Michel Foucault BT - Key Sociological Thinkers

Abstract

What strikes one most immediately about the work of Michel Foucault is its intellectual breadth, and indeed more than one commentator paid tribute to his curiosity. The broad sweep of his work interests the sociological audience first because of the persistence with which it crosses the themes, both central and minor, of sociological teaching. From his early books on the history of madness to his last works on sexual experience among the ancient Greeks, Foucault pursued a continuous critical reflection upon ‘the human subject’. His examination of the emergence of modern medical reason speaks to medical sociology; his analysis of western punitive reason touches criminology and the study of deviance; his discussion of deep shifts in the rationality of the human sciences goes to the heart of sociological thought. Yet, it is clearly not within sociology — neither in its accumulated knowledge nor with its point of view — that his writings would find their coherence, and in fact, Foucault was famous for finding no home among any of the established scholarly disciplines.1