William W. Fishkr III 58 abortion and the constitutionality of laws prohibiting it. Second, by revealing the contingency of events in the past, history can encourage readers to think more freely about their options in the present. In other words, it can leave readers with the impression: Things easily could have come out differently — and they still can.”^ This is what Roland Barthes refers to as “strategic history,” suggesting that we can draw wisdom from the past by reexperiencing the openness of the existential choices confronting earlier actors. The methodologies of Structuralism and Contextualismare both potentially effective in opening readers’ eyes in the first of the two ways just discussed. Indeed, denaturalization of current ways of thinking and acting through demonstration of how different things used to be was one of Foucault’s central ambitions in deploying his variant of Structuralism. Mark Poster explains: [Foucault] strives to alter the position of the historian fromone who gives support to the present by collecting all the meanings of the past and tracing the line of inevitability through which they are resolved in the present, to one who breaks off the past from the present and, by demonstrating the foreignness of the past, relativizes and undercuts the legitimacy of the present ... [The] alien discourses/practices [or earlier epochs] are explored in such a way that their negativity in relation to the present explodes the ‘rationality’ of phenomena that are taken for granted. When the technology’ of power of the past is elaborated in detail, present-dav assumptions which posit the past as ‘irrational,’ are undermined.’*^ 114 Contextualist legal histories often have the same objective. For example, WilliamTreanor and Morton Horwitz have recently argued that, until the late 1780s, many Americans believed that a government should have substantial latitude in expropriating the property cyf its citizens, and that that belief grew naturally out of their immersion in the discourse and idecilogy of classical reSee Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Lav: andthe Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), 155-95; James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 (New York; Oxford Univ. Press, 1978). An example that combines (or blurs the difference between) these two strategies is provided by Robert Gordon: “[I]t is exceedingly useful to be reminded that the present consensus, if it is one, that fundamental decisions about investment, production technologies, and the organization of work arc for management to make is a very recent artifact of the post-World War II period, that it can hardlv be explained simplv as what American workers “want,” because it was disputed for most of our history and has only (unstably) come to prevail after long and violent struggle.” Cordon, supra n. 110, 178. Afuller version of the argument appears in Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” Stanford Law Review 36 (1984); 81-87. Cf. Charles F. Sabel and Michael J. Piore, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilitiesfor Prosperity (NewYork: Basic Books, 1984). "■* See Bann, supra n. 90, 373. Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984): 74, 89-90. See also Gerard Raulet, “Structuralism and Poststructuralism: An Interview with Michel F'oucault,” Telos 55 (1983): 210.
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