Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Quotation

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ''politicians'' think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

Books

Please browse our Amazon list of titles about Michel Foucault. For rare and hard to find works we recommend our Alibris list of titles about Michel Foucault.

Research

COPAC UK: Michel Foucault
Library of Canada: Michel Foucault
Library of Congress: Michel Foucault
Other Library Catalogs: Michel Foucault

Biographical

The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) had an enormous impact on many fields including literary criticism and theory, philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis. He is considered a postmodernist (though some consider his earlier works, like The Order of Things, to be structuralist). Foucault was born in Poitiers, France on October 15, 1926. One of his most popular works, Discipline and Punish, looks at the ways in which the overt control through fear used in pre-modern times (public executions and torture, for example) have been generally replaced with covert, psychological controls.

Modern society is compared with Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon design for prisons, in which a few guards are able to watch many prisoners, while themselves remaining unseen. Foucault also remarks that since the birth of the prison system, prison has frequently been considered to be the only solution for criminal behavior. Foucault died in Paris on June 26, 1984 from complications resulting from HIV/AIDS. [This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Michel Foucault.]

Books from Alibris: Michel Foucault