Michel Foucault (1926–84) French philosopher and radical intellectual. The son of a prosperous surgeon, Foucault had a troubled youth in which he attempted suicide on several occasions and struggled to come to terms with his homosexuality. His work, which ranged beyond philosophy and included the fields of psychology and psychopathology, was influenced by the Marxist, Freudian and structuralist traditions but did not fall clearly into any of them.
Foucault set out to construct a ‘history of the present’ through what he called ‘archaeologies’ – large-scale analyses that blended philosophy with the history of ideas. His purpose was to uncover the implicit knowledge that underpins particular social practices and institutions. In his first major work, Madness and Civilization (1961), he examined the birth of the asylum through changes in social attitudes towards madness that had led it to be viewed as incompatible with ‘normal’ society. He undertook similar analyses of the genesis of the clinic and the prison in The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and Discipline and Punishments (1975). Foucault’s most influential work, The Order of Things (1966), was portrayed as an ‘archaeology of the human sciences’. It advanced the idea that a series of ‘epistemes’ have characterized the thinking and practices of successive historical periods by establishing a broad framework of assumptions. The more flexible notion of ‘discursive formations’ replaced epistemes in Foucault’s later writings. In the History of Sexuality (1976) he explored the formation of the desiring subject from ancient Greek times onwards, and examined changing attitudes towards male sexuality.
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