Michel Foucault in Five Key Books

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Michel Foucault (Poitiers, 1926 · Paris, 1984) is one of the most cited authors in the humanities and social sciences. In 1969 he was elected to the Collège de France to the chair of the History of Systems of Thought, which he held until his death (Gutting and Oksala, 2022). He did not write a philosophical system in the classical style. He wrote histories: of madness, of medicine, of the human sciences, of the prison and of sexuality. Through them he asked a question that still makes people uneasy: how did we come to think that certain things are normal, natural or true?

This post goes through five books that serve as a way into his work, in the order he published them.

1. History of Madness (1961)

This was his doctoral thesis and his first major book. Foucault studies how Europe went from living alongside the madman to locking him up. In the 17th century came the “great confinement”: general hospitals where the mad, the poor, vagrants and libertines were shut away with little distinction. Later, with Pinel and Tuke, the madman is “freed” from his chains and handed over to the asylum and the doctor.

The book's thesis is that this liberation was not just a humanitarian advance. The idea that madness is a mental illness, which looks like a neutral and scientific description, also served to keep watch over those who defied bourgeois morality. For Foucault, that idea is the product of highly questionable social and ethical commitments (Gutting and Oksala, 2022).

Why read it: it shows the method Foucault would use all his life. He takes something we consider obvious, in this case the line between reason and madness, and tells the story of how it was drawn.

2. The Order of Things (1966)

Subtitled “an archaeology of the human sciences,” it was an unexpected bestseller in France. Here Foucault introduces the notion of the episteme: the set of rules, almost always unconscious, that determine what can be meaningfully thought and said in a given period (Gutting and Oksala, 2022).

The book describes three great epistemes. In the Renaissance, knowledge is organized by resemblance. In the classical age (17th and 18th centuries) it is organized by representation, in tables and classifications, as in general grammar, natural history and the analysis of wealth. In the modern age come philology, biology and political economy, and with them a new figure: “man” as an object of knowledge. According to Foucault, in the classical age there was no epistemological awareness of man as such. Kant is the turning point (Gutting and Oksala, 2022).

Hence the book's most famous sentence, in its last lines: if those arrangements of knowledge were to disappear, “one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault, 1970).

Why read it: this is Foucault at his most ambitious and most difficult. Start with the preface, which opens with Borges's famous Chinese encyclopedia.

3. The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

This is the book on method. After three histories, Foucault stops to explain what he has been doing. He calls it archaeology: studying discourses not to find what an author meant to say, but the rules that made it possible for certain statements to appear and others not to. Those rules work beneath the awareness of individuals (Gutting and Oksala, 2022).

Concepts such as “statement,” “discursive formation” and “archive” come from here and are used today in discourse analysis, history and sociology.

Why read it: it is dry, but it clarifies the vocabulary of the earlier books. Many readers read it after the others, as a toolbox.

4. Discipline and Punish (1975)

This is probably his most widely read book. It opens with a brutal scene: the public torture of Damiens in 1757. A few pages later it presents the detailed rules of a house for young prisoners in Paris some eighty years afterward. Between one scene and the other, punishment stopped being a spectacle inflicted on the body and became a technique for correcting the soul.

Foucault argues that penal reform was not simply more humane. It was a more effective form of control: to punish less, perhaps, but to punish better (Gutting and Oksala, 2022). That is the birth of disciplinary power, which is exercised not only in the prison but also in the school, the barracks, the factory and the hospital.

Its central image is Jeremy Bentham's panopticon: a tower in the center from which every cell can be observed without the observer being seen. Since the prisoner never knows whether he is being watched, he ends up watching himself (Gutting and Oksala, 2022). With this book Foucault moves from archaeology to genealogy, a method taken from Nietzsche that shows how our institutions arose from contingent historical events rather than from inevitable progress. He also develops the idea of power-knowledge: power and knowledge are not opposed but produce each other. The examination, for example, joins the deployment of force with the establishment of truth (Gutting and Oksala, 2022).

Why read it: it is the most accessible of the five and the one most often used to think about surveillance, today including digital surveillance.

5. The History of Sexuality (1976-2018)

Foucault planned a long series and managed to publish three volumes. The fourth appeared in 2018, more than thirty years after his death (Gutting and Oksala, 2022).

Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (1976)

He rejects the “repressive hypothesis,” the idea that since the Victorian era society silenced and repressed sex. According to Foucault the opposite happened: it was talked about more and more, in medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy and confession. Power does not only forbid, it also produces identities and forms of knowledge. Here the concept of biopower appears: a power no longer defined by the sovereign's right to take life, but by the task of managing, optimizing and regulating the life of populations (Gutting and Oksala, 2022).

Volumes 2 and 3: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (1984)

Published shortly before his death, they turn toward Greek and Roman antiquity. They no longer study how power shapes subjects, but how individuals form themselves as ethical subjects. This is the theme of the care of the self, which Foucault presents as a way of resisting normalizing power (Gutting and Oksala, 2022).

Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh (2018)

It studies the Church Fathers, such as Cassian and Augustine, and the Christian practices of penance, spiritual direction and confession. For Foucault, one of the origins of the modern subject lies there: a subject who knows himself by examining and telling the truth about his inner life (Gutting and Oksala, 2022). For a Christian reader it is the most interesting volume and the one that most invites discussion.

Why read it: the first volume is short and is perhaps the best introduction to his idea of power.

Where to start?

If you have never read Foucault, a reasonable order is this:

1. Discipline and Punish, because it is the most narrative.
2. The History of Sexuality, volume 1, which is short and condenses his theory of power.
3. History of Madness, to see where his questions began.
4. The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, once you feel comfortable with his style.

Foucault does not give closed answers, and many of his historical theses have been disputed by specialists. His value lies in the questions: who decides what is normal? What forms of power are at work in what looks like mere knowledge? What do we do with ourselves when we examine ourselves? Reading him with a critical eye is a good way to learn to see what we take for granted.

Bibliography

• Foucault, M. (2006). History of Madness. Trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. London: Routledge. Original: Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (1961).
• Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. Original: Les mots et les choses (1966).
• Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock. Original: L'archéologie du savoir (1969).
• Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. Original: Surveiller et punir (1975).
• Foucault, M. (1978-2021). The History of Sexuality (4 vols.). Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Pantheon. Originals: La volonté de savoir (1976), L'usage des plaisirs and Le souci de soi (1984), Les aveux de la chair (2018).
• Gutting, G., and J. Oksala (2022). “Michel Foucault.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. View online.

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