Power : Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984

Part of the definitive collection of Michel Foucault’s articles, interviews, and seminars, this volume lays out the philosopher’s influential thinking on the machinations of power in society

“A rare opportunity to see how a great and original mind produces its work as well as itself at the same time. . . . Foucault’s work . . . leaves no reader untouched or unchanged.” —Edward Said, The New York Times Book Review

Power draws together Michel Foucault’s contributions to what he saw as the still-underdeveloped practice of political analysis. It covers the domains Foucault helped to make part of the core agenda of Western political culture—medicine, psychiatry, the penal system, sexuality—illuminating and expanding on the themes of The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and the first volume of The History of Sexuality.

Power includes previously unpublished lectures, later writings highlighting Foucault’s revolutionary analysis of the politics of personal conduct and freedom, interviews, and letters that illuminate Foucault’s own political activism.