Foucault at 100

The Thinker Who Taught Us to See Power Everywhere Made It Harder to See What Lies Beyond Power

I first read Michel Foucault seriously in 1975, struggling through Surveiller et punir in French.

The book was difficult, but that was not what made it unsettling. It was the way Foucault turned familiar moral assumptions inside out.

Prisons had long been seen as a humane alternative to torture and public execution. Reform was equated with progress, expertise with knowledge, and classification with greater precision.

Foucault made each of these ideas look less innocent: the prison, he argued, was not simply a more humane way to punish but part of a new system of power built around surveillance, examination, record keeping, and the correction of behavior.

Reform changed power’s form. The language of care, treatment, and improvement itself became a means of control.

This was explosive. Foucault was asking readers to reconsider categories that had seemed obviously good: reason, normality, expertise, reform, even progress itself. He showed how institutions created the kinds of people they claimed merely to identify — the delinquent, the mentally ill patient, the deviant, the abnormal child.

At the time, I was writing a history of the Victorian family, and Foucault changed how I saw marriage, childrearing, and relations between siblings. Not simply as private bonds of affection, duty, and sentiment, but as power relationships, structured by age, gender, dependency, inheritance, authority, discipline, and emotional obligation. Victorian culture hid these arrangements by idealizing the family as a realm of love and moral refuge.

Foucault’s larger lesson was that modern power often works through ordinary procedures: schedules, records, examinations, diagnoses, professional judgments, case files, and categories of normal and abnormal behavior. Power did not reside only in law, police, prisons, or the state. It also operated through the family, the schoolroom, the nursery, the medical report, the curriculum, the treatment plan, the personnel record, the form, the file, and the test.

I also remember discussing Foucault with my mentor, David Brion Davis, who was not swept up by the excitement around him. Davis did not dismiss Foucault; he understood why his questions about power, knowledge, reform, and classification mattered. But he doubted that Foucault represented the breakthrough many scholars claimed, regarding him as brilliant but thin: suggestive, but not always careful; bold, but insufficiently grounded; powerful as interpretation, but less convincing as history.

His concern was that Foucault sometimes wrote as though he had discovered problems — prisons, madness, moral reform, humanitarianism — that other historians had already studied with greater care and nuance.

That memory has stayed with me because it captures the difficulty of assessing Foucault at one hundred.

He was not simply right or wrong. He changed the questions scholars asked. He made power visible where earlier histories too often saw only progress, reform, benevolence, expertise, or care. He showed that labels organize institutions, confer authority, distribute stigma, and shape how people understand themselves.

But his influence also had costs. His work encouraged a style of scholarship that became increasingly predictable: identify a category, locate the institution behind it, expose the norm it produced, and show how the language of reform concealed power. That method produced important insights. Over time, it also became routine.

After nearly fifty years of scholarship shaped by Foucault, we need to ask what his approach made harder to see: agency, interiority, culture, memory, desire, embodiment, group life, and the ways people inhabit, resist, revise, and sometimes embrace the categories placed upon them.

I was shaped by Foucault’s work, and I remain grateful for what he taught. But no thinker should define questions forever. At his centenary, the task is not to repeat once more that discourse and power are connected. We know that. The task is to ask what comes next.

The Centennial Foucault

Michel Foucault occupies a place no other late twentieth-century theorist does. Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Althusser, Barthes, and Deleuze profoundly influenced the academy. Foucault became something more: almost a household name.

His name appears not only in scholarship but in journalism, political argument, activism, and debates over prisons, sexuality, public health, artificial intelligence, surveillance, and the administrative state. He is invoked by prison abolitionists and critics of pandemic lockdowns, queer theorists and anti-bureaucratic conservatives. He is revered and reviled in roughly equal measure.

The New York Times‘ Emily Eakin is therefore probably right to call him “the defining thinker of our era.” The harder question is why he, more than any of his contemporaries, became the theorist through whom so many learned to understand the present.

Eakin’s answer is that he anticipated the central problems of our time. He gave us a framework for understanding power that does not operate chiefly through force, censorship, command, or law, but through systems that observe, measure, classify, predict, and shape behavior.

That framework seems uncannily suited to the age of smartphones, social media, AI, and attention capitalism.

Digital platforms record our movements, purchases, relationships, and habits; algorithms sort us, anticipate our choices, and determine what we see. Surveillance is no longer confined to prisons, schools, hospitals, or the state. It is woven into daily life, accepted as the price of convenience, and turned inward: we monitor ourselves, manage our visibility, and adapt our behavior to systems whose rules remain largely hidden.

Eakin’s opening example is especially effective. In “What Is an Author?” Foucault imagined discourse circulating without a stable author, in “pervasive anonymity.” Generative AI has made that provocation concrete. The question is no longer simply who wrote a text, but who trained the system, owns it, and bears responsibility for what it produces — exactly the kind of question Foucault taught readers to ask.

The same is true of surveillance. His account of the panopticon, developed more fully below, gave modern culture its most powerful image of discipline: people govern themselves when they know they may be watched. Phones, cameras, biometric systems, workplace monitoring, and algorithmic scoring have made that condition ordinary.

Public health and sexuality offer related examples. Foucault’s concept of biopower — the management of health, reproduction, risk, and populations — once sounded academic and abstract. After the pandemic, it became easier to see why public health could become a battleground over expertise, bodily autonomy, and trust.

And his argument that modern society did not simply repress sex but produced ever more talk about it, along with more categories and identities, still matters in a culture where sexuality is openly discussed, bureaucratically classified, and central to many people’s sense of self.

This helps explain why Foucault cannot be contained within one political camp. The left uses him to criticize prisons, psychiatry, colonialism, and normalization. But a thinker who encourages suspicion of expertise, institutional benevolence, and claims of neutrality can also appeal to the right — critics of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, diversity bureaucracies, and the administrative state can all find something in him.

Foucault’s suspicion of power was never limited to capitalism, patriarchy, or the police. He was especially alert to power that spoke in the language of knowledge, care, reform, and emancipation, which made him useful to radical critics of domination and to conservative critics of bureaucracy alike.

A harder question is why his way of seeing became so dominant.

Part of the answer is that Foucault offered a usable theory of modern society, one whose questions traveled easily — who classifies, who defines normality, how does reform become control — across prisons, schools, hospitals, sexuality, disability, race, colonialism, and the university alike. That was his great advantage over many contemporaries: not that he was necessarily deeper or more careful, but that he was more usable, giving scholars, students, and activists a way to connect their encounters with modern institutions to a larger theory of power.

That is why his centennial matters. He helped create the intellectual common sense of our time — we learned to see power in categories, records, diagnoses, expertise, and claims of care, which was a major gain. But it also raises the question I want to pursue: what happens when a framework becomes so successful that it begins to limit thought? His dominance also made other things harder to see, in the ways this essay’s opening already suggested.

Foucault as a Historian of Modernity

In addition to giving scholars a vocabulary for criticizing power, Foucault offered a history of how modern categories, institutions, and selves came into being.

Foucault was not a historian in the narrow professional sense. He was not chiefly interested in reconstructing every institutional detail or situating his arguments within the full range of existing scholarship, which is one reason academic historians have often found him frustrating. But like Weber, Marx, and Freud, he wanted to explain how the modern world became what it is.

In Madness and Civilization, he traced the changing place of madness in European society. In The Birth of the Clinic, he examined the rise of the patient as an object of medical perception. In The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, he asked how systems of thought define what can count as knowledge in a given period. In Discipline and Punish, he traced the rise of disciplinary institutions. In The History of Sexuality, he challenged the simple idea that modern society repressed sex.

And in his later lectures on governmentality and biopolitics, he examined how modern states came to manage populations, risk, health, and economic life.

Although his subjects varied, Foucault kept returning to the same question: how did particular kinds of people come to be defined, studied, classified, and governed?

In earlier European societies, authority was visible, personal, and sovereign, punishing the body in public and announcing itself through ritual and spectacle. Modern power, in Foucault’s account, worked differently. It was administrative, continuous, and tied to knowledge, operating through prisons, clinics, schools, censuses, case files, and professional expertise.

The modern world produced new categories to describe people — the delinquent, the homosexual, the mentally ill patient, the normal child, the healthy population — not because such people hadn’t existed before, but because modern institutions created new ways of naming, studying, and managing them, and of inviting them to understand themselves in those terms.

The image that carried this argument furthest was Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, the prison design Foucault made famous: cells arranged around a central tower, from which a guard could see into any cell while prisoners could never know whether they were actually being watched. The uncertainty did the work; prisoners learned to police themselves.

For Foucault, this was a model of modern discipline generally — power that works most effectively once it no longer looks like force, becoming routine, internalized, and self-enforcing.

That is why Foucault’s account of modernity differed so sharply from older histories of reform, which often treated modern institutions mainly as evidence of progress. Prisons replaced the scaffold, clinics replaced older medicine, schools replaced ignorance.

Foucault did not deny these changes could reduce suffering. He asked what else they did. The clinic did not simply heal; it made the body visible to expert observation in new ways. The prison did not simply punish more humanely; it created a new object of knowledge, the delinquent personality. The study of sexuality did not simply liberate desire; it multiplied occasions for confession and diagnosis.

This is why his work cannot be reduced to the slogan that “power is everywhere.” His more precise claim was historical: modern societies developed new ways of joining knowledge, authority, and subjectivity, producing people as objects of knowledge and as subjects who came to understand themselves through it.

His later work on ancient ethics and “the care of the self” complicated this picture, turning more directly to practices of self-formation — the ways people shape themselves through habits and reflection — and reminding us that Foucault was not interested only in domination but in how selves are made. That turn came too late in his career, cut short by his death from AIDS in 1984, to reshape how most readers understood him. For many, he remained above all the thinker of discipline, surveillance, and power-knowledge.

The limits of his achievement are real. His histories were broad, selective, and thinly comparative. They gave too little attention to religion, political economy, empire, family life, national difference, and the ways people used or resisted the categories available to them. Lawrence Stone made a version of this criticism decades ago, arguing that Foucault’s model of “dominance and control” reduced history to controllers and controlled.

That criticism, which isn’t wrong, shouldn’t become the whole assessment. Like Weber or Freud, he made large claims, sometimes too large; he simplified, but also clarified. His central achievement was to show how modernity remade power and the self together. Modern people do not merely live under institutions, they live through categories those institutions help create. To understand modern society, we have to ask not only who holds power, but how people become knowable, labelable, governable, and recognizable — to others and to themselves.

Why Foucault Won

Foucault became the dominant French theorist in the American academy partly because the reach of his work was so evident. His prose was dense, but his major subjects were recognizable — madness, medicine, prisons, sexuality, surveillance — which set him apart from contemporaries like Derrida, Lacan, and Kristeva, whose work often seemed harder to translate into ordinary historical or social analysis.

Foucault was difficult too, but his materials were concrete: prisons, clinics, case files, medical categories. Readers could see what he was describing and where his questions might lead — historians applied them to schools or families, literary critics to authorship, sociologists to psychiatry, activists to prisons or disability.

His biography mattered too. Foucault’s father, a prominent surgeon, expected him to enter medicine. Foucault instead identified more with patients than doctors, especially the mental patients he encountered while teaching at the École Normale Supérieure.

As a gay man in a country that still treated homosexuality as pathological, and as someone who had attempted suicide and been evaluated at the same psychiatric hospital where he later did research, Foucault knew personally what it meant to be classified by authorities who claimed to know what was normal.

That experience gave his questions about normality, discipline, and institutional authority an urgency that was not merely theoretical. His political biography also helped. Unlike Heidegger or Paul de Man, Foucault carried no taint of fascism or collaboration. The postwar left could read him as radical without that burden.

But his biography does not explain his influence. What mattered most was that his method could be taught, even in simplified form: power and knowledge are joined; categories have histories; institutions produce subjects; reform can discipline. Those claims moved easily into classrooms and activist circles because they added a new set of questions to older left vocabularies.

Older radical traditions asked: Who owns? Who rules? Who exploits? Who is excluded? Foucault added: Who observes? Who diagnoses? Who normalizes? How do people come to understand themselves through the labels placed on them?

Those questions could be asked of a school, clinic, prison, welfare office, hospital, museum, university, or family — which is why Foucault’s work spread so widely across history, literary criticism, disability studies, queer theory, art criticism, and education.

That was part of Foucault’s appeal, but also part of the problem. His approach too often hardened into a formula: identify the discourse and the institution, expose the norm, show how knowledge reinforces power. This produced genuine insight, but increasingly predictable scholarship.

The pattern extended into visual art, performance, and museum practice as well, where a broadly Foucauldian sensibility shaped work centered on archives, surveillance, and the classified body. At its best this revealed how institutions made people visible and controllable; at its weakest it hardened into a familiar style — rearrange the archive, expose the institution, display the watched body — better at showing how power observes than at imagining what people create despite being watched.

Foucault gave scholarship and art powerful new questions. He became limiting once those questions became obligatory.

There is also a deeper philosophical problem, one critics identified early on. Jürgen Habermas did not argue, as Davis did, that Foucault’s histories were too thin. He argued that Foucault’s method undermined itself. If truth is always shaped by power, and there is no position outside power from which to judge institutions, then on what grounds can Foucault condemn the asylum, the prison, or the demand for normality?

Yet his books plainly carry moral force — the delinquent personality, the medicalized body, the normalized subject are presented as forms of domination, not neutral developments.

Habermas called this Foucault’s “cryptonormativism”: a hidden reliance on ideals of freedom and human flourishing that his own theory never fully justified. Foucault could show how people were constructed by institutions and categories. He had a harder time saying why one form of life was fuller, freer, or more humane than another, and a richer account of the person has to answer that question.

Edward Said raised a related concern from within the tradition Foucault helped create. Said used Foucauldian discourse analysis in Orientalism, but later worried about its “curious apolitical formalism” — a method so focused on how discourse constructs its objects that it can leave too little room for the people described to answer back, resist, or live beyond the categories imposed on them.

This criticism carried special weight because Said had used Foucault’s method so effectively: it could show how imperial knowledge created “the Orient” as an object of rule, but taken too far, it could make the people within that discourse seem passive, trapped, and wholly produced by the language used to describe them.

This is the recurring problem. Foucault gave us a powerful way to study how people are labeled, classified, and governed. The task now is to explain more fully how they live within and beyond those categories: how they resist, reinterpret, remember, desire, create, and make meaning.

Labels: Governed and Lived

Foucault’s account of labels is one of the places where his work most needs revision. His central insight was that labels are not simply descriptions. Terms such as madness, criminality, disability, and deviance sort people, connect them to institutions, and help determine who is watched, punished, treated, accommodated, believed, or ignored. Once a label enters a school, clinic, prison, welfare office, or personnel file, it has practical consequences.

But labels do not simply act on people. People also respond to them. Ian Hacking called this the “looping effect of human kinds”: classifications change the people being classified, but those people may reject, accept, revise, or organize around the classification, and their response can then change the category itself — a process Foucault never fully explained.

A diagnosis can stigmatize, but it can also explain years of confusion. A disability label can restrict a person, but it can also secure support. A sexual identity can begin in shame and become a source of solidarity. An insult can be reclaimed as a source of pride.

People resist labels, but they also fight to claim them, because labels can turn private suffering into public recognition and isolation into community. They also carry risks: a culture that recognizes people mainly through labels may encourage them to present themselves through identities, injuries, or claims, reducing shame while also making harm central to a person’s sense of self.

Foucault helps explain how labels are imposed. He is less useful in explaining why people need them, defend them, or become attached to them. This points to a larger limitation: his followers became skilled at showing how institutions and discourse make people into subjects, but less successful at explaining how people become selves through family, religion, memory, attachment, and inherited meaning.

Saba Mahmood’s study of women in the Egyptian piety movement makes the point powerfully. The women she studied practiced discipline, modesty, and religious devotion; a narrow Foucauldian reading might describe them as docile bodies shaped by power, but Mahmood showed that this missed how they understood their own actions — as moral discipline, agency, and the cultivation of virtue.

The same problem arises with Indigenous peoples, religious groups, and diasporic communities classified, often damagingly, by empires, states, and bureaucracies. No people can be understood only through the categories imposed on them. We also need to ask what they held sacred, how they preserved memory, and how they explained suffering and imagined repair. These questions are central to understanding human life.

Foucault taught scholars to study the systems that classify people. The next step is to study the lives those systems never fully contain.

Beyond Foucault

Foucault showed that power often works through knowledge, labels, institutions, and reform. A prison can call itself humane and still discipline, a diagnosis can appear neutral and still classify. But it is no longer enough to show that a category was constructed or that an institution exercises power. Those are starting points. Too much scholarship ends with exposure — identify the discourse, reveal the norm, expose the institution, and consider the work complete. It is not.

Nikolas Rose points toward a richer approach. His work on the “government of the soul” extends Foucault’s analysis into psychiatry, therapy, self-help, and the other psy-disciplines, showing how the inner self became something to be examined, managed, and governed by experts — but also asking how people come to understand themselves through psychological language, not only how experts impose it from above.

Scholarship must ask how people live within the categories applied to them: what a diagnosis means to the person who receives it, why one community rejects a label while another embraces it, how families transmit class identities and assumptions about authority before institutions ever classify anyone at all.

Answering these questions requires a fuller account of human beings as biological, psychological, social, and cultural.

People live in bodies that age, feel pain and desire, and depend on others — realities culture interprets but does not invent. They respond to labels unpredictably, through fantasy, devotion, or resignation, in ways that require taking shame and attachment seriously rather than treating a label’s institutional function as the whole of its meaning. And they inherit stories, rituals, and moral vocabularies that are not simply disguises for power but among the main ways communities interpret experience and form persons — teaching people how to mourn, marry, and respond to injury.

A scholarship focused mainly on discourse and classification can miss this work of how cultures form identities. It can explain how authorities label people without showing how people acquire an outlook, habits of feeling, or an idea of the good life.

The Missing Comparative Dimension

Foucault was rarely comparative. He explained how particular forms of knowledge and power developed in the modern West, but paid less attention to a basic fact: different societies respond differently to similar human problems.

Illness, disability, sexuality, childhood, death, and psychological distress exist across cultures and eras, but they do not produce the same categories, emotions, or kinds of selfhood everywhere. Why does distress appear as guilt in one culture, shame in another, possession in a third? Why is adolescence treated as rebellion in some societies and apprenticeship in others?

The same pressure can mean different things in different settings. Discipline may be domination, or devotion; silence may be repression, or dignity; dependence may be failure in an individualistic society and moral obligation in one organized around kinship.

Without comparison, scholars risk mistaking one historically specific form of selfhood for a universal one. Foucault challenged universals. Some of his followers, working only within a single modern Western setting, quietly built new ones. Mahmood’s and Hacking’s arguments, discussed above, are themselves a kind of comparison: each shows a category behaving differently once it travels outside the setting where a purely institutional analysis first seemed sufficient.

Under Foucault’s influence, scholars have often moved away from the study of cultural subjectivities: the slow processes through which people acquire identities, emotions, and ways of seeing the world. The institutional production of categories offers a clearer method and a more obvious politics; it is easier to expose a classification than to reconstruct an inner world.

But the harder task is the more important one. We need histories not only of discourse, but of outlooks, sensibilities, rituals, and forms of consciousness — an ambition his own contemporaries, in their own more difficult way, were already pursuing.

Coda: What Theory Once Tried to Explain

Don’t read this essay as an argument against theory. Theory gives scholarship its interpretive force, and the twenty-first-century turn against high theory, while understandable, has been, in my view, a mistake.

Foucault’s peers were less accessible but often more psychologically and philosophically sophisticated. They were trying to rethink some of the hardest problems in the human sciences: how people are socialized, how perception is shaped, how memory works, and how selves are formed.

Foucault showed how institutions make people governable. His contemporaries asked how people become selves. That larger ambition should not be lost.

Older accounts often treated socialization as the transmission of norms from society to the individual: children learned rules, adults internalized expectations, institutions reproduced the social order.

French theory made that process much less simple. Culture does not enter a passive mind intact; it is absorbed through language, attachment, fantasy, bodily experience, and conflict. People do not simply learn norms. They misunderstand them, resist them, and attach feelings and desires to them.

This is why Lacan mattered. He challenged the idea that people understand their own motives: the self is divided between what people say, what they want, what they imagine others want from them, and what they cannot acknowledge. Without some account of this divided self, scholarship tends to take stated beliefs too literally, describing a political commitment or identity without explaining the fear, resentment, or need for recognition that gives it force.

Kristeva addressed the formation of the boundary between self and world. Her work on dependence, separation, disgust, and abjection asked how people come to experience themselves as distinct persons — rooted in bodily vulnerability, fear of contamination, and the effort to separate the self from what it rejects. Political hatreds often draw on these deeper responses. Outsiders come to embody fears of impurity, disorder, sexuality, or death.

Derrida asked how thought is organized through oppositions: reason and madness, normal and abnormal, self and other, civilization and barbarism. He showed that these categories are never as stable as they appear — each side depends on the other, and what is excluded often remains present inside what is privileged. Scholars often expose one binary only to replace it with another.

Derrida’s deeper lesson was that critical categories also require scrutiny, since no vocabulary places the critic entirely outside the world being criticized.

Barthes asked how photographs, objects, gestures, and everyday rituals acquire emotional force — why one image remains in memory while another disappears, why a small detail can call up a person or an entire past.

People do not encounter culture only as ideology; they encounter it through tone, texture, pleasure, embarrassment, and shock. Without attention to those experiences, cultural analysis can explain what an image represents without explaining why it matters to anyone.

Deleuze and Guattari asked how new forms of life emerge. People do not only submit to institutions or resist them. They improvise, borrow, and form unexpected attachments, creating identities and practices for which no settled category yet exists.

A theory centered only on power can explain how institutions contain such developments. It is less good at explaining invention and change.

Taken together, these thinkers were rethinking selfhood: neither a stable inner core nor simply an effect of institutions, but something formed through language, memory, bodily experience, fantasy, and relations with others.

They were also rethinking modernity itself, which did not merely produce new institutions but changed perception, memory, and experience — mass media multiplying images, consumer culture turning objects into signs, psychoanalysis challenging the idea of a transparent self, new technologies unsettling the boundaries between public and private, presence and absence, original and copy.

Postmodernity identified a further shift: inherited sources of authority weakened, identities became less stable, images became more pervasive, and representation became harder to separate from reality.

These problems have only intensified.

Digital platforms do not merely transmit information. They train attention, determining what appears urgent, memorable, desirable, or threatening. Photographs, posts, and messages create external archives of the self, while algorithms return selected fragments of the past in new contexts.

Identity is now performed before partly imagined, partly measured audiences. People watch themselves being watched, revising their appearance and behavior in response to likes, rankings, and anticipated judgment. The self becomes both performer and audience, product and manager.

Yet scholarship often addresses these changes with a vocabulary limited to representation, identity, discourse, and power. Those concepts are not enough. We also need to ask how repeated exposure changes perception, how digital archives alter memory, how comparison becomes envy, how political messages attach themselves to fear and resentment, and why people become attached to systems they know are manipulating them.

The same problem appears in scholarship on coloniality, race, gender, and sexuality, which has shown how law, empire, and institutions create and enforce categories but often says less about how those categories enter inner life.

How does racial classification become bodily vigilance, shame, or expectation? How does colonial rule alter memory across generations? Why do people defend hierarchies that wound them, or find dignity in identities once imposed as stigma?

It is not enough to say identities are constructed. We need to explain how they become habits of perception and emotional reflexes — and, just as much, how people reinterpret, reject, and reorganize the categories imposed on them, since the same label may humiliate one person, clarify another’s experience, and give a third community and political purpose.

Without a theory of socialization, we cannot explain how social arrangements become habits and expectations. Without a theory of perception, we cannot explain why people living in the same society see different worlds. Without a theory of memory, we cannot explain how injury and obligation persist across generations. Without a theory of selfhood, we cannot explain contradiction, attachment, or change.

Theory does not need to provide a final answer. It should identify problems, propose relationships, and produce claims that evidence can test.

The point is not to revive every claim made by Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes, Deleuze, or Guattari. Much in their work should be challenged or discarded. The point is to recover the level of ambition they brought to the study of human beings.

Foucault taught scholars to ask how people are classified, disciplined, and governed. His contemporaries asked how people perceive, remember, desire, internalize, and become selves.

Scholarship still needs both sets of questions.