Foucault on Power, Knowledge, and Discourse

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) trained at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, studied under Althusser, and held, from 1970 until his death, the chair of "History of Systems of Thought" at the Collège de France, where his annual lecture courses developed much of the material later expanded into his books. His early works — Madness and Civilization (Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, 1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (Naissance de la clinique, 1963) — examined how psychiatry and clinical medicine constructed their objects of knowledge, such as madness and disease, through historically specific institutional practices rather than simply discovering pre-existing natural kinds. The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (L'Archéologie du savoir, 1969) developed the method Foucault called "archaeology," aimed at uncovering the largely unconscious rules — the episteme — governing what could count as a legitimate statement or object of knowledge within a given historical period, independent of any individual author's intentions.