" 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.

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.

Foucault main feature in his work discipline and punish traces how it was possible that our society has become one in which surveillance and monitoring are permanent and constant features of our world.

* Foucault pendulum-which traces a rose curve as viewed from above.

Political means the institutions that are governing the rest of society ; government covered by legal institutions which gives both the political electorate, political executive and political legitimacy, Foucault traces this practice to the ancient Greek text from the Pythagoreans known as nomas ( meaning the law ) and according to this text the shepherd is the lawmaker, he directs the flock, indicates the right direction and says how the sheep must mate to have good offspring.

Foucault traces this original practice to government practices of the Middle Ages, where the term government meant an entirely different definition as modern society knows it.

Foucault traces this tactic back through history to the east ( Mediterranean East, Egypt, Assyrian Empire, Babylonian etc.

The invention of the political campaign which Foucault traces back through its original modern founder, Cardinal Richelieu, who according to Foucault actually invented the modern political campaign by means of lampoons and pamphlets and more importantly, invented those professional manipulators of opinion who were called at the time publicistes.

Foucault traces three examples which neo-liberalism call a conformable economic action ; firstly the question of monopolies which they claimed differed somewhat from classic liberalism.

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.

In The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception ( 1963 ), Foucault extended his critique to institutional clinical medicine, arguing for the central conceptual metaphor of " The Gaze ", which had implications for medical education, prison design, and the carceral state as understood today.

More broadly, Nussbaum criticized Michel Foucault for his " historical incompleteness and lack of conceptual clarity ", but nevertheless singled him out for providing " the only truly important work to have entered philosophy under the banner of " postmodernism ".

Foucault argues that this confinement made the mad conveniently available to medical doctors who then began to view madness as a natural object, worthy of inquiry ; and that the conceptual distinction between the mad and the reasonable was in a sense a product of this physical separation into confinement.

* In the work of Michel Foucault, and that of the social theoreticians he inspired: discourse describes “ an entity of sequences, of signs, in that they are enouncements ( énoncés )”.

This conception of discourse is largely derived from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault ( see below ).

French social theorist Michel Foucault developed a notion of discourse in his early work, especially the Archaeology of knowledge ( 1972 ).

Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from one period's episteme to another.

Foucault recognized the enormous power of the new discourse of militant Islam, not just for Iran, but for the world.

Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, in major and relatively sudden shifts, from one period's episteme to another.

Foucault reiterates that the analysis he is outlining is only one possible procedure, and that he is not seeking to displace other ways of analysing discourse or render them as invalid.

But, focusing on discursive meaning, Foucault did not look for a deeper meaning underneath discourse or for the source of meaning in some transcendental subject.

In addition, Michel Foucault used the terms episteme and discourse, mathesis and taxinomia, for aspects of a " paradigm " in Kuhn's original sense.

The historico-political discourse analyzed by Michel Foucault in Society Must Be Defended ( 1975 – 76 ) considered truth as the fragile product of a historical struggle, first conceptualized under the name of " race struggle " — however, " race "' s meaning was different from today's biological notion, being closer to the sense of " nation " ( distinct from nation-states ; its signification is here closer to " people ").

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

According to Foucault, Marxists also seized this discourse and took it in a different direction, transforming the essentialist notion of " race " into the historical notion of " class struggle ", defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian.

Foucault shows that what specifies this discourse from the juridical and philosophical discourse is its conception of truth: truth is no longer absolute, it is the product of " race struggle ".

Foucault warns that it has nothing to do with Machiavelli's or Hobbes's discourse on war, for to this popular discourse, the Sovereign is nothing more than " an illusion, an instrument, or, at the best, an enemy.

Michel Foucault referred more elaborately to mathesis as a rigorous episteme suitable for enabling cohesion of a discourse and thus uniting a community of its followers.

Further to this general theme, when one looks at much Social Constructivist discourse ( especially that informed by Michel Foucault ), one finds something of a bifurcation between the theorist and the non-theorist.

In addition to linguistic theory, the approach draws from social theory — and contributions from Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu — in order to examine ideologies and power relations involved in discourse.

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.

Entering the second chapter of this section, " The Perverse Implantation ", Foucault argues that prior to the 18th century, discourse on sexuality focused on the productive role of the married couple, which was monitored by both canonical and civil law.

In contrast, Foucault attempts to demonstrate the constitutive limits of discourse, and in particular, the rules enabling their productivity ; however, Foucault maintained that though ideology may infiltrate and form science, it need not do so: it must be demonstrated how ideology actually forms the science in question ; contradictions and lack of objectivity is not an indicator of ideology.

Foucault goes on to argue that Disciplinary punishment leads to self-policing by the populace as opposed to brutal displays of authority from the Monarchical period.

Philosophers who Vattimo exemplifies as a part of this back and forth movement are French philosophers Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida.

Foucault then notices that this formation of a liberal type of governmentality had general shifts within this circle which can be traced back to the 18th century old or classical liberalism programmed by the Physiocrats, Turgot, and the other economists of the 18th century, for whom the problem was the exact opposite.

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.

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.

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

Foucault looks at the early institutional practices of this method of frugal government, which starts from the early Middle Ages right down to the early 16th and 17th centuries.

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.

In his lecture titled Governmentality, Foucault gives us a definition of governmentality:

As Foucault ’ s explicit definition is rather broad, perhaps further examination of this definition would be useful.

We shall begin with a closer inspection of the first part of Foucault ’ s definition of governmentality:

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.

The next and last strand of Foucault ’ s definition of governmentality is " 3.

Hunt and Wickham, in their work Foucault and Law begin the section on governmentality with a very basic definition derived from Foucault ’ s work.

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 ".

According to Dean any definition of governmentality should incorporate all of Foucault ’ s intended ideas.

Thus, in modern European social sciences, one can find a wide range of different approaches working with Foucault ´ s definition of discourse and his theoretical concepts.

Foucault then offers rather tentative, slow and at times brilliant analysis of the basic definition of the practices of neo-liberalism art of government.