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Why did Michel Foucault study prisons and modern medicine?
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Postmodernism
French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, 1979.
Michel Foucault studied institutions like prisons and modern medicine to critically examine how power-knowledge operates in society. Rather than viewing these institutions as purely objective or humane advancements, he investigated how they function as mechanisms of "discipline" and "normalization" to control human behavior.123
His research aimed to:
- Expose Arbitrary Power: Foucault argued that modern liberal societies use ostensibly objective branches of social science to label individuals as "normal" or "abnormal," thereby justifying coercion and control.3
- Analyze Subjectivation: He sought to understand how individuals are shaped into "subjects" through historical practices, such as the classification of the "criminal" in Discipline and Punish or the medicalization of illness in The Birth of the Clinic.13
- Challenge Grand Narratives: By tracing the genealogy of these institutions, he challenged the Enlightenment assumption that modern history is a linear progression toward greater freedom, suggesting instead that it has created new, less visible forms of oppression.3
Ultimately, Foucault viewed these studies as "histories of the present," intended to reveal the artificiality of societal norms and the dangerous entanglement of knowledge with domination.13