About Michel Foucault
French philosopher and historian of ideas (1926–1984), among the most cited thinkers in the humanities. Foucault's work traces how power operates not only through law and sovereignty but through knowledge, institutions, and the shaping of bodies and subjects. Discipline and Punish (1975) charts the shift from public execution to the modern prison, and the disciplinary techniques — surveillance, normalisation, examination — that spread through schools, hospitals, and factories. His concept of 'power/knowledge' reframed political analysis around the diffuse mechanisms that produce docile, productive subjects.
Books by Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish
A major work for understanding modern power as discipline, surveillance, normalization, and institutions.
Read about this book →The History of Sexuality, Volume 1
Important for understanding power, sexuality, identity formation, and modern social regulation.
Read about this book →The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge
Foucault's most influential short work and the source of his ideas of 'biopower' and the productive, everywhere-present nature of power. Against the story that modernity repressed sex, he argues that it did the opposite…
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