3 Review(s)

PENGUIN SOCIAL SCIENCES It has been the particular achievement of Michel Foucault to show how seemingly neutral descriptive terms used by doctors and judges, teachers and sexologists, are in fact weapons in the never-ending conflict between desire and power. For as soon as an action is declared 'unnatural' or 'sick', it becomes legitimate to use force on 'deviants', or even imprison them, in order to try and make them 'normal'. We need to unmask terms like 'justice' and 'labour' and even 'human nature'. The Foucault Reader is the ideal introduction to one of the century's most stimulating and influential thinkers (whose works included Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality) and contains lengthy excerpts from all his richly detailed historical studies as well as much new material and several very revealing interviews. No earlier writer has investigated so thoroughly the role of institutions in our society, from schools and factories to hospitals, prisons, asylums and clinics. Foucault makes us look again at all the social sciences - and almost every aspect of our lives.