In France, a country that awards its intellectuals the status other countries give their rock stars, Michel Foucault was part of a glittering generation of thinkers, one which also included Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. One of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, Foucault was a man whose passion and reason were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of his time. From law and order, to mental health, to power and knowledge, he spearheaded public awareness of the dynamics that hold us all in thrall to a few powerful ideologies and interests. Arguably his finest work, Archaeology of Knowledge is a challenging but fantastically rewarding introduction to his ideas.
Part II: The Discursive Regularities 1. The Unities of Discourse 2. Discursive Formations 3. The Formation of Objects 4. The Formation of Enunciative Modalities 5. The Formation of Concepts 6. The Formation of Strategies 7. Remarks and Cosequences
Part III The Statement and the Archive 1. Defining the Statement 2. The Enunciative Function 3. The Description of Staements 4. Rarity, Exteriority, Accumilation 5. The Historical a priori and the Archive
Part IV Archeological Description 1. Archeology and the History of Ideas 2. The Original and the Regular 3. Contradictions 4. The Comparative Facts 5. Change and Transformations 6. Science and Knowledge
Part V: Conclusion Conclusion
Index
Biography
Michel Foucault (1926-84). Celebrated French thinker and activist who challenged people's assumptions about care of the mentally ill, gay rights, prisons, the police and welfare.
'He is a brilliant writer.' - Maurice Cranston
'A necessary guide to Foucault's often difficult ideas ... and to his overall historical ambition, which is to define the 'soil' out of which contemporary events in a given period grow.' - Times Literary Supplement
'Next to Sartre's - Search for a Method and in direct opposition to it, Foucault's work is the most noteworthy effort at a theory of history in the last 50 years.'
