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...