Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) was a French philosopher, historian, and social theorist who held the chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. [1] In a series of studies of madness, clinical medicine, the human sciences, imprisonment, and sexuality, he examined how institutions and forms of knowledge produce the categories through which people are governed and understand themselves. [2] His work has become among the most cited in the humanities and social sciences.
Early life and education
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers into a prosperous family; his father was a surgeon who expected him to follow into medicine. [1] He studied at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1946, where his teachers included Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. He took degrees in philosophy and psychology and worked for a period in a Paris psychiatric hospital.
During the 1950s he taught abroad at Uppsala, Warsaw, and Hamburg, drafting in Sweden the thesis published in 1961 as Folie et déraison, known in English as Madness and Civilization. [2]
Archaeology of knowledge
Foucault's early books pursued what he called an archaeology: a description of the rules that determine what can count as knowledge in a period. Madness and Civilization traced how unreason was separated from reason and confined, while The Birth of the Clinic (1963) analysed the emergence of the medical gaze in post-revolutionary France. [3]
The Order of Things (1966) argued that the human sciences rest on historically specific configurations of thought, or epistemes, that shift abruptly rather than developing continuously; the book made him a public figure in France. [2] The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) set out the method explicitly. He taught at Clermont-Ferrand and at the experimental University of Vincennes before being elected to the Collège de France in 1970.
Genealogy, power, and sexuality
From the early 1970s Foucault turned to what he termed genealogy, studying how practices of power shape both institutions and individuals. His work with the Prisons Information Group, which he helped found to publicise conditions inside French prisons, fed directly into Discipline and Punish (1975). [1]
That book contrasted public execution under the old regime with the modern prison and its regime of timetables, examination, and surveillance, using Jeremy Bentham's panopticon as a model of a power that works by making people visible and self-monitoring. [4] The first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) rejected the idea that modernity repressed sexuality, arguing instead that it produced an endless discourse about it, and introduced the concept of biopower, the administration of populations through health, birth rate, and life itself.
Two further volumes, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, appeared in 1984 and shifted towards ancient Greek and Roman ethics and practices of self-formation. [3]
Death and legacy
Foucault died in Paris on 25 June 1984 of an AIDS-related illness, one of the first prominent figures in France whose death was attributed to the disease. [1] A fourth volume of The History of Sexuality was published from his manuscripts in 2018, and his Collège de France lecture courses have since appeared in print.
His concepts of discourse, disciplinary power, biopolitics, and governmentality are now standard tools across history, sociology, criminology, literary studies, and queer theory. [2] Critics have questioned the accuracy of some of his historical claims and the political implications of his account of power, but the terms he introduced continue to structure debate in the fields he entered. [3]
