Michel Foucault

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Michel Foucault (1926–84) was a French historian, philosopher and theorist who critically analyzed social institutions - medicine, psychiatry and the designation of 'madness', sexuality and prisons - and attempted to show a hidden discourse of power behind them. As an activist, Foucault was radicalised after the 1968 Paris student riots and founded an organisation called the Prisoners Information Group - Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (or GIP) - which saw prisoners as an oppressed component of the proletariat to be liberated.

Works

  • Madness and Civilization (1961)
  • The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
  • The Order of Things (1966)
  • The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
  • Discipline and Punish (1975)
  • The History of Sexuality (vol. i, 1976)