Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher who traced how knowledge, power, institutions, and forms of selfhood emerge through history. History of Madness and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason examine changing boundaries around reason and unreason. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison follows the movement from spectacular punishment toward surveillance and disciplinary control, while Archaeology of Knowledge explains a method for studying the rules that shape discourse. His questions widen again in work on sexuality and ethical self-formation. Discipline and Punish gives the clearest institutional route into his thought; History of Madness supplies the deeper historical challenge, and Archaeology of Knowledge clarifies the analytical vocabulary behind both without reducing his work to one formula.