Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, literary critic and historian of ideas who wrote about how power, knowledge and liberty operate through institutions. His books include The Order of Things, an archaeology of the human sciences, and Discipline and Punish, a study of the prison and how punishment changed in modern times. He was active in left-wing groups campaigning against racism and for penal reform, and he died in Paris in 1984 from complications of HIV/AIDS.