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Hey, text, what kind of thing are you?

That is, based entirely on the text (which includes the title, table of contents, index, etc., but not material written by someone other than the author), what kind of work is this?

The answer of course may be complex -- Lucretius wrote philosophy in poetic form, Plato wrote philosophy in dialogs that included important narrative elements.

More details on shared inquiry are here.

But the basic idea is that within this thread we have to base our claims and arguments on the text itself exclusively.

I read through Part One and Part Two. I dipped here and there into Part Five (the work's concluding section) and I read through the index.

It seems to me the book is an essay. The title says it is a history of something; but the text consists of high-level observations and claims by the author, with only a very few references (footnotes) and no bibliography. I saw no statistics of any kind. That is, what we have here is an author speaking at length in his own voice with very little interaction with or direct reference to the wider academic or intellectual community.

By saying it's an essay I'm saying that it is not a "treatise" or a "history" in the normal academic sense. It does not attempt to be comprehensive either in time or space -- it covers the 16th century to the present (with a few references to earlier history) and so far as I can tell limits itself exclusively to Western Europe (though the USA may also fall within its scope). Another thing it's not is a "polemic." Nietzsche described his Genealogy of Morality as a polemic, and this text is not like that.

Another thing that it's not is philosophy. It makes claims about what happened in a particular region during a particular time period. If there is "philosophy" here it will be implicit in the modes of reasoning, the kinds of supports offered, etc. The book's claims may be high level and abstract but they are not universal; I deem philosophy to make universal claims.

Well, what kind of an essay is it? The author has a paragraph that starts with "One can raise three serious doubts concerning what I shall call the 'repressive hypothesis.'" (It's on p 10 in the scanned book in my PDF.) He says the first of the doubts is historical, the second is a "historico-theoretical," and the third is "historico-political." I would classify the "historico-theoretical" doubt as being in the realm of sociology and political science. That is, at least the parts of the book about these three doubts will be high-level, conceptual discussions of social science and political material about some past times.

In what I saw the author was claiming to state what is, not what should be. That is, he was making claims about what is true or false and not (for instance) calling for social or political change.

Hence I conclude for now that the work is an essay concerning some recent history of Western Europe, approached at a very abstract level, laying out the author's analysis of some social and intellectual topics.

Historico-political made me think of the study of law. What do you think?

Thank you for joining the discussion.

Well, in this thread what we say is to be directly based on the text. See the first note in this thread and the separate folder on "shared inquiry." There is a separate topic here for discussion that isn't limited this way. For convenience there are links to the work in English and in French in the resources topic.

So in this text-based thread what one would do would be to note that I said the author used the term "historico-political" to label his third doubt, on p. 10 of my copy of the book. To find out what the author meant by "historico-political" the first step is to read what the author said. So we go there and read:

"A third and final doubt: Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it 'repression'? Was there really a historical rupture between the age of repression and the critical analysis of repression? This is a historico-political question."

By looking at what the author actually said we can say there is no evidence at all that the study of law is what he was talking about.