Michel Foucault
The historian of the present who showed how power shapes what we take to be true
Michel Foucault is, by most counts, the most cited author in the humanities and social sciences today – ahead of Marx, Freud, Kant or anyone else. Yet he refused almost every label people tried to pin on him. He was not, he insisted, a structuralist, a postmodernist, a Marxist or even, in the usual sense, a philosopher. He described himself variously as an “archaeologist,” a “genealogist” and a “historian of the present.” What he actually did was take things we assume are simply natural – madness, illness, crime, sexuality, the very idea of a human “self” – and show that each has a history, that each was made rather than found, and that power was at work in the making. Once you have read him, it is hard to look at a hospital, a school, a prison or a confession in quite the same way again.
Who was Foucault?
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers, in western France, into a prosperous, conservative family. His father and both grandfathers were surgeons, and it was assumed he would follow them. He refused, a decision that soured his relationship with his father for good. He was a gifted but difficult student who, after the war, was admitted at his second attempt to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the training ground of the French intellectual elite.
His years there (1946–1951) were miserable. He was socially awkward, prone to violent quarrels, and tormented by his homosexuality at a time when it was both illegal and shameful. He attempted suicide at least once and was seen by a psychiatrist; his father arranged for him to be examined at the Sainte-Anne hospital, the same institution where he would later work as a trainee psychologist. His first encounter with psychiatry, in other words, was as a patient. He read Hegel under Jean Hyppolite, was briefly a member of the Communist Party under the influence of Louis Althusser, and left it in 1953, disgusted by its anti-Semitism and dogmatism. Around the same time he discovered Nietzsche, who, he later said, freed him from both Hegel and Marx.
He took degrees in philosophy and psychology, and spent much of the 1950s abroad – teaching in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg – partly to escape a France in which his private life was dangerous. In Sweden he wrote the enormous doctoral thesis that became his first major book, History of Madness (1961). In 1960 he met Daniel Defert, a sociology student ten years his junior, who became his partner for the rest of his life.
Michel Foucault lecturing in Brazil, 1974. Source: Brazilian National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons.
The 1960s made him famous. The Order of Things (1966) became, improbably for a dense history of the human sciences, a Paris bestseller, and Foucault was hailed, to his irritation, as the leading light of “structuralism” alongside Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Barthes. He spent 1966 to 1968 teaching in Tunis, where he witnessed the brutal repression of student protests and, for the first time, saw intellectual work and political action come together. He returned to France just after the upheavals of May 1968 and was appointed to run the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Vincennes, a chaotic, radical place where police raids were a regular occurrence.
In 1970 he was elected to the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic post in the country, under a title he chose himself: Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. The position had no students and no exams; the only duty was to deliver a public course of lectures each year on original research. The lectures, now published, drew huge crowds and are among the most important sources for his later thought.
The 1970s were his most political decade. He co-founded the Groupe d’information sur les prisons, which collected and published prisoners' own accounts of their conditions – not speaking for them but, as he put it, letting them speak. He campaigned for immigrants, for Soviet dissidents, for the Vietnamese boat people. He reported on the Iranian revolution in 1978 with an enthusiasm he was later criticised for. From 1975 he spent increasing amounts of time in California, teaching at Berkeley and exploring the gay subculture of San Francisco, which he experienced as a laboratory for new ways of living.
He died in Paris on 25 June 1984, aged fifty-seven, of complications from AIDS, one of the first public figures in France to die of the disease. His will forbade posthumous publications, an instruction his heirs have interpreted with increasing freedom: the lecture courses and, in 2018, the unfinished fourth volume of The History of Sexuality have all since appeared.
The main works
Foucault’s work is usually divided into three phases, each with its own method and its own key word.
The archaeological period (1961–1969). History of Madness (1961; long known in English through its abridgement, Madness and Civilization) argues that “mental illness” is not a timeless fact but a way of understanding and confining unreason that emerged in the seventeenth century. The Birth of the Clinic (1963) does the same for modern medicine and the “medical gaze.” The Order of Things (1966) is the most ambitious: it claims that Western knowledge has passed through several great underlying frameworks, which Foucault calls epistemes, and that “man” as an object of scientific study is a recent invention, one that may soon disappear “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) is the methodological reflection on all this, and his hardest book.
The genealogical period (1970–1976). Under Nietzsche’s influence, Foucault turns from how knowledge is organised to how it is tied to power. Discipline and Punish (1975), his most widely read book, traces the shift from public torture to the modern prison and argues that the prison is only the clearest instance of a “disciplinary” society whose techniques are found in schools, barracks, factories and hospitals. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (1976) attacks the “repressive hypothesis” – the idea that sex has been silenced since the Victorians – and argues that modern society has in fact produced an explosion of talk about sex, through which it manages bodies and populations.
The ethical period (1977–1984). After a long publishing silence, Foucault turned to the ancient world. The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (both 1984) study how Greeks and Romans worked on themselves through diet, exercise, writing and self-examination, and ask what an ethics not based on obedience to a moral code might look like. Confessions of the Flesh, on the early Church Fathers, appeared posthumously in 2018. The Collège de France lectures of these years – Security, Territory, Population, The Birth of Biopolitics, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Courage of Truth – contain some of his most influential ideas, including the analysis of neoliberalism that has made him a key reference in contemporary political theory.
Alongside the books stand the interviews. Foucault gave hundreds, and they are often the clearest statements of his views. Many are collected in Power/Knowledge, The Foucault Reader and the three-volume Essential Works.
The big ideas
Everything has a history
The thread running through all of Foucault’s work is the conviction that what looks natural and inevitable was in fact made, at a particular time, for particular reasons, and could have been otherwise. There was a time before “madness” was a medical category, before “homosexuality” was a type of person rather than a type of act, before “the criminal” was an object of scientific study, before anyone thought of themselves as having a “sexuality.” Foucault’s histories are not stories of progress, in which we gradually discover the truth about these things. They are histories of how certain ways of seeing came to seem obvious. The aim is not to debunk them as false but to loosen their grip: to show that “what is” is only “what has come to be,” and therefore might be changed.
Discourse and the episteme
In his early work Foucault’s key term is discourse: not language in general but the organised ways of speaking and writing about a subject that determine what can count as a meaningful, true-or-false statement within a given field at a given time. Medical discourse, psychiatric discourse, economic discourse each have rules about who may speak, from where, about what, and in what terms. Archaeology is Foucault’s name for digging beneath the surface of what people said to uncover these rules. An episteme is the deeper framework shared by all the discourses of a period – the historical conditions of possibility for knowledge. The Renaissance, the Classical age (roughly 1650–1800) and the modern age each had its own, and the transitions between them were not gradual but abrupt, like a shift of tectonic plates.
Power/knowledge
In the 1970s Foucault came to think that archaeology had left out the crucial question: why did these ways of knowing arise, and what did they do? His answer is summed up in the compound term power/knowledge (pouvoir-savoir). Knowledge is not the opposite of power, the pure truth that power distorts. Knowledge and power produce each other. You cannot run a prison without knowing about criminals, and you cannot know about criminals without a prison in which to observe them. The examination, the case file, the statistical survey, the psychiatric diagnosis are simultaneously ways of knowing people and ways of governing them. This does not mean that knowledge is “just” power, or that truth does not exist; it means that the production of truth always happens somewhere, under some conditions, with some effects.
A new picture of power
Foucault’s most original contribution may be his redescription of power itself. The traditional picture – what he called the “juridical” or “sovereign” model – sees power as something possessed by a king, a state or a class, exercised from above, essentially through prohibition: thou shalt not. Foucault argued that this picture is centuries out of date. Modern power is:
- Not possessed but exercised. It is a relation, not a thing; it runs through the whole of society rather than radiating from a centre. “Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”
- Productive, not merely repressive. It does not just forbid; it creates: knowledge, pleasures, capacities, kinds of person. The modern individual is not what power crushes but what power produces.
- Anonymous. No one planned the disciplinary society. It emerged from countless local tactics that happened to fit together.
- Inseparable from resistance. “Where there is power, there is resistance.” Power relations only exist between agents who could act otherwise; total domination would not be power but mere force.
Discipline and the Panopticon
Discipline and Punish describes how, from the late eighteenth century, European societies developed a new technology of power that Foucault calls discipline: a set of techniques for managing bodies in space and time – timetables, drills, ranks, examinations, records – that produce individuals who are both more useful and more obedient. Its emblem is the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s design for a circular prison in which a single guard in a central tower can watch every cell while remaining invisible himself. The inmates, never knowing when they are observed, come to watch themselves. The genius of the arrangement is that it makes power automatic and cheap: the prisoner becomes his own warder. Foucault saw this principle at work far beyond the prison, in a society of surveillance and normalisation in which we are constantly measured against standards and learn to measure ourselves.
Biopower and governmentality
From the mid-1970s Foucault identified a second modern form of power operating not on individual bodies but on populations. Biopower is the management of life itself: birth rates, mortality, public health, hygiene, longevity, “race.” Where the old sovereign had the right to kill, the modern state takes charge of making live. In the Collège de France lectures he extended this into an analysis of governmentality – the whole art of “conducting the conduct” of people, from pastoral care in the Church through the police science of the eighteenth century to modern liberalism and neoliberalism, which govern not by command but by shaping the environment in which free individuals make their choices.
The subject, the confession and the care of the self
Foucault’s last question was about the subject: how do human beings come to understand themselves as particular kinds of selves, and to work on themselves accordingly? One answer runs through all his work: the confession. From the medieval confessional to the psychoanalyst’s couch to the talk show, Western culture has taught us that we have a hidden inner truth, that it is above all a sexual truth, and that we are freed by speaking it to an authority who interprets it. Foucault thought this was one of the most powerful techniques of subjection ever invented – the more we “express ourselves,” the more legible and governable we become.
Against it he set the ancient idea of the care of the self (epimeleia heautou), the practices by which Greeks and Romans sought to shape their own lives as works of art, before Christianity turned self-examination into the hunt for sin. He did not propose going back to antiquity. He proposed that ethics might be understood as an aesthetics of existence: not conformity to a code but the deliberate fashioning of a self, a “practice of freedom.” The late Foucault, to the surprise of many, sounds at times remarkably like a Stoic.
Why Foucault matters
Foucault’s influence is so broad that it is easier to list the fields he has not changed than those he has. History, sociology, criminology, literary theory, anthropology, geography, nursing, education, queer theory, disability studies, postcolonial studies, media studies, management theory and the history of science have all been reshaped by his vocabulary. Edward Said’s Orientalism, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitics are all unthinkable without him.
He has also drawn fierce criticism. Historians have found his accounts of madness and the prison selective and sometimes simply wrong on the facts. Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor charged that his notion of power was so all-embracing as to become empty, and that his refusal to say what better would look like left him with no basis for the political causes he supported – a “crypto-normativist,” as Habermas put it, smuggling in values he officially denied. Noam Chomsky, after their celebrated 1971 television debate, said he had never met anyone so “completely amoral.” Feminists have noted that his histories of power say almost nothing about women. Some recent commentators have accused him, with little textual evidence, of having paved the way for neoliberalism; others, with somewhat more, of having excused abuses in Iran.
What survives the criticism is a set of tools. “Genealogy,” “discourse,” “normalisation,” “biopolitics,” “the gaze,” “the Panopticon”: these have passed into the common language of anyone who wants to understand how institutions shape people. And a question survives too, one he inherited from Kant and Nietzsche and radicalised: what are the limits of what we can think, and are they really limits, or just the walls of the particular room we happen to have been born in?
Relevance to life
Foucault wrote, he said, so that his books could be used as “toolboxes.” Here are some of the tools.
Ask what is being taken for granted. The Foucauldian reflex is to notice when something is presented as natural, obvious or inevitable – “boys will be boys,” “that’s just how hospitals work,” “normal people don’t” – and to ask: since when? Who decided? What would it look like otherwise? This is not cynicism. It is the recognition that most of what constrains us was made by people and could be remade.
Notice the small mechanisms. Power, for Foucault, lives less in parliaments than in timetables, forms, waiting rooms, performance reviews, open-plan offices and the layout of the supermarket. If you want to understand how your life is being shaped, look at the mundane arrangements, not the grand pronouncements.
Watch the watcher inside you. The Panopticon’s lesson is that the most effective surveillance is the kind we do to ourselves. Step counters, screen-time reports, social-media metrics and the constant low hum of comparison are all ways in which we have internalised the guard in the tower. Foucault does not tell you to smash your phone. He invites you to ask whose norms you are measuring yourself against, and whether you chose them.
Be suspicious of the demand to confess. “Open up.” “Share your truth.” “What’s really going on with you?” Sometimes these are invitations to intimacy. Sometimes they are techniques for making you legible and manageable. The difference matters, and Foucault’s work sharpens the eye for it.
Treat your life as a work. The late Foucault’s “care of the self” is, in practice, close to the oldest philosophical advice there is: that a life can be shaped, and that shaping it is a craft. Keep a notebook. Examine your day. Practise the things you want to become. What Foucault adds to the Stoics is a warning: do this for yourself, as an exercise of freedom, not because an authority has told you what the finished product should look like.
Resist where you are. Foucault did not believe in a single revolution that would end power. He believed in many local refusals: the prisoner who writes, the patient who asks questions, the person who declines to be the kind of individual the institution has prepared for them. “Where there is power, there is resistance” is not only a description. It is a reminder that there is always room to move.
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Where to start reading
- Discipline and Punish – the most accessible of the major books and the best introduction to his idea of power. The opening pages, contrasting a public execution of 1757 with a prison timetable of 1838, are among the most famous in modern philosophy.
- The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 – short, dense, hugely influential. Part Four, “The Deployment of Sexuality,” contains his most concentrated statement on power.
- The Foucault Reader (ed. Paul Rabinow) – a well-chosen anthology including the essays “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” and “What is Enlightenment?” and several key interviews.
- Power/Knowledge (ed. Colin Gordon) – interviews from the 1970s in which Foucault explains himself more plainly than in the books.
- The Order of Things and History of Madness – for those who want the early work. Read the preface to The Order of Things even if you read nothing else of it.
Gary Gutting’s Foucault: A Very Short Introduction is a reliable brief guide. Didier Eribon’s Michel Foucault is the standard biography; James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault is more controversial but more vivid.
Read more
- Michel Foucault – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A thorough overview of the three phases of his work.
- Michel Foucault: Political Thought – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Focused on power, discipline, biopower and governmentality.
- Michel Foucault: Ethics – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. On the late work and the care of the self.
- Foucault, Michel – Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A compact scholarly summary.
- The Chomsky–Foucault debate on human nature (1971) – transcript of the famous television debate, a good place to see Foucault’s view of power and justice tested against a very different one.
- Foucault News – Clare O’Farrell’s long-running site with key concepts, a bibliography, and news of new publications and research.
