Books by Michel Foucault

“Discipline and Punish is more theoretical and abstract than a lot of abolitionist writing, and Foucault is of course not just attacking the prison system, but other social systems of domination and control that he thinks are attendant to it. He has large ambitions here in critiquing a central feature of modern social life, one that some people now call the carceral system or carceral ways of responding to others and controlling others.” Read more...

The best books on Prison Abolition

Tommie Shelby, Philosopher

“These are lectures that Michel Foucault gave at the College de France in 1978 and 1979. They were only published in English in 2008. They still constitute some of the most interesting writing on neoliberalism. Foucault saw in neoliberalism an ideology that vastly increased the terrain of human activities that could be understood by reference to market principles.” Read more...

The best books on Neoliberalism

Gary Gerstle, Historian

“It begins with a painting: Velasquez’s Las Meninas. Foucault does a reading of that painting to show that at any particular moment in culture, the way that something gets represented and the ways in which we analyze representation – what we choose to see, what is emphasized, what occluded – is governed by a world view peculiar to that age. What he does is to track changes in the way that knowledge and ideas get organized from the Renaissance onward. And for my purposes what’s really extraordinary about this book is Foucault’s description of the renaissance world as being a world of infinite connectedness, infinite analogy, where it seems that everything is analogous or equivalent to everything else. So that if you think about the world of a Shakespeare play you realize that the world of finance and of magic and of the professional classes and of the aristocracy – poets, madmen – all of these worlds are knowable and fundamentally the same. But what happens with the Enlightenment is that suddenly it occurs to people that perhaps, rather than everything being comparable to everything else, rather than analogy being the system of understanding, that perhaps distinction and discrimination might be a better way of understanding the complete human experience. What’s particularly compelling about Foucault’s approach is that he recognizes that we are always struggling with the same problems: how to understand the world around us; how to connect different aspects of experience and give them meaning. This impulse to order is what we do when we think and Foucault recognizes the same impulse in every age; but by creating an anatomy of each distinct period since the renaissance he helps us to grasp the way in which people are looking and representing things differently even if they are asking very similar questions.” Read more...

The best books on The Enlightenment

Sophie Gee, Literary Scholar

“I wanted to recommend a couple of Foucault books here. He’s going through a less fashionable phase now, but I think he’s one of the most exciting, innovative thinkers of the twentieth century. I also wanted to show that part of post-structuralist thinking in the twentieth century – i.e. what went on to become cutting-edge modern philosophy – was still deeply indebted to the Enlightenment. Something amazing happened in the last years of the seventeenth century that somebody in the 1960s was still thinking through. And I suppose that the question Foucault asks is, how, after the catastrophes of the twentieth century—the Holocaust, the world wars, the economic depression—are we going to reground ourselves? How are we going to find an intellectual framework from which we can understand what we’ve done to ourselves and establish the foundations of an ethical life?” Read more...

The best books on The Enlightenment

Sophie Gee, Literary Scholar