Leiter on Foucault, Weber, and postmodernism

Brian Leiter:

Much of Foucault's corpus is of a piece with the Weberian project of analyzing the "iron cage" of the modern world, though Foucault locates the features of the cage in places Weber had not thought about (e.g., in the concepts of "normality" promulgated by the human sciences). Foucault's notion of a genealogical inquiry is, insofar as it is borrowed from Nietzsche, the idea that from the present meaning or significance of some institution or practice (e.g., the prison, the insane asylum, the hospital), we can not draw reliable inferences about where it came from, about its origins--indeed, its origins might be multivarious and have meanings far different from the institution or practice as we find it today. Foucault sometimes supplements the Nietzschean idea of genealogy with postmodern skepticism about historical knowledge of origins, but this is an unfortunate and, in my view, not entirely consistent, overlay, with which one might dispense.