Continental · 1926–1984
Michel Foucault
French historian of madness, prisons and sexuality
Foucault showed that categories like madness, delinquency and sexuality were produced by historical practices of knowledge and power; modern power works less by punishment than by discipline, surveillance and norms.
Life and thought
Michel Foucault (1926–1984), a surgeon’s son from Poitiers, studied philosophy and psychology at the École normale supérieure and worked in a psychiatric hospital before writing the doctoral thesis published as History of Madness (1961). He taught in Sweden, Poland, Germany and Tunisia, and in 1970 was elected to the Collège de France to a chair in the “history of systems of thought”. He was also a political activist, notably for prisoners’ rights, and died of an AIDS-related illness in 1984.
Foucault wrote histories of things that seem timeless, such as madness, illness, crime and sexuality, to show that they were shaped by particular practices of knowledge and power. Discipline and Punish opens with a gruesome public execution in 1757 and asks why, within a century, punishment moved behind prison walls. His answer: modern power works less by spectacular violence than by discipline, through timetables, examinations and constant visibility, as in Bentham’s Panopticon, producing “docile bodies” in schools, barracks and factories as well as prisons.