Foucault among the Sociologists: The "Disciplines" and the History of the Professions

In trying to assess the usefulness of Michel Foucault's work for the writing of conventional history-and, in this case, for the writing of the history of psychiatry-I have not ignored his early Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, both indisputably relevant to the subject at hand; but I have focused more attention on his later Discipline and Punish. What interests me is the concept of the disciplines which Foucault develops in that book, how it compares with the sociological concept of the professions, and what an historian of psychiatry (or of medicine, or of any of a number of other professions) stands to gain by keeping the Foucauldian model in mind. The Foucauldian model strikes me as brilliant, perhaps too neatly and cleverly brilliant to be entirely credible. Nonetheless, for the heuristic purposes of this paper, I have deliberately adopted only a positive attitude towards it, seeking to understand it in its own terms and to specify what, on the level of theory, it offers which the sociological model does not provide. Accordingly, the paper is divided into three parts. The first part tries to say something about the kind of concept the disciplines is, within the canon of Foucault's epistemology and within his unconventional historiography. The second part compares and contrasts disciplines and professions; and finally, the third part attempts to vindicate the Foucauldian concept of the disciplines by showing how it can illuminate the reading of a group of late eighteenthand early nineteenthcentury French documents concerning the treatment of the insane.