Michel Foucault and Claude Lefort: Toward a Post-classical Philosophy of History

Abstract

French philosophers Michel Foucault (1926‒1984) and Claude Lefort (1924‒2010) are often
called as “historians of present”. They treat the history as the history of ideas, the history of thinking. They consider the present as a realization of the history of thinking in a functioning of social
institutions and practices. They are rarely considered by the scholars as philosophers of the history, because their early “historiosophical” projects (the “archeology” of Foucault and the “phenomenological Marxism” of Lefort) are unachieved and eclipsed by their later work, especially their studies of the power. In our paper we try to show these projects have their proper value for the history
of philosophy and create a special context for comparative studies of the both thinkers. The author
elucidates a meaning of some basic concepts of the “early” Foucault’s and Lefort’s philosophies in
the light of a possible post-classical philosophy of history.