Michel Paul Foucault Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Michel Paul Foucault Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Michel Paul Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher and social theorist. Trained initially in philosophy and later in psychology, he turned to a critical analysis of modernity (including its conception and practices of knowledge and its practices of the self), the constitution of power, the development of modern institutions, and the deployment of discourses and practices of sexuality. In his accounts of these phenomena he examined how they were intertwined, often reinforcing one another, sometimes at odds with one another, and how they changed over time.

Foucault described his early work as a form of archaeology. This involved the detailed historical examination of the rules that govern systems of thought and discourses of knowledge with respect to any particular subject matter. For example, in History of Madness (2006; originally published in English in abridged form as Madness and Civilization), Foucault examines the development of rules of exclusion and confinement regarding those considered insane in the modern period. These rules were not those that were consciously applied, but those that operated just below the level of conscious examination and discussion of madness and reason that took place during the emergence of the modern account of unreason.

Foucault’s later work shifted to a genealogical focus that explored the changes that take place from any one historical period to another. This genealogical method, influenced by the work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, emphasizes the extent to which the changes that take place from one historical period to another do not reflect any grand strategy, conscious plan, or progressive laws of development but are the result of the contingent coincidence of historical and technological developments, competing systems of ideas, and the development of new institutions.

Several themes emerge in Foucault’s thought. Most fundamentally, along with Nietzsche, Foucault can be described as an ant essentialist. That is, he believed there is no single account of the world that reveals the essential world, as it is in itself. This also leads him to reject foundationalism, or the claim that there is a single form of knowledge that is the foundation for all other forms of knowledge.

Second, Foucault also challenged the Enlightenment idea that power and knowledge could and should be separated from one another. In his view every discourse of knowledge is made possible by networks of power and institutions, and every network of power is made possible by discourses of knowledge.

Third, much of Foucault’s later work concerns the ways in which the self—or the individual in modern terms—is constituted by practices, institutions, discourses of knowledge, technologies, and philosophical doctrines. His Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (originally published in 1975) is an examination of how modern systems of power in the form of surveillance, standards of normality, and systems of discipline take hold in modern institutions and everyday life, thereby constituting modern practices of the self that reflect less freedom than is understood by modern individuals. Similarly, his three-volume The History of Sexuality (originally published between 1976 and 1984) explores the changes that take place in how ideas and practices of sexuality are formed and the behaviors they impose on modern individuals.

In response to these phenomena, Foucault encouraged practices of the self that are resistant to forms of discipline, standards of normality, govern mentality, and subjugation. He articulated an ethics of the self that would help to provide for greater resistance to the increasing docility of individuals and the homogenization of modern, totalizing societies.

Bibliography:

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.
History of Madness. New York: Routledge, 2006.
The History of Sexuality. 3 vols. New York:Vintage, 1988–1990.