The reception of The History of Sexuality among scholars and academics has been mixed.
Scientific and academic journals
The cultural anthropologist and sociologist Stephen O. Murray wrote in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that a passage of The History of Sexuality in which Foucault discussed how European medical discourse of the late 19th century had classified homosexuals had "clouded the minds" of many social historical theorists and researchers, who had produced a "voluminous discourse" that ignored how homosexuals had been classified before the late 19th century or non-European cultures.[20] The philosopher Alan Soble wrote in the Journal of Sex Research that The History of Sexuality "caused a thunderstorm among philosophers, historians, and other theorists of sex". He credited Foucault with inspiring "genealogical" studies "informed by the heuristic idea that not only are patterns of sexual desire and behavior socially engineered ... but also that the concepts of our sexual discourse are equally socially constructed" and with influencing "gender studies, feminism, Queer Theory, and the debate about the resemblance and continuity, or lack of it, between ancient and contemporary homoeroticism". He credited Simone de Beauvoir with anticipating Foucault's view that patterns of sexual desire and behavior are socially determined.[21]
Evaluations in books, 1976–1989
The historian Jane Caplan called The History of Sexuality "certainly the most ambitious and interesting recent attempt to analyse the relations between the production of concepts and the history of society in the field of sexuality", but criticized Foucault for using an "undifferentiated concept" of speech and an imprecise notion of "power".[22] The gay rights activist Dennis Altman described Foucault's work as representative of the position that homosexuals emerged as a social category in 18th and 19th century western Europe in The Homosexualization of America (1982).[23] The feminist Germaine Greer wrote that Foucault rightly argues that, "what we have all along taken as the breaking-through of a silence and the long delayed giving of due attention to human sexuality was in fact the promotion of human sexuality, indeed, the creation of an internal focus for the individual's preoccupations."[24] The historian Peter Gay wrote that Foucault is right to raise questions about the "repressive hypothesis", but that "his procedure is anecdotal and almost wholly unencumbered by facts; using his accustomed technique (reminiscent of the principle underlying Oscar Wilde's humor) of turning accepted ideas upside down, he turns out to be right in part for his private reasons."[25] The philosopher José Guilherme Merquior suggested in Foucault (1985) that Foucault's views about sexual repression are preferable to those of Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and their followers in that they have provide more accurate descriptions and that Foucault is supported by "the latest historiographic research on bourgeois sex". Merquior considered the second two volumes of The History of Sexuality to be of higher scholarly quality than the first, and found Foucault to be "original and insightful" in his discussion of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and other Stoics in The Care of the Self. However, he found the details of Foucault's views open to question, and suggested that Foucault's discussion of Greek pederasty is less illuminating than that of Kenneth Dover, despite Foucault's references to Dover's Greek Homosexuality (1978).[26]
The philosopher Roger Scruton rejected Foucault's claim that sexual morality is culturally relative in Sexual Desire (1986). He also criticized Foucault for assuming that there could be societies in which a "problematisation" of the sexual did not occur. Scruton concluded that, "No history of thought could show the 'problematisation' of sexual experience to be peculiar to certain specific social formations: it is characteristic of personal experience generally, and therefore of every genuine social order."[27] The philosopher Peter Dews argued in Logics of Disintegration that Foucault's rejection of the repressive hypothesis is more apparent than real, and that the hypothesis is not "abolished, but simply displaced" in The History of Sexuality, as shown for example by Foucault's persistent references to "the body and its pleasures" and to ars erotica.[28] The classicist Page duBois called The Use of Pleasure "one of the most exciting new books" in classical studies and "an important contribution to the history of sexuality", but added that Foucault "takes for granted, and thus 'authorizes,' exactly what needs to be explained: the philosophical establishment of the autonomous male subject".[29] The historian Patricia O'Brien wrote that Foucault was "without expertise" in dealing with antiquity, and that The History of Sexuality lacks the "methodological rigor" of Foucault's earlier works, especially Discipline and Punish.[30]
Evaluations in books, 1990–present
The philosopher Judith Butler argued in Gender Trouble (1990) that the theory of power Foucault expounds in the first volume of The History of Sexuality is to some extent contradicted by Foucault's subsequent discussion of the journals of Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century French intersex person: whereas in the former work Foucault asserts that sexuality is coextensive with power, in Herculine Barbin he "fails to recognize the concrete relations of power that both construct and condemn Herculine's sexuality", instead romanticizing Barbin's world of pleasure as the "happy limbo of a non-identity", and expressing views akin to those of Marcuse. Butler further argued that this conflict is evident within The History of Sexuality, noting that Foucault refers there to "bucolic" and "innocent" sexual pleasures that exist prior to the imposition of "regulative strategies".[31]
The classicist David M. Halperin claimed in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990) that the appearance of the English translation of the first volume of Foucault's work in 1978, together with the publication of Dover's Greek Homosexuality the same year, marked the beginning of a new era in the study of the history of sexuality.[32] He suggested that The History of Sexuality may be the most important contribution to the history of western morality since Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).[33] The critic Camille Paglia rejected Halperin's views, calling The History of Sexuality a "disaster". Paglia wrote that much of The History of Sexuality is fantasy unsupported by the historical record, and that it "is acknowledged even by Foucault's admirers to be his weakest work".[34] The economist Richard Posner described The History of Sexuality as, "a remarkable fusion of philosophy and intellectual history" in Sex and Reason (1992), adding that the book is lucidly written.[35]
Diana Hamer wrote in the anthology The Sexual Imagination From Acker to Zola (1993) that The History of Sexuality is Foucault's best-known work on sexuality.[36] The historian Michael Mason wrote that in The History of Sexuality, Foucault presents what amounts to an argument "against the possibility of making historical connections between beliefs about sex and sexual practices", but that the argument is only acceptable if one accepts the need to shift attention from "sexuality" to "sex" in thinking about the sexual culture of the last three centuries, and that Foucault does not make a case for such a need.[37] The critic Alexander Welsh criticized Foucault for failing to place Sigmund Freud in the context of 19th century thought and culture.[38] The classicist Walter Burkert called Foucault's work the leading example of the position that sexuality takes different forms in different civilizations and is therefore a cultural construct.[39] The historian Roy Porter called The History of Sexuality, "a brilliant enterprise, astonishingly bold, shocking even, in its subversion of conventional explanatory frameworks, chronologies, and evaluations, and in its proposed alternatives." Porter credited Foucault with discrediting the view, proposed for example by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955), that "industrialization demanded erotic austerity."[40] The philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote that the claim that homosexuality is a cultural construction is associated more with Foucault's The History of Sexuality than with any other work.[41]
The classicist Bruce Thornton wrote that The Use of Pleasure was, "usually quite readable, surveying the ancient evidence to make some good observations about the various techniques developed to control passion", but faulted Foucault for limiting his scope to "fourth-century medical and philosophical works".[42] The philosopher Arnold Davidson wrote that while "Foucault's interpretation of the culture of the self in late antiquity is sometimes too narrow and therefore misleading", this is a defect of "interpretation" rather than of "conceptualization." Davidson argued that, "Foucault's conceptualization of ethics as the self's relationship to itself provides us with a framework of enormous depth and subtlety" and "allows us to grasp aspects of ancient thought that would otherwise remain occluded."[43]
The psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook argued that while Foucault proposes that "bodies and pleasures" should be the rallying point against "the deployment of sexuality", "bodies and pleasures", like other Foucauldian terms, is a notion with "little content." Whitebook, who endorsed Dews' assessment of Foucault's work, found Foucault's views to be comparable to those of Marcuse and suggested that Foucault was indebted to Marcuse.[44] In 2005, Scruton dismissed The History of Sexuality as "mendacious", and called his book Sexual Desire (1986) an answer to Foucault's work.[45] Romana Byrne criticized Foucault's argument that the scientia sexualis belongs to modern Western culture while the ars erotica belongs only to Eastern and Ancient societies, arguing that a form of ars erotica has been evident in Western society since at least the eighteenth century.[46]
Scruton wrote in 2015 that, contrary to Foucault's claims, the ancient texts Foucault examines in The Use of Pleasure are not primarily about sexual pleasure. Nevertheless, he found the second two volumes of The History of Sexuality more scholarly than Foucault's previous work. Scruton concluded, of the work in general, that it creates an impression of a "normalized" Foucault: "His command of the French language, his fascination with ancient texts and the by-ways of history, his flamboyant imagination and beautiful style - all have been put, at last, to a proper use, in order to describe the human condition respectfully, and to cease to look for the secret 'structures' beneath its smile."[47]
