Foucault was one of the first, but the only, historian to question the presumption of objectivity in history, as if historians are simply telling a story of events as they unfolded. In the English-speaking world, perhaps the most influential antagonist to this view of history was Hayden White, whose Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, published in 1973, four years after The Archaeology of Knowledge, similarly argued that historians tend to work by assembling some events and putting them into a narrative. For White, this was “ideological” because the ways in which you write a story are determined by your worldview, for instance whether you are more conservative or more liberal. There is no objective history.
A distrust in history led in the 1970s and 1980s to a larger critique of modernity, or the idea that civilizations could progress and become completely rationalized. In 1979, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard developed the term “postmodernism” to refer to an “incredulity toward meta-narrative,” or a rejection of any master story that governs all histories, such as civilization’s march toward progress or good’s steady defeat of evil. These master narratives no longer make sense in the complicated, globalized, chaotic world of the 20th century. Fredric Jameson, in his 1991 book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, thought this “incredulity” was in part the result of the current state of the global economy, in which capital increasingly flows across borders and in which labor is often intellectual rather than material. Before Lyotard and Jameson, Foucault’s 1969 Archaeology of Knowledge was already making a similar argument about the impossibility of a “total” history.
Nonetheless, Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge is finally a statement about how to study history rather than a statement on the nature of the culture in which he lives. He does not reject continuity because, for the first time in the late 20th century, continuity is no longer possible. Rather, he rejects the idea that continuity could ever exist, or that any historical period could be neatly unified. Discourse is always fragmented and contradictory, not just in “postmodernism.” He therefore would also reject historically-specific arguments that others have made about the “end of history.” For instance, Francis Fukuyama’s influential 1989 essay “The End of History?” argued that the triumph of the West in the Cold War signaled that mankind had reached its final point, past which there could be no improvement in forms of government. Thus, history ends, because there is no more progress to achieve. Foucault thinks, instead, that there is always history, because it is not about the triumph of certain institutions or political formations, but about the constantly-evolving state of discourse. Far from agreeing with Fukuyama, Foucault would want to do a history of the present to understand how it is even possible to think, as Fukuyama does, that history is over once a particular period (the Cold War) war is over. Foucault would work to uncover the unspoken discursive "rules" that align Western civilization with progress and history with a teleological narrative, rules that make it possible for Fukuyama to argues that the West has reached the end of history.
In the end, although Foucault thematically anticipates some of the arguments of Lyotard, Jameson, and even Fukuyama, Foucualt stands apart because of his refusal to reduce any field of discourse to one cause, like politics in Fukuyama or capitalism in Jameson. This would be an example of what Foucault calls the historian of ideas’ tendency to reduce contradictions into one underlying principle. Unlike others postmodernists, Foucault distrusts history while also provides a method for doing it; he does not stop at the negative project of rejecting master narratives, because he adds the positive project of describing discourse in all its complexity, at any given moment.
