Week 3 reading response

Two questions arose during my reading of The Order of Things. The first of which is similar to the question posed by Tug in that I am curious about what kind of factors could have compelled the reconfiguration of positivities at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Foucault writes that, during this period, as wealth, natural history and discourse began to take on the likeness of economics, biology and philology, respectively, the departure from the Classical age had occurred. Foucault tells us that this change did not occur abruptly as Ricardo's work was harbingered by that of Adam Smith, Cuvier's by Lamarck's, and Bopp's by Coeurdoux's and William Jones', but he does not explain how this change, which occurred almost simultaneously to the three--seemingly disparate--modes of being, had come to take place during this specific time in history.

The other question I have might be irrelevant or it might just be that I am confused by the similarity in terminology, but can Ranke's positivist/empiricist history, which is one of the major methodologies of historiography in Korea, be worked into Foucault's discussion of the nineteenth-century positivism/empiricism?