The Foucault Reader

Michel Foucault was one of the most influential philosophical thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half a dozen disciplines ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But of his many books, not one offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose.

The Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume, the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality, and interviews with Foucault himself, in the course of which he discussed his philosophy at first hand and with unprecedented candor.

This philosophy comprises an astonishing intellectual enterprise: a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. Foucault's analyses of this power as it manifests itself in society, schools, hospitals, factories, homes, families, and other forms of organized society are brought together in The Foucault Reader to create an overview of this theme and of the broad social and political vision that underlies it.

• Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977
• Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
• The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language
• The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
• The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction
• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
• Democracy in America (First Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
• Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom
• The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure
• The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self