Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian whose studies of madness, medicine, prisons and sexuality changed how scholars think about knowledge and power. Rather than asking what power is or who holds it, he asked how it works in everyday institutions such as asylums, hospitals, schools and prisons, and how these shape what people take to be normal and true about themselves. He is among the most cited authors in the humanities and social sciences, and one of the leading figures of postwar continental philosophy.

Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers, in western France, into a prosperous family; his father was a surgeon who hoped his son would follow him into medicine. He grew up during the German occupation and was educated at Catholic and state schools in Poitiers before moving to Paris to prepare for the École normale supérieure, which he entered in 1946. There he studied philosophy and psychology. He was brilliant but deeply unhappy, partly because of the difficulty of being gay in the France of the time, and made at least one attempt at suicide. His teachers included the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, under whose influence he joined the French Communist Party in 1950, leaving it within a few years. He also read widely in Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, who he later said were the most important influences on his thought.

In the 1950s Foucault worked abroad, as a cultural attaché and lecturer in Uppsala in Sweden, in Warsaw and in Hamburg. In Uppsala's library he researched his doctoral thesis, published in 1961 and known in English as History of Madness. It argued that the line between reason and madness has a history. From the seventeenth century, he claimed, the mad were confined alongside the poor and idle in what he called a "great confinement", and the later asylum, though presented as humane, subjected them to a new kind of moral control. Historians have challenged many of his facts and dates, but the book opened the history of psychiatry as a field.

The Birth of the Clinic (1963) traced the rise of modern medicine around the time of the French Revolution and the new medical "gaze" directed at the body. The Order of Things (1966), an unexpected bestseller, compared the ways knowledge about life, language and wealth was organised in different periods. Each age, he argued, has an underlying framework, which he called an episteme, that decides what can count as knowledge. The book ended by suggesting that "man", as an object of study, was a recent invention that might soon disappear. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) he reflected on his own method. Because of these books he was grouped with the structuralists, a label he rejected.

Foucault taught at the University of Tunis from 1966 to 1968, where he saw students persecuted for protesting against the government, an experience that drew him towards political activism. He returned to head the philosophy department at the new experimental university at Vincennes, set up after the protests of May 1968. In 1970 he was elected to the Collège de France, the country's most prestigious academic institution, to a chair in the "history of systems of thought", which he held until his death. His annual lectures there, published long afterwards, are now a major part of his work.

In 1971 he co-founded the Prisons Information Group, which gave prisoners a way to describe their own conditions. He campaigned with other intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, on behalf of immigrants and prisoners and against the death penalty.

Discipline and Punish (1975) begins with a gruesome public execution in Paris in 1757 and contrasts it with a timetable for young offenders written about eighty years later. Within that short span, Foucault argued, punishment moved from spectacular violence against the body to the quiet, constant regulation of behaviour. The model for this new "disciplinary" power was the Panopticon, a prison design by Jeremy Bentham in which a single guard could watch every cell without being seen, so that inmates learned to watch themselves. The same techniques of surveillance, examination and ranking, he argued, spread through armies, factories, schools and hospitals.

For Foucault, power was not only something that forbids and punishes. It is spread through social relations and is productive: it creates categories of people, such as the delinquent or the patient, and the knowledge used to manage them. He described this pairing as "power/knowledge". In later lectures he added the idea of "biopower", the modern state's concern with managing the health, birth rates and lives of whole populations.

The first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) challenged the common view that modern societies, especially the Victorians, simply repressed sex. On the contrary, he argued, they talked about it endlessly, through confession, medicine, psychiatry and law, and in doing so invented new identities, such as "the homosexual" as a type of person. The second and third volumes, published in 1984, turned unexpectedly to ancient Greece and Rome and to the ways people there shaped themselves through ethical practices, which he called "technologies of the self". A fourth volume, on early Christianity, was published only in 2018.

In 1978 and 1979 he wrote newspaper reports from Iran during the revolution against the Shah, in which he showed sympathy for the movement's religious "political spirituality"; these were sharply criticised once the new regime turned repressive. In his last years he taught often at the University of California, Berkeley.

Foucault died in Paris on 25 June 1984, aged 57, of an AIDS-related illness, one of the first prominent people in France to do so. His partner, Daniel Defert, went on to found AIDES, the country's first AIDS organisation.

His influence is enormous across history, sociology, criminology, gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies and medicine. Critics, including the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, argued that his view of power left no basis for saying that one social order is better than another, and historians have disputed his use of evidence. Supporters reply that he never offered a theory of everything, only historical tools for seeing how the present came to be and how it might be otherwise.