The Lives of Michel Foucault

This biography opens with a moving account of Foucault's death from AIDS. The author then returns to the provincial France of Michel's childhood, and follows the transformation of a conservative doctor's son into the foremost radical philosopher of his generation, the force of his work made doubly glamorous by his actively gay lifestyle. Like many young Frenchmen he had a brief fling with communism, but it left him with an abiding hatred of the Soviet Union. He began work on the history of psychiatry and became convinced that madness was something we impose on people. He spent most of the 1950s and 1960s in Sweden, Poland and Tunisia, escaping the France of his childhood. He returned after the violence of May 1968 with a disturbing vision of modern society policed by mechanisms of power and control. His books include Discipline and Punish, The Order of Things, The History of Sexuality and Madness and Civilisation.