From beginner-friendly introductions to archetype works past Foucault, this folio features books to suit any learning style. Information technology'due south important to note that there is no single best book on Foucault. The best book for yous will depend heavily on your preferred learning style and the amount of time/energy you're willing to spend reading. For example, if you tend to discover classic works of philosophy difficult to understand, yous might desire to start with a short, beginner-friendly introduction. If y'all adopt more depth, you can choose a more comprehensive introduction or read Foucault for yourself.

It's also worth noting that it is non a list of personal recommendations. Personal book recommendations tend to exist highly subjective, idiosyncratic, and unreliable. This list is part of a drove of over 100 philosophy reading lists which aim to provide a primal resource for philosophy book recommendations. These lists were created by searching through hundreds of academy course syllabi, internet encyclopedia bibliographies, and community recommendations. Links to the syllabi and other sources used to create this listing are at the stop of the mail. Following these links will aid y'all apace observe a broader range of options if the listed books do not fit what y'all are looking for.

Hither are the all-time books on or by Michel Foucault in no particular order.

Foucault: A Very Short Introduction – Gary Gutting

Category: Short Introduction | Length: 145 pages | Published: 2005 Foucault: A Very Short Introduction Book Cover

Publisher description: Foucault is one of those rare philosophers who has become a cult figure. Born in 1926 in France, over the class of his life he dabbled in drugs, politics, and the Paris SM scene, all whilst striving to sympathise the deep concepts of identity, cognition, and power.

From aesthetics to the penal system; from madness and civilisation to advanced literature, Foucault was happy to pass up old models of thinking and replace them with versions that are still widely debated today. A major influence on Queer Theory and gender studies (he was openly gay and died of an AIDS-related disease in 1984), he as well wrote on architecture, history, police, medicine, literature, politics and of course philosophy, and fifty-fifty managed a all-time-seller in France on a book dedicated to the history of systems of thought….

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How to Read Foucault – Johanna Oksala

Category: Short Introduction | Length: 128 pages | Published: 2008 How to Read Foucault Book Cover

Publisher description: Michel Foucault was a philosopher of extraordinary talent, political activist, social theorist, cultural critic, and creative historian. He irreversibly shaped the style we recollect today about such controversial issues every bit power, sexuality, madness, and criminality.

Johanna Oksala explores the conceptual tools that Foucault gave us for constructing new forms of thinking as well as for smashing old certainties. She offers a lucid business relationship of him every bit a thinker whose persistent aim was to challenge the self-evidence and necessity of our current experiences, practices, and institutions by showing their historical development and, therefore, contingency.

Extracts are taken from the whole range of Foucault's writings―his books, essays, lectures, and interviews―including the major works History of Madness, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.

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The Lives of Michel Foucault – David Macey

Category: Biography | Length: 624 pages | Published: 1995 The Lives of Michel Foucault Book Cover

Publisher description: When he died of an AIDS-related condition in 1984, Michel Foucault had become the near influential French philosopher since the terminate of World War II. His powerful studies of the cosmos of modernistic medicine, prisons, psychiatry, and other methods of classification accept had a lasting impact on philosophers, historians, critics, and novelists the earth over. But as public as he was in his militant campaigns on behalf of prisoners, dissidents, and homosexuals, he shrouded his personal life in mystery.

In The Lives of Michel Foucault — written with the full cooperation of Daniel Defert, Foucault's former lover — David Macey gives the richest account to date of Foucault'southward life and work, informed as it is by the complex issues arising from his writings.

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The Cambridge Companion to Foucault – Gary Gutting

Category: Overview | Length: 488 pages | Published: 2005 The Cambridge Companion to Foucault Book Cover

Publisher description: For Michel Foucault, philosophy was a way of questioning the allegedly necessary truths that underpin the practices and institutions of modernistic society. He carried this out in a series of deeply original and strikingly controversial studies on the origins of modernistic medical and social scientific disciplines. These studies have raised fundamental questions most the nature of human knowledge and its relation to power structures, and have get major topics of word throughout the humanities and social sciences. The essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of Foucault's major themes and texts, from his early work on madness through his history of sexuality. Special attention is also paid to thinkers and movements, from Kant through current feminist theory, that are particularly important for understanding his work and its impact. This revised edition contains five new essays and revisions of many others, and the extensive bibliography has been updated.

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The Foucault Reader – Michel Foucault

Category: Anthology | Length: 400 pages | Published: 1984 The Foucault Reader Book Cover

Publisher clarification: Michel Foucault was one of the most influential philosophical thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the pedagogy of half a dozen disciplines ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But of his many books, non ane offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire circuitous body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose.

The Reader contains selections from each surface area of Foucault's work as well equally a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume, the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality, and interviews with Foucault himself, in the form of which he discussed his philosophy at first manus and with unprecedented candor….

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Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison – Michel Foucault

Category: Archetype | Length: 333 pages Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Book Cover

Publisher clarification: In this vivid work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary accept just shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner'due south trunk to his soul.

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The History of Sexuality – Michel Foucault

Category: Classic | Length: 168 pages The History of Sexuality Book Cover

Publisher description: Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and hash out sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to directly the questions of what nosotros are to what our sexuality is.

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The following sources were used to build this list:

University Class Syllabi:

  • Michel Foucault – New York University
  • Select Foucault Bibliography – John Protevi
  • Disquisitional Methods: Reading Foucault – CTSJ 222 | Occidental College

Bibliographies:

  • Bibliography for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Foucault
  • Bibliography for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Foucault

Other Recommendations:

  • How do I showtime reading Foucault'south work?
  • What's the best identify to start with Foucault?
  • Where to brainstorm with Foucault?
  • Foucault Reading Order

Boosted Resources

If you want to acquire more than about Foucault, you can observe a collection of free articles, videos, and podcasts here.

Y'all might besides exist interested in the post-obit reading lists:

  • The All-time Introductory Philosophy Books
  • The Best Books on the History of Philosophy