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.

Foucault traces the conceptual discourse of the populace back to the Middle Ages definition of the pastorate which to the Middle Ages mind meant salvation, obedience and truth.

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 wake of postmodern literature, critics such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have examined the role and relevance of authorship to the meaning or interpretation of a text.

This posture allows Foucault to denounce a priori concepts of the nature of the human subject and focus on the role of discursive practices in constituting subjectivity.

A point where Foucault and Szasz agreed was that sociological processes played the major role in defining " madness " as an " illness " and prescribing " cures ".

* The technical system is an apparatus which has a specific role ( wherein all objects are inserted: a technical object exists only insofar as it is disposed within such an apparatus with other technical objects: this is what Gilbert Simondon calls the technical group ): the rifle, for example, and more generally the technical becoming with which it forms a system, are thus the possibility of the emergence of a disciplinary society, according to Michel Foucault.

The traditional, commonsense view that the key to understanding works of art can be located in the intentions of the author, has been critiqued convincingly by authors such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault who emphasise the active role of the viewer / reader in creating meaning in visual and written texts.

The novel Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco deals greatly with this establishment, as the Foucault pendulum hung in the museum plays a great role in the storyline.

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.

Foucault then considers how Mercantilism played a big role in this new context of European balance of power ; these are the mercantilist requirements: every country should try to have the largest possible population, second ; the entire population be endgible and be put to work, third ; wages given to the population be as low as possible, fourth ; the cost price of goods at the lowest price as possible.

The theory of communicative rationality has been criticized for being utopian and idealistic ( Foucault 1988, Flyvbjerg 1998, Calhoun 1992 ), for being blind to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality ( Cohen 1995, Fraser 1987, Ryan 1992 ), and for ignoring the role of conflict, contest, and exclusion in the historical constitution of the public sphere ( Eley 1992 ).

Therefore, to describe a discursive formation, Foucault also focuses on expelled and forgotten discourses that never happened to change the discursive formation ( the genealogical analysis ).

The contemporary philosopher Michel Foucault used the term épisteme in a highly specialized sense in his work The Order of Things to mean the historical a priori that grounds knowledge and its discourses and thus represents the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch.

Following in the tradition of Michel Foucault, scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and David Halperin have argued that various Victorian public discourses, notably the psychiatric and the legal, fostered a designation or invention of the " homosexual " as a distinct category of individuals, a category solidified by the publications of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing ( 1840 – 1902 ) and Havelock Ellis ( 1859 – 1939 ), sexologists who provided an almost-pathological interpretation of the phenomenon in rather Essentialist terms, an interpretation that led, before 1910, to hundreds of articles on the subject in The Netherlands, Germany, and elsewhere.

But, following Michel Foucault, such systems are formed through the savoir and pouvoir ( knowledge and power ) of the hierarchies that control access to the discourses.

Drawing upon Foucault but also Quine and Wittgenstein, they criticised essentialism, epistemological discourses and the possibility of any general theory, in a move against careless sociological constructionist imperialism.

Foucault had initially received an offer of publication from the Presses Universitaires de France, but he wanted his work to be published by a popular rather than an academic press, so that it would reach a wider audience.

Its motif is the concept of the medical regard ( translated by Alan Sheridan as " medical gaze "), traditionally limited to small, specialized institutions such as hospitals and prisons, but which Foucault examines as subjecting wider social spaces, governing the population en masse.

In his lecture series from 1979 to 1980 Foucault extended his analysis of government to its ' wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the behaviour of men ', which involved a new consideration of the ' examination of conscience ' and confession in early Christian literature.

In his lecture series from 1979 to 1980 Foucault extended his analysis of government to its " wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the behaviour of men ", which involved a new consideration of the " examination of conscience " and confession in early Christian literature.

Michel Foucault expressed the wider usage of the doctrine of signatures, which rendered allegory more real and more cogent than it appears to a modern eye:

This notion is also part of a wider analysis on the topic of disciplinary institutions, on neoliberalism and the " Rule of Law ", the " microphysics of power " and also on what Foucault called biopolitics.

The industrial working population which comprises the overwhelming majority of human populations anywhere in the world, in a wider context unwittingly there must be at least seen, essentially a systematic position however clandestinely operated, without disruption taking place of economic productivity and activity which still has to take place in a smooth, transitory and unfussy way this then takes on a new meaning Foucault offers us a chilling reminder of those who take part, through no fault of their own, in this involuntary naive complicity he introduces to us the concept of Homo economicus ( economic man )

The most important French social theorist since Foucault and Lévi-Strauss is Pierre Bourdieu, who trained formally in philosophy and sociology and eventually held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France.

The work of French philosopher and social theorist, Michel Foucault has been utilized in a variety of disciplines, such as history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics.

Following an interpretation of power similar to that of Machiavelli, Foucault defines power as immaterial, as a " certain type of relation between individuals " that has to do with complex strategic social positions that relate to the subject's ability to control its environment and influence those around itself.

Often, the term " critical theory " is appropriated when an author ( perhaps most notably Michel Foucault ) works within sociological terms yet attacks the social or human sciences ( thus attempting to remain " outside " those frames of enquiry ).

However, the claims of such cultural universalism have been criticized by various 19th and 20th century social thinkers, including Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser and Deleuze.

Since the 1950s, when Lacan and Foucault argued that each epoch has its own knowledge system, which individuals are inexorably entangled with, many post-structuralists have used historicism to describe the view that all questions must be settled within the cultural and social context in which they are raised.

While, theoretically relying on Michel Foucault ’ s theory of discipline and governmentality, as well as related insights in the social control literature, this paper examines Project Carnivore relative to the larger context of state rationality and related privacy issues.

Thinkers such as Althusser, Foucault or Bourdieu theorize the subject as a social construction.

In direct contradiction to what have been typified as Modernist perspectives on epistemology, Foucault asserted that rational judgment, social practice and what he called ' biopower ' are not only inseparable but co-determinant.

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.

However, by the late 1960s, many of Structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from a new wave of predominantly French intellectuals such as the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the philosopher and social commentator Jacques Derrida, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the literary critic Roland Barthes.

The basic view of knowledge that motivated the emergence of social epistemology can be traced to the work of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, which gained in prominence at the end of the 1960s.

In terms of the two strands of social epistemology, Fuller is more sensitive and receptive to this historical trajectory ( if not always in agreement ) than Goldman, whose self-styled ' veritistic ' social epistemology can be reasonably read as a systematic rejection of the more extreme claims associated with Kuhn and Foucault.

* 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 )”.

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

Michel Foucault (; born Paul-Michel Foucault ) ( 15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984 ) was a French philosopher, social theorist, historian of ideas, and literary critic.

Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, social anthropology of medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality.

In the book, Foucault dealt with the manner in which Western European society had dealt with madness, arguing that it was a social construct distinct from mental illness.

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

Foucault also argues that madness was silenced by Reason, losing its power to signify the limits of social order and to point to the truth.