Michel Foucault Biography

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World of Sociology on Michel Foucault

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 assumptions, especially about mental illness, prisons, police, insurance, care of the mentally ill, sexuality, gay rights, welfare, and the effects of power.

Born in Poitiers, France, Foucault studied philosophy and psychology at the elite École Normale Superieure in Paris. During the 1960s, he served as head of the philosophy departments at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and the University of Vincennes. In 1970, he was elected to the highest academic post in France, the College de France, where he took the title, Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. During the 1970s and 1980s his international reputation grew as he lectured around the world.

German philosophers Frederick Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger were major influences on Foucault's thought, as were philosophies from ancient and medieval times. Foucault explored the shifting patterns of power within a society and the ways in which power at various levels affects individuals. He investigated how beliefs which society hold to be absolutely true in one era--for example, the idea that homosexuals are mentally ill--are proven false later and replaced by other beliefs held to be absolutely true. Foucault also studied how everyday practices, including sexuality, help shape identity, and he argued that each way of understanding has advantages and disadvantages.

In his early period, Foucault traced how, in the Western world, madness, which was once thought to be divinely inspired, came to be thought of as mental illness. He attempted to expose the creative force of madness that Western societies have traditionally repressed. In the last years of his life, Foucault questioned whether imprisonment is a more humane punishment than torture. He also traced the way in which people in Western societies have come to understand themselves as sexual beings, and he related how moral and ethical beliefs affect sexuality.

A large part of Foucault's later years also were spent showing that Western society has developed a new kind of power called bio-power: a system of control that traditional concepts of authority are unable to understand and criticize. Rather than being repressive, this new power enhances life. Foucault encouraged people to resist the welfare state by developing individual ethics with which they can turn their lives into what others can respect and admire.

Foucault's major works include: Mental Illness and Personality (1954); History of Madness in the Classical Age (1961); The Birth of the Clinic (1963); The Order of Things (1966); and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). His later works dealing with sexuality and religion, as well as modern thought, include: Discipline and Punish (1975); History of Sexuality (1976); The Confessions of the Flesh (unpublished); The Use of Pleasure (1984), and The Care of the Self (1984).