Abstract

The philosophical historiography of postwar Europe has, for the most part, abandoned the "idea" as a standard, independent unit of measure. By the late 1940s, Heidegger had already promoted the view that history was a series of epochs governed not by human ingenuity and accomplishment but by something much more like fate or destiny. In the 1950s, Merleau-Ponty enjoined his readers to see it as the embodiment of general material structures to which scientific, philosophical, and literary works invariably respond. The 1960s and 1970s brought the works of Foucault, recasting history as a dynamic network of power relations the play of which was most evident in the genesis and development of shared institutions. More recently, leading poststructuralists have treated it as a troublesome side effect of Western metaphysics—an effluvium of the logocentric text.