Michel Foucault is the philosopher who taught us to question how knowledge itself can be a form of power. He was a French thinker who didn’t look like a typical academic sage studying timeless truths from an armchair. Instead, he prowled through archives of asylums, prisons, and clinics to uncover how modern society quietly defines what is normal and what is deviant. Born Paul-Michel Foucault in nineteen twenty-six in the provincial city of Poitiers, France, he came of age in a country rebuilding after World War Two. He studied philosophy and psychology in the elite halls of Paris, just as existentialist ideas and structuralist theories were buzzing. But Foucault would soon strike off on his own path. By the time of his death in nineteen eighty-four, he had become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, a historian of ideas and social critic whose works unsettled our understanding of sanity, punishment, sexuality, and even the nature of truth.

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