conception of the relationship between these terms and social structure, and an indication of how one can evaluate their efficacy.
The methodology Foucault uses to analyze social structure can be characterized as oppositional. In the term the philosophy of difference is enclosed the general approach to challenging the traditional understanding of social history and the realities of social structure that the notion of difference implies. Two related concepts that are associated with Foucault's approach to social structure are archeology and genealogy.
Foucault's understanding of archeology is an understanding of the overall structure of knowledge, which includes a shared "knowledge" about society, or the social structure itself. Yet Foucault is specifically not structuralist as the term is commonly understood in social science (Foucault, 1977). Rather, Foucault's archeology is specifically and programmatically a critique of prevailing structure, or a means of observing and describing the ways in which information or knowledge or aspects of structure may be processed, formalized, and perhaps eventuate in what may be described as a science. His long-range purpose appears to be to reshape perceptions (knowledge) of the archeology of prevailing structure, and he uses the means of attack and opposition to achieve it, chiefly with reference to what one interviewer termed "an ever more disciplinary form of society."
I have attempted to analyze how, at the initial stages or industrial societies, a particular punitive apparatus was set up together with a system for separating the normal and the abnormal. To follow this up, it will be nec...