Foucault begins his history in the Middle Ages, noting the social and physical exclusion of lepers.

Foucault begins by contrasting two forms of penalty: the violent and chaotic public torture of Robert-François Damiens, who was convicted of attempted regicide in the mid-18th century, and the highly regimented daily schedule for inmates from an early 19th century prison ( Mettray ).

Foucault begins to chart through this historical, political reasoning behind the doctrine raison d ' état ( reason of state ).

Foucault begins to try to trace back through time how this was at all possible, Foucault manages this task by reading into the set of practices interwoven into the policy of society, this was accomplished from the 16th until the 18th century where there was a whole set of practices of tax levies, customs, charges, manufacture regulations, regulations of grain prices, the protection and codification of market practices, etc.

Foucault proceeds to examine how the confession of sexuality then came to be " constituted in scientific terms ", arguing that scientists began to trace the cause of all aspects of human psychology and society to sexual factors.

Foucault tries to trace the ' government of things ' ( as he refers to it ) with its direct collaboration and correlation to modern society as it is today ; starting from Niccolo Machiavelli with The Prince in 1513, where Foucault noticed that there wasn't unanimous reception over the prince.

First of all the discourse of raison d ' état and salvation ; Foucault manages to trace conceptually the system of salvation through the 17th century usage of coup d ' état politics.

Foucault manages to trace this anomaly through the subject of right ( known as consent of the governed the theory of right of that legal theorists of the 18th century tried to establish during their legal discourse ) which did receive a great deal of attention because of what was perceived at the time of problems regarding the sovereign's power.

Critchley offers the example of the ‘ will of God ’ as the prime example of obscurantism, but within continental philosophy also the ‘ drives ’ in Sigmund Freud, ‘ archetypes ’ in Carl Jung, the ‘ real ’ in Jaques Lacan, ‘ power ’ in Michel Foucault, ‘ différance ’ in Jaques Derrida, the ‘ trace of God ’ in Emmanuel Levinas, and the ‘ epochal withdrawal of being in and as history ’ in Martin Heidegger.

Following Nietzsche, Foucault argued that knowledge is produced through the operations of power, and changes fundamentally in different historical periods.

Using ideas about power and subjectification first broached by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, and the linguistic theories of J. L. Austin, Butler argued that sex was an effect rather than the cause of social gender difference, and that the fiction of a stable core gender identity was maintained through socially coerced performances of gender.

" Foucault traces the role of discourses in wider social processes of legitimating and power, emphasizing the construction of current truths, how they are maintained and what power relations they carry with them .” Foucault later theorized that discourse is a medium through which power relations produce speaking subjects.

Hyppolite devoted his energies to uniting the existentialist theories then in vogue among French philosophers with the dialectical theories of Hegel and Karl Marx ( 1818 – 1883 ); these ideas influenced the young Foucault, who would adopt Hyppolite's conviction that philosophy must be developed through a study of history.

Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the " Classical Age " ( the later seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries ) and the modern experience.

" It is through this visibility, Foucault writes, that modern society exercises its controlling systems of power and knowledge ( terms Foucault believed to be so fundamentally connected that he often combined them in a single hyphenated concept, " power-knowledge ").

Foucault suggests that a " carceral continuum " runs through modern society, from the maximum security prison, through secure accommodation, probation, social workers, police, and teachers, to our everyday working and domestic lives.

The widespread adoption of these authorization-based security strategies ( where the default state is DEFAULT = DENY ) for counterterrorism, anti-fraud, and other purposes is helping accelerate the ongoing transformation of modern societies from a notional Beccarian model of criminal justice based on accountability for deviant actions after they occur, see Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment ( 1764 ), to a Foucauldian model based on authorization, preemption, and general social compliance through ubiquitous preventative surveillance and control through system constraints, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish ( 1975, Alan Sheridan, tr., 1977, 1995 ).

In 1850, he did an experiment using the Fizeau – Foucault apparatus to measure the speed of light ; it came to be known as the Foucault – Fizeau experiment, and was viewed as " driving the last nail in the coffin " of Newton's corpuscle theory of light when it showed that light travels more slowly through water than through air.

This for Foucault made punishment and the criminal become an integral part of ' western ' scientific rationality basing it on a model ' cure ' for reforms and meant two things ; a surface of inscription for power / knowledge, knowledge / objects and the submission of bodies through the control of ideas ; the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics of bodies, which for Foucault was far more effective than the old institutions of torture and executions.

Foucault describes the painting in meticulous detail, but in a language that is " neither prescribed by, nor filtered through the various texts of art-historical investigation ".

In this course Foucault tries to establish an alternative conception of militancy and revolution through a reading of Diogenes and Cynicism.

* " a ' guideline ' for the analysis that Michel Foucault offers by way of historical reconstructions embracing a period starting from Ancient Greece right through to modern neo-liberalism "

The notion of governmentality ( not to confuse with governance ) gained attention in the English-speaking academic world mainly through the edited book The Foucault Effect ( 1991 ), which contained a series of essays on the notion of governmentality, together with a translation of Foucault's 1978 short text on " gouvernementalité ".

Scholars such as Michel Foucault, the Frankfurt School and other postmodernists have argued that the process of othering has everything to do with knowledge, and power acting through knowledge to achieve a particular political agenda in its goal of domination.

Although some critics believe that these former philosophers have made more of an impact on New Historicism as a whole, there is a popularly held recognition that Foucault ’ s ideas have passed through the New Historicist formation in history as a succession of épistémes or structures of thought that shape everyone and everything within a culture ( Myers 1989 ).

Foucault insists social institutions such as governments, laws, religion, politics, social administration, monetary institutions, military institutions cannot have the same rigorous practices and procedure with claims to independent knowledge like those of the human sciences ; such as mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, physics, genetics and the biological sciences for example so its workings ( and therefore, its rationale and acceptance ) consent to making it imperative that its ' substance ' has too function as axiomatic strategic logic to be accomplished by other methods obscurity, invisibility, sanctions and if necessary by ' cohesion ' ( by those caught within the networks ) or, failing that, coercion not coercion through threat but by your own rationality as " what is the alternative "?

Drawing on Michel Foucault ’ s concept of liberal government, Tony Bennett has suggested the development of more modern 19th century museums was part of new strategies by Western governments to produce a citizenry that, rather than be directed by coercive or external forces, monitored and regulated its own conduct.

At the same time he gave assistance to his friend Pierre Foucault who was working on the development of a device that could emboss letters in the manner of a typewriter.

Lyotard and other poststructuralist thinkers ( like Foucault ) view this as a broadly positive development for a number of reasons.

According to Foucault, by the 19th-century, when capitalism and industrialisation had allowed for the development of a dominant bourgeoisie social class, discourse on sex was not suppressed, but in fact proliferated.

Part three, " Scientia Sexualis ", explores the development of the scientific study of sex, the attempt to unearth the " truth " of sex, a phenomenon which Foucault argues is peculiar to the west.

The second part of Foucault ’ s definition ( the " resulting, on the one hand, in formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs ") presents governmentality as the long, slow development of Western governments which eventually took over from forms of governance like sovereignty and discipline into what it is today: bureaucracies and the typical methods by which they operate.

Foucault wants to tie scientific knowledge and technological development to the development of the prison to prove this point.

The emergence of prison as the form of punishment for every crime grew out of the development of discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to Foucault.

By quoting Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi “ of laws and regulations that concern the interior of a state and which endeavours to strengthen and increase the power of this state and make good use of its forces .” What Foucault reveals is that the original police had a different function as we know it today ; for example one of their primary function was to administer the state in the guise of statisticians, allocating resources, supervision of grain in times of crisis, ensuring circulation of goods and men, secure the development of the state ’ s forces.

There has been a considerable development of this topic since Michel Foucault broached it in his book The Order of Things ( 1966 ).

While Foucault himself was deeply involved in a number of progressive political causes and maintained close personal ties with members of the far-Left, he was also controversial with Leftist thinkers of his day, including those associated with various strains of Marxism, proponents of Left libertarianism ( e. g. Noam Chomsky ) and Humanism ( e. g. Jürgen Habermas ), for his rejection of what he deemed to be Enlightenment-derived concepts of freedom, liberation, self-determination and human nature.

Michel Foucault believed that modern political theory was too state-centric, saying " Maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythologized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think.

As a philosopher, Foucault applied the discursive formation in the analyses of large bodies of knowledge, such as political economy and natural history.

After taking up his post, Foucault soon developed a friendship with Vuillemin despite their political differences ; Vuillemin being a rightist and Foucault a leftist.

In 1979 Foucault made two tours of Iran, undertaking extensive interviews with political protagonists in support of the new interim government established soon after the Iranian Revolution.

Later on when Foucault went to Iran “ to be there at the birth of a new form of ideas ,” he wrote that the new “ Muslim ” style of politics could signal the beginning of a new form of “ political spirituality ,” not just for the Middle East, but also for Europe, which had adopted the practice of secular politics ever since the French Revolution.

Much of this debate is related to the works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault ( 1926 – 1984 ), who, following the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli ( 1469 – 1527 ), sees power as " a complex strategic situation in a given society social setting ".

Foucault also suggested that a focus on the rights of patients at Bicetre was partly due to revolutionary concerns that it housed and chained victims of arbitrary or political power, or alternatively that it might be enabling refuge for anti-revolutionary suspects, as well as just ' the mad '.

Foucault regarded him as the founder of the historico-political discourse as political weapon.

According to Foucault, the very notion of the criminal had became political within the confines of Political economy, the western legal system had been transformed from one of cruelty to one of repeating one's crimes over and over again, therefore producing the ' rational ' professional criminal ; criminals were punished differently ( and less dramatically, rather ironically ).

Indeed, Foucault states that at the start of the 18th century, there was an emergence of " a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex ", with self-appointed experts speaking both moralistically and rationally on sex, the latter trying to categorise it.

To fully understand this concept, it is important to realize that in this case, Foucault does not only use the standard, strictly political definition of " governing " or government used today, but he also uses the broader definition of governing or government that was employed until the eighteenth century.

They acknowledge that this definition lacks some of Foucault ’ s finer nuances and try to redress this by explaining some more of Foucault ’ s ideas, including reason of state, the problem of population, modern political economy, liberal securitisation, and the emergence of the human sciences ".

This reflects that the term government to Foucault meant not so much the political or administrative structures of the modern state as the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups may be directed.

Harley, drawing on Foucault, affirms that State-produced maps " extend and reinforce the legal statutes, territorial imperatives, and values stemming from the exercise of political power ".

The journal, like the book, focuses on the further elaboration of the philosophical and political thought of the Italian operaismo, but seems also to rest on Foucault, Althusser, and Deleuze's thought.

With the concept of " biopower ", which first appears in courses concerning the discourse of " race struggle "( Society Must Be Defended 1975-1976 courses ), Foucault uses terms such as mechanism, dispositif, apparatus, Discourse, Genealogy in order to get us to think ( and write about ) of this version of power as continuous, penetrable, observable as opposed to the classical argument seeing man as :" inherent primate disposition for hierarchical social and authoritarian political systems. With a predisposition for social and political hierarchical structures.

Foucault then takes on the concept into a different direction by positioning it between biological processes, the control of human populations through political means ; government, management and Social organization ; through work, the labor force and the ruthless efficiency of the organization of money through the International monetary systems of whole human populations ( bio ) and politics ( polis ), this is essentially Foucault's meaning of biopolitics ; human biology and its amalgamation with politics.

This is a slight point to make but a valid one when considering that he was effectively the ' master of the archive ' and was brilliant at excavating ' obscure material ' Foucault concentrates more on neo-liberalism's political justification for state existence, rather than Skinner's techniques on controlling human behavior through controlling the mind Manuel Castells while operating in the field of social science dares to venture outside the limited field of social science which he noticed in his brilliant work Communication Power where

Foucault further notices that political economy had a new tool called statistics founded by the Physiocrats economists ( another term for scientific government ) and it is with François Quesnay that this process can be found the very notion of economic government.

Statistics was just a tactic to this new kind of political power, for Foucault statistics doesn't mean counting, it means the large population which can be expanded at will within the new territory, the modern idea of this is globalisation which rather differs somewhat from Marx's conception of surplus value with its ultimate aim to produce surplus population.