Michel Foucault
Philosopher and historian: knowledge and power produce each other, and every society has its regime of truth.
Life
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and historian, professor at the Collège de France from 1970. He studied how societies produce knowledge, norms and forms of power around madness, prisons and sexuality. For him knowledge and power are linked: every society has its regime of truth.
Main works
Shows how the West gradually set apart and confined the mad in the name of reason.
Studies the frameworks of thought that make an era's knowledge possible, and the emergence of "man".
Traces the shift from public torture to prison, and discipline as a modern form of power.
Argues that sexuality is produced by discourses and powers rather than simply repressed.
In his own words
« What is surprising if prison resembles factories, schools, barracks and hospitals, which all resemble prisons? »
« There is no exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth operating in, from and through that power. »
« Punishment has shifted from an art of unbearable sensations to an economy of suspended rights. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceWhat counts as true depends on historical systems of knowledge and power, so no timeless certainty stands outside them.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)
Individuals are largely shaped by the powers and norms that produce them, though he also stresses resistance and self-transformation.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)
Morality is studied as changing historical practices of shaping the self, not as a set of universal truths.
Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (1984)
The idea of 'man' as an object of knowledge is a recent invention, not a timeless nature that is good or bad.
Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)