Foucault is #1

Michel Foucault was the authority most often cited in scholarship published in the humanities during the year 2007, according to Thomson Reuters’ ISI Web of Science. The French historian barely edged out his countryman Pierre Bourdieu, the radical sociologist, by fewer than a hundred citations. Jacques Derrida trailed badly in third place.

You have to drop pretty far down the list to trip over a scholarly authority who wrote longer than ten minutes ago. Max Weber finished seventh, with just over a third of the references to Foucault. At least he edged out Judith Butler, however, whose self-serving obscurity limited her to nine hundred and sixty nods. Yet Butler is now apparently more important to humanists even than Freud, who struggled to top nine hundred.

The list was not entirely devoid of original thinkers. Kant finished ahead of Heidegger, somehow, and Arendt and Wittgenstein both received slightly fewer than six hundred notices—although Edward Said, the late Egyptian Christian, got more than both of them.

Names missing from the list include Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Maimonides, Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Adam Smith, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Husserl—to name only philosophers.

The “enchanting crisscrossing of names” from France—Foucault, Bour­dieu, Derrida—suggests that humanists remain bogged down in the slough of Theory. They are engaged in a common pursuit, all right, but it is not the pursuit of truth. It is the pursuit of intellectual fashion, even if the fashion is a little worn and threadbare after four decades.

Update: The most frequently cited authors on A Common­place Blog:

(  1.) Philip Roth (164)
(  2.) God (160)
(  3.) Vladimir Nabokov (99)
(  4.) Henry James (78)
(  5.) Patrick Kurp (76)
(  6.) Francine Prose (68)
(  7.) J. V. Cunningham (66)
(  8.) John Updike (62)
(  9.) Toni Morrison (56)
(10.) Saul Bellow (53)

Until today, I managed to restrict any mention of Foucault to just fifteen occasions.