![]() ![]() But Foucault and the brilliant scholars who trailed him, with new technologies in their toolboxes, make extremely strong cases. ![]() Their intellectual preference is to see power as a downward, repressive force. They think the American Revolution was more significant than the Anopheles mosquito. Some call this “revisionist history.” They don’t like the idea that potatoes are more historically important than Napoleon. Mann’s complete inverted vision of the world since Columbus’s first voyage. Annette Gordon-Reed has done so with her fascinating studies of the Hemmings family of Monticello. Howard Zinn took up the mantle of inversion in A People’s History of the United States. The effect of this notion has resonated since the late 1960s. One of the great contributions Michel Foucault made to Western scholarship and intellectual history was what he called “inversion.” Simply put, this notion means that if one studies power at the furthest extent of its reach, the dynamic between the powerful and the oppressed is quite different from how it appears to the mainstream of any given culture. ![]()
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