The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Michel Foucault

1926–1984

French historian and philosopher who wrote histories of madness, the prison and sexuality to show how knowledge and power shape what seems natural and necessary.

To punish less, perhaps; but certainly to punish better.

Discipline and Punish, p. 82 in Sheridan's translation, translated by Alan Sheridan

Foucault was born in Poitiers in 1926 and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1946. There he heard Merleau-Ponty lecture, an influence that mattered to him greatly, and learned Hegel from Jean Hyppolite and Marx from Louis Althusser. He studied psychology as well as philosophy and worked in a Paris psychiatric hospital, and the historian of science Georges Canguilhem sponsored his doctoral thesis on the history of madness.

The Collège de France elected him in 1969 to a chair in the history of systems of thought. From the 1970s he was very active politically, helping to found a group that gathered information on French prisons and protesting on behalf of marginalised groups, and he often lectured in the United States. An early victim of AIDS, he died in Paris in 1984. He defined himself partly against Sartre, rejecting both his privileging of the individual subject and the role of the “universal intellectual”.

Key ideas

History as critique
Kant looked for what is necessary behind what seems contingent. Foucault turned this round, looking for what is contingent in what seems necessary. His histories show that the human sciences’ claims about human nature often express the commitments of a particular society.
Archaeology
Systems of thought and knowledge, which Foucault called epistemes or discursive formations, are governed by rules beneath the awareness of individual thinkers. These rules set the boundaries of what can be thought in a given field and period.
Power/knowledge
When human beings are the object of study, the aims of knowledge and the aims of power are inseparable. An examination of a pupil or a patient both establishes truths about them and controls their behaviour.
Disciplinary society
The modern prison, gentler than torture, was also a more effective means of control, “to punish less, perhaps; but certainly to punish better”. Its techniques of hierarchical observation, normalising judgement and examination became the model for factories, hospitals and schools.
Ethics as care of the self
In his last books Foucault found in antiquity an idea of ethics as a practice of shaping oneself into an ethical subject, not a matter of obeying a code.
Tradition
Western
Region
France

Influences

Influenced by

Michel Foucault1926–1984

Influenced

Influenced by

Michel Foucault1926–1984

Influenced

Where these links come from
  • Michel Foucault drew on Immanuel Kant. Source: Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala, Michel Foucault, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Michel Foucault drew on G. W. F. Hegel. Source: Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala, Michel Foucault, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Michel Foucault drew on Karl Marx. Source: Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala, Michel Foucault, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Michel Foucault drew on Martin Heidegger. Source: Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala, Michel Foucault, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Michel Foucault studied with and drew on Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Source: Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala, Michel Foucault, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Jacques Derrida studied with and argued against Michel Foucault. Source: Leonard Lawlor, Jacques Derrida, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Key works

  • History of Madness (Folie et déraison), 1961
  • The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses), 1966
  • The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969
  • Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir), 1975
  • The History of Sexuality (Histoire de la sexualité), 1976

Sources

  1. Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala, Michel Foucault, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy