Michel Foucault was a twentieth-century French philosopher who produced a set of works that challenged the philosophical, historical, and sociological underpinnings of Western Civilization. An idiosyncratic thinker who has been compared to the German phi...

The French philosopher, critic, and historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was an original and creative thinker who made contributions to historiography and to understanding the forces that make history. Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Po...

Michel Foucault is remembered as a thinker who tried to show that the basic ideas which people normally believe to be permanent truths about human nature and society actually change throughout the course of history. He regularly tested long-held assumpti...

[In The History of Sexuality] Foucault has attempted to redefine completely the question of sexuality by removing it from the paradigm of repression. Instead, sexuality for him must be considered in terms of concepts of knowledge and power. In this manner Foucault places sex in relation to the emergence of the administered society of the twentieth century. He challenges both Marx and Freud by shifting the grounds of the debate: the concepts of labor and repression no longer serve in the critical comprehensi...