Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian who held a chair at the Collège de France in the history of systems of thought and wrote histories of madness, medicine, punishment and sexuality that showed how knowledge and power produce each other. Discipline and Punish of 1975 traces the shift from public torture to the prison and the disciplined body, and makes Bentham’s Panopticon the model of a society that watches itself. He was active in prison reform and gay politics and died of AIDS in 1984. He is the most cited author in the humanities and the one the lists have most recently admitted.