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 philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, Foucault examined the transformation of madness into mental illness, the development of modern forms of punishment, the ordering of knowledge systems, and the nature of sexuality.
Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France. The son of a physician, Foucault studied under the Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, at the école Normale Superieure in Paris. He then taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand from 1960 to 1968. In 1968, he moved to the University of Paris at Vincennes before assuming his final position in 1970 as chairman of the Department of History of Human Thought at the College de France. During the 1970 and 1980s, Foucault became an internationally well-known intellectual. His works were translated into English and other languages, and he traveled widely.
In 1961, Foucault published his first major work, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (translated in 1965 as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason), an examination of seventeenth-century social attitudes toward madness. Foucault charted the movement to reclassify madness from a divinely-inspired condition to a mental illness. This "medicalization of deviance" argument was soon adopted by a new generation of sociologists and criminologists, who looked at this process in other contexts.
In 1966, Foucault published a groundbreaking work, Les Mots el les choses: Une Archeologie des sciences humanes (translated in 1971 as The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences), which demonstrated a dramatic change in his approach to history and philosophy. In this work, he argued against the acceptance of the traditional understanding of history as a sequence of events driven by individuals. He developed the idea of an archeology or genealogy of knowledge production. Foucault examined the continuities and discontinuities between "epistemes", which he defined as the knowledge systems that primarily informed the thinking during certain periods of history. Therefore, history could be divided into periods marked by the domination of different knowledge systems. In addition, this theory allowed him to examine the social context in which certain knowledges and practices were permitted. Finally, he concluded that knowledge is always connected to power.
These knowledge and power systems were contained in discourses. Foucault saw discourses as more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the "nature" of the body, unconscious and conscious mind, and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern. There is no fixed and definitive structuring of either social or personal identity or practice. Instead, both the formation of identities and practices are related to, or are a function of, historically specific discourses. In effect, individuals were trained to act within the discourse of their time. Foucault believed an understanding of how these and other discursive constructions are formed might open the way for social change.
Foucault's next major work, published in 1975, was Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (translated in 1977 as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison). In this book, he charts the transition from a top-down form of social control in the form of physical coercion by the sovereign to a more diffuse and insidious form of social surveillance and process of "normalization." According to Foucault, normalization is encapsulated by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a nineteenth-century prison system in which prison cells were arranged around a central watchtower from which the supervisor could watch inmates. In this prison, the inmates could never be certain when they were being watched, so, over time, they began to police their own behavior. The Panopticon was a metaphor for the processes whereby disciplinary "technologies", together with the emergence of a normative social science, police both the mind and body of the modern individual.
In all of his works, Foucault expressed a relativistic conception of the prevailing conceptions about what counts as knowledge and as acceptable discourse. He relished subverting conventional assumptions while understanding the implication of his relativism: he could not pretend to think from a position outside the variety he described. His idea that the approved knowledge of a period is a leading device for the exercise of power over those it brands as deviant suggests a desire to emancipate the oppressed.
Foucault did not confine himself to the academy. He campaigned for prison reform and later for gay rights. In his last years, his interest in sexuality led him to begin writing a multivolume work entitled Histoire de la sexualite (translated as History of Sexuality). He published three volumes in which he recounted how people in Western societies came to understand themselves as sexual beings. Foucault died on June 25, 1984, in Paris.
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