This book was born out of a disagreement among friends. Paul Rabinow, attending a seminar given in 1979 by Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle which concerned, among other things, Michel Foucault, objected to the characterization of Foucault as a typical "structuralist." This challenge stirred a discussion that led to the proposal of a joint article. It became evident as the discussion continued through the summer that the "article" would be a short book. It is now a medium-length book and should have been longer. The book was first to be called Michel Foucault: From Structuralism to Hermeneutics. We thought that Foucault had been something like a structuralist in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge but had moved to an interpretive position in his later works on the prisons and on sexuality. A group of literary specialists and philosophers on whom we inflicted our ideas assured us with great conviction and no arguments that Foucault had never been a structuralist and hated interpretation.
