Philosophy
1926 to 1984, Paris, France
Power, knowledge, discipline, and the hidden histories of madness, punishment, and sexuality.
Start learning Michel →Foucault’s central insight: power and knowledge are not opposites but partners. Every body of knowledge about human beings - medicine, psychiatry, criminology - both grows out of and feeds back into systems of pow…
In Discipline and Punish , Foucault traces how punishment moved from the spectacular torture of the body to the quiet, constant surveillance of the soul. His emblem is Bentham’s Panopticon: a prison designed so th…
In his first major book, Foucault wrote a history not of madness but of how ‘Reason’ came to define itself by silencing and confining its other. Through the ‘Great Confinement’ of the classical a…
Foucault argued that around the eighteenth century a new kind of power emerged. The old sovereign power was the right to take life - the king’s sword. The new power is the power to foster life: to manage populatio…
In The Order of Things , Foucault argued that each historical age thinks within a hidden underlying order - an episteme - that silently fixes what can count as knowledge. Tracing these deep ruptures, he reached a startl…
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