Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian, and social theorist whose genealogical analyses of the relationships between power and knowledge transformed the humanities and social sciences. His studies of madness, medicine, the prison, and sexuality showed how modern institutions produce "regimes of truth" that define normalcy, pathology, and subjectivity itself. Drawing on Nietzsche's genealogical method, Foucault argued that knowledge is never neutral but always embedded in power relations.