Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984

Essential Works of Foucault (1954-1984) #3

by Michel Foucault

The definitive edition of Foucault's articles, interviews, and seminars.

Few philosophers have had as strong an influence on the twentieth century as Michel Foucault. His work has affected the teaching of any number of disciplines and remains, twenty years after his death, critically important. This newly available edition is drawn from the complete collection of all of Foucault's courses, articles, and interviews, and brings his most important work to a new generation of readers.

Power (edited by James D. Faubion) draws together Foucault's contributions to what he saw as the still-underdeveloped practice of political analysis. It covers the domains Foucault helped to make part of the core agenda of Western political culture—medicine, psychiatry, the penal system, and sexuality.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Psychology, France, Academic

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.

Reviews

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather than saying what lesson intellectuals should give to others, I would prefer to give you the one I try to give myself. I don’t really know what they mean by “intellectuals,” all the people who describe, denounce, or scold them. I do know, on the other hand, what I have committed myself to, as an intellectual, which is to say, after all, a cerebro-spinal individual: to having a brain as supple as possible and a spinal column that’s as straight as necessary.

Foucault's longer works have a lyricism and depth that maybe can't ever be reached in this collection of interviews, lectures, short essays, and other tid-bits -- but I love the pace of these works, the movement to them. More than just respecting the ideas, I started to feel an immense appreciation for the PERSON who was Michel Foucault, watching him question himself, change, concede to his critics, mock his critics, dig down into real projects of resistance with those at the wrong end of a power imbalance.

The interviews are great for this -- to see him surprised, or harried by a dogged interviewer, and still maintain a kind of easy brilliance and patience. Every interviewer wants to complain that Foucault doesn't tell us What To Do, and each gets a delightful response from a person who never wanted to craft a policy, but rather wanted to make facile answers by policy-crafters impossible, so the real work could be done by large groups of the most affected.

A lot of us who are interested in anarchist thought have been reading David Graeber, who sees Foucault as a paralyzer and distraction. I still think Graeber's more fundamental point is right -- academics who just write essays and want more personal choice can't claim to be The Radicals -- but this volume redeemed Foucault for me as a rebel-thinker.

[Priya · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an acceptable reference book since it collects most of his works on power and that, in itself, is both a good and a bad thing. Good because if you have that one quote of Foucault that you can't remember, you are likely to find it here (and the index is well-organised). Bad because, to be all Foucauldian about it, who decides these writings (and not others) are his works on power? Also, it misses out on how Foucault's thinking shifted from the (more) structural foundations of Archaelology... to later writings. These writings do not quite show how Foucault struggled with the concept of writing itself and how he saw the writer's role in creating and communicating texts. Surprisingly, my last book here--Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland --goes well with this one. Next up on the Foucault front, the latest book from his series of lectures-- Security, Territory, Population

[TL]

'Many things have been superseded, certainly. I'm perfectly aware of always being on the move in relation both to the things I'm interested in and to what I've already thought. What I think is never quite the same, because for me my books are experiences, in a sense, that I would like to be as full as possible. An experience is something one comes out of transformed. If I had to write a book to communicate what I'm already thinking before I begin to write, I would never have the courage to begin. I write a book only because I still don't exactly know what to think about this thing I want so much to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I think. Each book transforms what I was thinking when I was finishing the previous book. I am an experimenter and not a theorist. I call a theorist someone who constructs a general system, either deductive or analytical, and applies it to different fields in a uniform way. I'm an experimenter in the sense that I write in order to change myself and in order not to think the same thing as before.'

'When I write a book, not only do I not know what I'll be thinking at the end, but it's not very clear to me what method I will employ. Each of my books is a way of carving out an object and of fabricating a method of analysis. Once my work is finished, through a kind of retrospective reflection on the experience I've just gone through, I can extrapolate the method the book ought to have followed--so that I write books I would call exploratory somewhat in alternation with books of method.'

'The idea of a limit-experience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me in my reading of Nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot, and what explains the fact that however boring, however erudite my books may be, I've always conceived of them as direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free of myself, at preventing me from being the same.'

'The problem of the truth of what I say is a very difficult one for me: in fact, it's the central problem. That's the question I still haven't answered. And yet I make use of the most conventional methods: demonstration, or, at any rate, proof in historical matters, textual references, citation of authorities, drawing connections between texts and facts, suggesting schemes of intelligibility, offering different types of explanation. There is nothing original in what I do. From this standpoint, what I say in my books can be verified or invalidated in the same way as any other book of history.

In spite of that, the people who read me--particularly those who value what I do--often tell me with a laugh, "You know very well that what you say is really just fiction." I always reply, "Of course, there's no question of it being anything else but fiction."

...But my problem is not to satisfy professional historians; my problem is to construct myself, and to invite others to share an experience of what we are, not only our past but also our present, an experience of our modernity in such a way that we might come out of it transformed. Which means that at the end we would establish new relationships with the subject at issue.'

'So it's a book that functions as an experience, for its writer and reader alike, much more than as the establishment of a historical truth. For one to be able to have that experience through the book, what it says does need to be true in terms of academic, historically verifiable truth. It can't exactly be a novel. Yet the essential thing is not in the series of those true or historically verifiable findings but, rather, in the experience the book makes possible. Now, the fact is, this experience is neither true nor false. An experience is always a fiction: it's something that one fabricates oneself, that doesn't exist before and will exist afterward. That is the difficult relationship with truth, the way in which the latter is bound up with an experience that is not bound to it and, in some degree, destroys it.'

'The book makes use of true documents, but in such a way that through them it is possible not only to arrive at an establishment of truth, but also to experience something that permits a change, a transformation of the relationship we have with ourselves and with the world where, up to then, we had seen ourselves as being without problems--in short, a transformation of the relationship we have with our knowledge.

So this game of truth and fiction--or if you prefer, of verification and fabrication--will bring to light something which connects us, sometimes in a completely unconscious way, with our modernity, while at the same time causing it to appear as changed. The experience through which we grasp the intelligibility of certain mechanisms (for example, imprisonment, punishment, and so on) and the way in which we are enabled to detach ourselves from them by perceiving them differently will be, at best, one and the same thing. That is really the heart of what I do.

What consequences does that have? The first is that I don't depend on a continuous and systematic body of background data; the second is that I haven't written a single book that was not inspired, at least in part, by a direct personal experience... A third implication: it's not at all a matter of transporting personal experiences into knowledge. In the book, the relationship with the experience should make possible a transformation, a metamorphosis, that is not just mine but can have a certain value, a certain accessibility for others, so that the experience is available for others to have. Fourth and last: this experience must be capable of being linked in some measure to a collective practice, to a way of thinking.'

'I don't accept the word "teaching." A systematic book employing a generalizable method or offering the demonstration of a theory would convey lessons. My books don't exactly have that particular value. They are more like invitations or public gestures.'

'An experience is something that one has completely alone but can fully have only to the extent that it escapes pure subjectivity and that others can also--I won't say repeat it exactly, but at least encounter it--and go through it themselves. Let's go back for a moment to the book on prisons. In a certain sense, it's a book of pure history. But the people who liked it or hated it felt that way because they had the impression that the book concerned them or concerned the purely contemporary world, or their relations with the contemporary world, in the forms in which it is accepted by everyone. They sensed that something in present-day reality was being called into question... This was a complicated, difficult work carried out in association with prisoners, their families, prison staff, magistrates, and others.'

'On the one hand, I chose not to be a historian of philosophy like my professors and, on the other, I decided to look for something completely different from existentialism. I found it in my reading of Bataille and Blanchot and, through them, of Nietzsche. What did they represent for me? First, an invitation to call into question the category of the subject, its supremacy, its foundational function. Second, the conviction that such an operation would be meaningless if it remained limited to speculation. Calling the subject into question meant that one would have to experience something leading to its actual destruction, its decomposition, its explosion, its conversion into something else.'

'For me, politics was the chance to have an experience in the manner of Nietzsche or Bataille. For someone who was twenty years old shortly after World War II ended, who had not been drawn into the morality of the war, what could politics in fact be when it was a matter of choosing between the American of Truman and the USSR of Stalin?... To become a bourgeois intellectual, a professor, a journalist, a writer, or anything of that sort seemed repugnant. The experience of the war had shown us the urgent need of a society radically different from the one in which we were living, this society that had permitted Nazism, that had laid down in front of it, and that had gone over en masse to de Gaulle. A large sector of French youth had a reaction of total disgust toward all that. We wanted a world and a society that were not only different but that would be an alternative version of ourselves: we wanted to be completely other in a completely different world. Moreover, the Hegelianism offered to us at the university, with its model of history's unbroken intelligibility, was not enough to satisfy us. And the same was true of phenomenology and existentialism, which maintained the primacy of the subject and its fundamental value. Whereas the Nietzschean theme of discontinuity, on the other hand, the theme of an overman who would be completely different from man, and, in Bataille, the theme of limit-experiences through which the subject escapes from itself, had an essential value for us.'

'I'll just mention a rather curious fact. the interest in Nietzsche and Bataille was not a way of distancing ourselves from Marxism or communism--it was the only path toward what we expected from communism... We were looking for other ways to that utterly different reality we thought was embodied by communism. That's why in 1950, without knowing Marx very well, rejecting Hegelianism and feeling uncomfortable in existentialism, I was able to join the French Communist Party. Being a "Nietzschean communist" was really untenable and even absurd. I was well aware of that.'

'There was a point in common between all those who, over the last fifteen years, were called "structuralists" but weren't, except for Lévi-Strauss, of course: Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and myself... It was a certain pressing desire to raise the question of the subject in a different way, to free ourselves of the fundamental postulate that French philosophy had never abandoned since Descartes, that was reinforced, even, by phenomenology.'

'But The Order of Things is not a book that's truly mine: it's a marginal book in terms of the sort of passion that runs through the others.'

'I... understood that the representatives of the Frankfurt School had tried, earlier than I, to say things I had also been trying to say for years... For my part, I think that the philosophers of that school raised problems we're still laboring over today--in particular, that of the effects of power in their relation to a rationality that was defined, historically and geographically, in the West, from the sixteenth century onward. The West wouldn't have been able to achieve the economic and cultural results that characterize it without the exercise of that particular form of rationality. And, in fact, how can that rationality be separated from the mechanisms, procedures, techniques, and effects of power that accompany it... Couldn't it be concluded that the Enlightenment's promise of attaining freedom through the exercise of reason has been turned upside down, resulting in a domination by reason itself, which increasing usurps the place of freedom? This is a fundamental problem we're all struggling with, which many people have in common, whether they are communist or not. And as we know, this problem was isolated, pointed out by Horkheimer before all the others; and it was the Frankfurt School that questioned the reference to Marx in terms of that hypothesis. Wasn't it Horkheimer who maintained that in Marx there was the idea of a classless society that resembled an enormous factory?'

'When I acknowledge the merits of the Frankfurt School philosophers, I do so with the bad conscience of someone who should have read them long before, who should have understood them much earlier. Had I read these works, there are many things I wouldn't have needed to say, and I would have avoided some mistakes. Perhaps, if I had known the philosophers of that school when i was young, I would have been so captivated by them that I wouldn't have done anything else but comment on them. One doesn't know whether to be glad or sorry about these retrospective influences, these people one discovers after the age when one would have been ready to come under their influence.'

'There definitely are some differences. Simplifying things, one could say, for the moment, that the conception of the subject adopted by the Frankfurt School was rather traditional, philosophical in nature--it was permeated with Marxist humanism. Its particular connection with certain Freudian concepts, such as the relation between alienation and repression, between liberation and an end to alienation and exploitation, is explainable in that way. I don't think that the Frankfurt School can accept that what we need to do is not to recover our lost identity, or liberate our imprisoned nature, or discover our fundamental truth; rather, it is to move toward something altogether different.

A phrase by Marx is pertinent here: man produces man. How should it be understood? In my judgment, what ought to be produced is not man as nature supposedly designed him, or as his essence ordains him to be--we need to produce something that doesn't exist yet, without being able to know what it will be.

As for the word "produce," I don't agree with those who would assume that this production of man by man occurs like the production of value, the production of wealth or of an economically useful object: it's the destruction of what we are as well as the creation of a completely different thing, a total innovation.'

'When I speak of the death of man, I mean putting an end to everything that would set a rule of production, an essential goal for this production of man by man.'

'The relation with history is an element that disappointed me in the Frankfurt School philosophers. It seemed to me that they weren't doing much history in the full sense, that they would refer to research carried out by others, to a history already written and authenticated by a certain number of good historians, usually of a Marxist tendency, and they would present that history as an explanatory background. Some of them claim that I deny history. Sartre says that as well. About them it could be said, rather, that they are eaters of history as others have prepared it. They consume it preprocessed. I don't mean to say that everyone should construct the history that suits him, but it's a fact that I have never been completely satisfied with the works of historians. Although I've referred to and used numerous historical studies, I've always insisted on doing my own historical analyses in the areas I was interested in.

I think that the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, on the other hand, reason this way when they make use of history: they consider that the work of the professional historian supplies them with a sort of material foundation that can explain phenomena of a different type which they have called "sociological" or "psychological" phenomena, for example. Such an attitude implies two postulates: first, what philosophers talk about is not of the same order as history that is taking place (what takes place in someone's head is a social phenomenon that doesn't belong to the same level of reality as historical events); second, once a history is admitted to have been well constructed and provided it speaks about the economy, it will have inherent explanatory value.

But this sort of reasoning is both too modest and too credulous. Too modest because, all things considered, what happens in someone's mind, or in the minds of a series of individuals, actually does belong to history: to say something is an event. The formulation of a scientific discourse is not situated above history or off to the side: it's as much a part of history as a battle or the invention of a steam engine, or an epidemic. Of course, these are not the same types of events, but they ARE all events...

Moreover, whatever the importance of economic analyses, the fact of considering that an analysis based on the mutations of economic structure has an explanatory value in itself seems to me to be a naiveté--typical, it should be added, of those who aren't historians by trade. It isn't necessarily the case by any means.'

'The type of intelligibility that I try to produce cannot be reduced to the projection of a history--a socio-economic history, say--onto a cultural phenomenon so as to make it appear as the necessary and extrinsic product of that cause. There is no unilateral necessity: the cultural product is also part of the historical fabric. That's why I feel obliged to do historical analyses myself. Making me out to be someone who denies history is really ludicrous. I don't do anything but history. For them, to deny history is not to use that intangible, sacred, and all-explaining history they appeal to.'

[Nour · Rating 4 out of 5]

The rating is based on it’s importance and impact on my university studies and writings. If it were for Foucaults writing style it would be a 3.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up solely to read "The Lives of Infamous Men" (also available here: http://signsoflife10.files.wordpress....) and, jeez, it does not disappoint. Here is Foucault in transition, Foucault in microcosm, Foucault at his scintillating best. From approximately 6 paragraphs of primary sources (although he's clearly read hundreds more), he fashions an account of power/no-power, fame/infamy, and fable/fiction that is about as good as a twenty-page essay could get. Highly recommended.

Oh, and if you're ever looking for a riposte to Spivak's assertion about the subaltern not speaking (what a terrible article that is!), check out pp. 161-162: "Is not one of the fundamental traits of our society that destiny takes the form of a relation with power, of a struggle with or against it? The brief and strident words that went back and forth between power and the most inessential existences doubtless constitute, for the latter, the only monument they have ever been granted; it is what gives them, for the passage through time, the bit of brilliance, the brief flash that carries them to us. It is doubtless impossible to ever grasp them again in themselves, as they might have been 'in a free state'; they can no longer be separated out from the declamations, the tactical biases, the obligatory lies that power games and power relations presuppose."

[Theryn Fleming]

Power is volume 3 of the Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. It includes Foucault's essays, lectures, and position papers, as well as interviews, from the years 1972 – 1984. The aim of the Essential Works series is to compile the works that do not appear in Foucault's books, in particular those that seem "central to the evolution of [his] thought" (p.viii). In this volume are Foucault's responses to charges that he "considered truth to be no more than an effect of power, that his thought is a wholesale and nihilistic rejection of the values of the Enlightenment, that he and his work are incapable of contributing to any form of rational and morally responsible action" (p.xvii). The introduction gives an overview of Foucault's work, including main themes, controversies, misinterpretations.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great, short, readable, concise essays on Foucault. The interviews with him are really interesting. All three volumes were invaluable in helping me write papers for school:).

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

new modes of subjectivity can be generated via judicial discourse's conceptualization of accountability. and lots of other things, more than I can name.

[Shae C R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's like being in a class taught by Foucault.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm honestly always a bit shocked at how easy Foucault is to read, and how straightforward his arguments are while they also revel in the complexity of the world and the challenges of human relations. This collection of essays focused on power and power relations is a gift that really provides a clear introduction to Foucault's thinking on power and thinking on the methods by which power is both constructed and analyzed, which are more strangely casual than I would have anticipated coming into a book such as this. The first 3/4 of this collection are phenomenal, useful, interesting essays that provide a lot of material to think through and grapple with. The last 1/4 is comprised of smaller essays that kind of demonstrate Foucault's ideas in action, but I found these much less useful than I anticipated, as they seem to lean into the specificity of the situations they're addressing without providing much context, so while the writing is clear the context is gone and with that goes the applicability of the ideas. Still, a phenomenal read from start to finish--and an easier, more convicting one than I'd have thought.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad I read this at the current stage of my intellectual development as I was able to have an insight that Foucault is really laying out the rationale for what eventually became the logic of Neoliberalism. Foucault at his core is a philosophy of control based on the incorrect notion that we cannot ever fully appreciate how our current actions may affect future states and therefore we must necessarily delimit what actions 'free' agents can make through the modes of governance.

In essence Foucauldian philosophy is a philosophy of cowardness and inaction. It is a rejection of the beauty manifest through uniqueness inherent in each person, and a rejection of the concept that the sum of societies constitutive parts can ever be greater than the intentional construction of formal modes of governance which necessarily restrict individuality and creativity.

It makes complete sense that Foucault has been so thoroughly institutionalized into higher education. This orientation to the world is exactly the grist needed to reproduce the social conditions of Neoliberalism.

[Chandar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foucault's analysis shows how power plays an insidious and ubiquitous role in almost every aspect of our lives. Power play is at work be it education, health, psychiatry, sexuality, prisons, government...almost every walk of life. And it has a bearing on human rights and freedom. Foucault's meticulous research on the innocuous origins of these power equations make for fascinating reading.

[Oguz Albayrak · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a really good collection of articles, interviews and lecture notes from Michel Foucault, concerning power.
It is possible to trace ideas back and forth between the book, the political reflections of his analyses, ideas and his publications.

[Lobna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not widely familiar with Foucault’s works but this felt like a wide over view of the general areas he wrote in. I would have loved for end notes to be footnotes, especially that I read this as a digital book and going back and forth was not easy with endnotes

[Waris Ahmad Faizi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative!

A well read on Power by Michel Foucault for all Sociologists, Anthropologists, and all the people who in the field of political and social science.

[Raina Isabela · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beginner easy-to-read book to introduce you to Foucault.

[Negusa Nagast · Rating 1 out of 5]

My impression of what Foucault was selling is that everything is oppression.
Families, societies, hospitals, schools, governments.
All the institutions that allow humanity to function is supposedly oppression.
If I were to be facetious, this kind of thinking is akin to believing the electrostatic bonds stabilising our DNA is oppressive, or that the bond a mother has for her baby is a manipultive one of control and power differentials.
My belief is that this kind of pessimissim and cynicism is antihumanist in its core.
I believe it fuels the fires of resentment.
The destruction of our institutions would only bring a deluge of chaos.
Lawlessness is not freedom.
Lawlessness is the enemy of liberty.

[Hudson · Rating 4 out of 5]

can't really remember

[D. Travers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the others in this series, it's a hit and miss collection. For me, this has too many interviews digressing into Foucault's current and past stances on French politics, when certain essays on power, such as the Jan. 15, 1975 lecture in "Abnormal," would have been better to include.

But this is like quibbling about what b-sides should have been included in your favorite band's rarities collection, and I love this series in the same way: It offers an alternate illumination of its subject--through limits, margins, false starts, and apocrypha--that is very different from a book or album, but nonetheless insightful. And, in some ways, more fun.

One essay, "The Subject and Power," provides the most clear and concise explanation of those concepts I've yet to find in his own words. For teachers, a good alternate or addendum to History of Sexuality, v. 1.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of interviews, reviews, prefaces, and op-ed pieces by Foucault on the issues of power and social control. The essays on "Governmentality", the rise of what Foucault calls "social medicine", and the various brief pieces on the role of the intellectual are a very readable introduction to Foucault's ideas on discourse and bio-power. He reminds us in the later pieces that the role of the public intellectual is and should be to create discomfort--- to question those received ideas that make thinking about society and politics too easy, and he repeats something that needs to be said again and again: that to assert human rights is always and ever to seek to limit state power, to force governments to respect the individual subject.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably the most useful of the three volumes in the set for political theorists. in this book, some of the better known essays on politics are collected (i.e., 'the subject and power,' 'governmentality,' etc.) however, there were a couple of things in here that i had not read before that were particularly good, such as 'truth and juridical forms' and 'the political technologies of individuals.' the ideas in these essays/lectures aren't unfamiliar to those who have read 'discipline and punish' or 'governmentality' or 'two lectures' (the last of which is conspicuously absent from the collection). however, they are stated or developed in different ways here--often with more citations and references than there were in the other, better known essays.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would not recommend reading this book, but would any of his completed works. There are set of lecture series in this book Foucault gave before publishing his book that was really interesting, and makes one want to read more. However there are small essays or lectures done after a book has been released which feels like walking into an advanced philosophy class four weeks into the semester. Also there are interviews that are shrouded in academic language that seems meaningless, for this I blame the interviewer. So go get another one of his studies and drink Gin and Tonics and learn that every institution we think is eternal(police, courts, hospitals, or the courts) are relative newborns.

[Joel Silverberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've purchased 5 or so books on Foucault's lectures, this being one of them. As far as I can tell, if you like Foucault's ideas, you will love his lectures. Essentially all of them. You can't really go wrong. They are all bangers. It is what it is.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philosophy, Foucault, power structures... what else do you need?

[Thorsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

really enjoyed it, and hopefully helped me pass my social science exam! *i hope*!

[Shirin Heidari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nowadays "Ponopticism reigns" over society; Foucault calls it "a Ponoptic society" (70).

[John Turner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tedious - but covered the subject of power from many angles, in many contexts.