Phrase: “Freed from the Anthropological Theme”

In his introduction, Foucault lays the foundation of his style concerning the context in which he will be placing human knowledge and the historical object. It is hard for me to get a total grasp of his intent without specific examples that I am sure he uses in his writing as he spends his introduction trying to explain the problems with perspective when reviewing history. He shows that history can never be a dormant definition of events, linked by our own precepts of cause and effect, but rather that our own knowledge is constantly growing and therefore changing our understanding of history. “…historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves…” (Foucault p. 5)