Paul-Michel Foucault, known as Michel Foucault, was a French philosopher, literary critic and historian of ideas, born in 1926, who analyzed the relationships between power, knowledge and liberty and how they are used as a form of social control through institutions. Sometimes called a structuralist or postmodernist, he rejected both labels and sought to critique authority without limiting himself to a single framework. His thought influenced scholarship in many fields, including anthropology, communication studies, criminology, cultural studies, feminism, literary theory, psychology and sociology, and his arguments against homophobia, racial prejudice and other ideological doctrines also shaped scholarship on critical theory and Marxism. He died in 1984. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Nationality / Culture Defining ContributionAnalyzed how power, knowledge and institutions jointly produce social control, tracing this through the history of the prison, the clinic, sexuality, and systems of thought. 1 Notable WorkDiscipline and Punish (1975) 1 Connections
Associated With
Michel Foucault is among the theorists most closely identified with poststructuralism, alongside Derrida.
Source Wikipedia: Poststructuralism
Institutions Informed
Butler theory of gender performativity draws explicitly on Foucault genealogical account of how power produces the categories it appears only to regulate.
Rose governmentality studies directly extend Foucault late work on power, discipline and the government of the self.
Theories Developed
Michel Foucault developed panopticism in Discipline and Punish, using Bentham panopticon as a figure for modern disciplinary power that operates through the internalized possibility of being watched.
Michel Foucault developed the power/knowledge concept across his later work to describe how power and the production of accepted knowledge are mutually constitutive rather than separable.
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Geography Atlas: France, nationality there.
Sources
1. Michel Foucault (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationLead section
Paul-Michel Foucault, known as Michel Foucault, was a French philosopher, literary critic, and historian of ideas who analyzed the relationships between power, knowledge, and liberty, and how they are used as a form of social control through institutions.
lead paragraph, opening sentences (dates through structuralist/postmodernist rejection)
15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, literary critic, and historian of ideas who analyzed the relationships between power, knowledge, and liberty, and how they are used as a form of social control through institutions. Sometimes called a structuralist or postmodernist, he rejected these labels and sought to critique authority without limiting himself.
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