Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose analyses of how power operates through institutions — prisons, hospitals, asylums, schools — reshaped the humanities and social sciences. Works such as Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) examined how modern societies produce subjects through surveillance, normalization, and the regulation of bodies and desires. Foucault is among the most cited scholars in the humanities worldwide and a founding figure of poststructuralism and critical theory.