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| Books by Michel Foucault | |
|---|---|
| Name | Michel Foucault |
| Caption | Michel Foucault |
| Birth date | 15 October 1926 |
| Death date | 25 June 1984 |
| Occupation | Philosopher, Historian, Theorist |
| Notable works | Discipline and Punish; The History of Sexuality |
Books by Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault’s books map a trajectory through French philosophy and intellectual history centered on inquiries into power, knowledge, and institutions such as the prison, madness, and sexuality. His corpus influenced debates across structuralism, post-structuralism, continental philosophy, sociology, and literary theory, intersecting with figures and entities like Georges Canguilhem, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Cesare Beccaria, and institutions such as the École Normale Supérieure, Collège de France, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, University of Clermont-Ferrand, and Université Paris 8.
Foucault’s book-length studies include early works like Madness and Civilization and later landmark volumes such as The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and the multi-volume The History of Sexuality. These texts dialogue with historical episodes and institutions—the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, the July Monarchy, the nineteenth century, World War II, the Paris Commune—and with thinkers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Michel de Montaigne and Voltaire. Editions and lectures delivered at venues like the Collège de France produced published courses that shaped contemporaneous debates involving journals and movements connected to Tel Quel, Minuit, Gallimard, Seuil, and intellectual circles around Simone Weil and Jean Hyppolite.
Key monographs include Madness and Civilization, an engagement with archives such as the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris and figures like Philippe Pinel; The Order of Things, which invokes taxa from natural history and figures like Linnaeus; Discipline and Punish, centered on the Panopticon and technologies associated with Jeremy Bentham and Alexis de Tocqueville; and The History of Sexuality, interacting with medical authorities like Sigmund Freud, Magnus Hirschfeld, and institutions such as hospitals, asylums, and prisons. His published lecture series—Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population, The Birth of Biopolitics, The Hermeneutics of the Subject—were delivered at the Collège de France and later edited by teams including Gourevitch, Miller, and Foucault's estate scholars. Editions by publishers such as Gallimard, Folio, Éditions Gallimard, Pantheon Books, Vintage Books, and Penguin Books made translations available worldwide.
Across his books Foucault tracks transformations in authority as they relate to institutions like the prison, psychiatric hospitals, schools, military academies, and medical clinics, drawing on historians and theorists such as Michel de Certeau, E. P. Thompson, Natalie Zemon Davis, Victor Hugo, Foucault's contemporaries and legal texts like the Code Napoléon and debates around penal reform. He mobilizes genealogical methods derived from Friedrich Nietzsche and archaeological methods referencing Émile Durkheim and Claude Lévi-Strauss, while engaging with debates sparked by Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida. Major thematic arcs include analyses of disciplinary techniques (linking to Jeremy Bentham and Panopticism), the emergence of modern subjectivity (echoing René Descartes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau), and the formation of sexual identity in relation to Victorian England, Fin-de-siècle Europe, and medico-legal regimes.
Foucault’s texts first appeared in French with publishers such as Gallimard and Seuil and later English translations by Alan Sheridan, Robert Hurley, P. Rabinow (Paul Rabinow), David Macey, James D. Faubion, Sherry Simon, and others. The translation history intersects with international intellectual networks involving Harvard University Press, Columbia University Press, Routledge, Princeton University Press, University of Chicago Press, Stanford University Press, and journals like Les Temps Modernes and Critique. Posthumous editorial projects compiled lecture transcripts, correspondence with figures such as Gaston Bachelard and Jean Hyppolite, and archival materials housed at archives including the Bibliothèque nationale de France and university special collections.
Foucault’s books provoked responses from contemporaries and successors like Noam Chomsky, who debated him publicly, and critics in schools associated with structuralism, post-structuralism, critical theory, and queer theory—including Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Nancy Fraser, Jürgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Seyla Benhabib, Terry Eagleton, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Paul Veyne, and Giorgio Agamben. His influence extended into movements and institutions such as May 1968 protests, second-wave feminism, LGBT rights movement, penal reform campaigns, and debates within human rights and bioethics domains. Scholarly disputes over his methods implicated historians like Natalie Zemon Davis and Roger Chartier and philosophers including John Rawls and Robert Nozick.
Posthumous compilations include edited volumes of lectures and essays, collected shorter writings in series by Gallimard and Folio Essais, and critical editions produced by editors like Frédéric Gros, Jacques Ruffié, Jean Leclercq, and translators who curated texts for readers via Blackwell, Verso Books, and academic series at Oxford University Press. Unfinished manuscripts, correspondence with figures such as André Breton and Paul Ricoeur, and archival exhibitions have been organized by institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Musée d'Orsay, and university archives, continuing scholarly engagement across disciplines and nations.
Category:Works by Michel Foucault