doing your best work usually. So I don't see this as outrageous as many other people do. Now the word "history" itself is avoided by Foucault, because he thinks that the word "history" within Western Civilisation is necessarily a kind of continuous narrative about progress. So Foucault prefers to the term "history" terms like "archaeologies" and "genealogies". You may notice that this is some of the influence of Nietzsche on Foucault. Nietzsche wrote a wonderful history of moral life as it had arisen in the West, but he didn't call it a history , he called it a genealogy. So what is the difference between genealogies and histories and at least these following conditions are ones I have been able to pick out in Foucault's work. One of the methods that's different in a genealogy and a history is what might be called a reversal of perspective. Now this is one he takes from some of the better historical work in the tradition of Marxism, and that's where, and I mean Marx is famous for this, but so are some people you should know about like E. P. Thompson who wrote The Making of the English Working Class and C. L. R. James , a wonderful Caribbean intellectual who wrote The Black Jacobins . This is reversal of perspective where you don't write history from the standpoint of Henry Kissinger but the standpoint of the masses of humans that do the masses of things that they do in order to