Michel Foucault

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.