Foucault: Power-Knowledge, Discipline, and the Surveillance Society in Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault is perhaps the most cited thinker in the human sciences of the past half-century — and also one of the hardest to classify. He built no system, founded no school, and refused the labels “structuralist” and “postmodern.” What he left behind was a body of historical investigations so original that they rewrote the vocabulary of entire disciplines: what we now mean by “power,” “discourse,” “normalization,” and “surveillance” passed, in large part, through his pages. This article traces the core of his thought: the archaeological and genealogical method, the thesis that power and knowledge are inseparable, and the analysis of disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish. ...