The most recommended Michel Foucault books

Michel Foucault spent the last years of his life in his plain-speaking public lectures, calling our attention to the ancient philosophers’ practices for mastering the self. I help leaders (and myself) with these practices of managing desires without trying to eliminate them.

In this book (1982-1983 lectures), Foucault focuses on the practice that guides my life: parrhesia, telling truth to power. From 400 BCE to 600 CE, parrhesia reigned in education. Foucault’s account of Plato’s subtle truth-telling to Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, is spellbinding. As thanks, Dionysius sold Plato into slavery. Telling the truth always carries a high moral risk. Truths cut across common sense.

Today’s mantra of radical candor—sharing views—avoids hard truths, produces agreeableness, and undermines good lives. This book wakes us up.

Laporte’s poetic and sweeping tour of turds made me realize how flushing my toilet produces and reinscribes cultural norms. Read the history behind our collective fascination with “sewer stories,” whether it’s London’s immense blobs of underground fat or urban legends about deadly crocodiles or mutant goldfish. 

I love how this book has inspired and influenced contemporary metabolic artists. In 2017, Kathy High and Guy Schaffer created a mixed media project “committed to re-imaging and re-inserting feminist and queer stories into our histories of medicine and science” and called their work History of Shit as an homage to Laporte. I am moved by how High and Schaffer continue Laporte’s work within what might have been his natural lifespan had we not lost him and countless artists and philosophers to the AIDS pandemic.

This is the Granddaddy of earthshattering, perspective-changing books: philosopher Michel Foucault’s nimble dissection of the rise and the role of sexuality in the Western world. Written, and surely meant to be read, more like a Homeric epic poem than an academic treatise, every single sentence in this book quivers with energy and perception. From pithy aphorisms like “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”, to heady pronouncements such as ‘”Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective”, this book is a gift that perpetually keeps on giving. Guaranteed to blow your mind.

Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting sadly passed away right before COVID, but not before writing countless articles, many of them on the New York Times philosophy website The Stone, showing practical uses of the philosophical tradition. Many of his thoughts are collected in his 2015 book What Philosophy Can Do which includes chapters on how philosophical practices can help us better argue about politics and religion, better understand the power, nature (and limitations) of science, and how to think about education and art. Gutting’s thoughtful and insightful writing provides practical ways to navigate a contentious age using tools that have been helping people argue about and even solve difficult problems for over two thousand years. For anyone laboring under the delusion that philosophy is an exercise in abstraction, suitable for the classroom and research symposium, but little else, What Philosophy Can Do will cure you of that stereotype.

When I was growing up, Paris was the world center for thinkers on existentialism and postmodernism, my two favorite subjects. I knew the names of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir better than the names of my classmates.

John Sturrock has written the best essays ever on the thinkers of that pivotal period in intellectual thought, among them, in addition to Camus and Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. If you want a smart, eloquent, and accessible introduction to the postmodern thought revolution about the truth—how “true” lost its meaning and how it might mean something again—this is your book!  

Foucault’s classic 1961 book, History of Madness, was republished in 2006 in its entirety, exposing the serious omissions of the earlier English translation. In its full form, it stands the test of time as a groundbreaking book that exposed the origins of the modern rational self as the product of repeated attempts to understand, exclude, contain, eliminate, and treat ‘madness’. Foucault’s main argument was that since the Renaissance, our understanding of madness shifted from a philosophical phenomenon into an objective medical science. In the Renaissance, madness could still provide wisdom and insight. Yet, during the 17th and early 18th Centuries, numerous institutions of confinement, such as asylums and poor houses, were established to contain both madness and economic redundancy.’

Foucault characterises the modern experience of madness as defined purely by medical science. He claims this perspective is limiting and definitely not a move towards the ‘truth’ of madness. His… show more.

I love the subversive title of this book. If there is no “heterosexuality” then there is no “homosexuality.” A challenging read, because of the subtle and complex reasoning Katz uses to untangle early erotic/procreative/love relationship concepts that were very differently structured from our own homo/hetero dichotomy. He uses history to show the slow development of the concept of heterosexuality, and that it is not “an essential, eternal, normal.” Katz draws on Michel Foucault regarding ancient Greece, on the Puritans, the Victorians, on Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and Alfred Kinsey, showing how language reveals the changing ways of conceptualizing and valuing differing modes of sexual expression. The critiques of Freud are a revelation.

In these extraordinary lectures, Foucault offers a comprehensive social history of neoliberal theory from the 1920s to 1980 in Germany, France, Britain, and the U.S. While this work does not focus on racism, Foucault critically elaborates neoliberalism’s defining ideas: the attack on the state and dissipation of the commons, the privatization of everything, and the individualizing of all responsibility; financializing all social and individual choice, while redefining social subjectivity as “the Man of Enterprise,” of innovation and self-making. Foucault opened me to seeing how the liberal in “neoliberalism” signals the elevation of individual freedom as a counter to state power and social support. The question this raised for me is how these shifts in social thought suggest new developments in racist expression.

Foucault’s groundbreaking work from the 1960s looks at how systems of order and classification came into being during the age of rationalism with Descartes, culminating in the 18th-century Enlightenment’s project of subjecting every field of knowledge to its own self-enclosed order. It remains of the great works of theoretical synthesis, patiently dissecting the structures of knowledge, of order and priority, that western learning continues to take for granted. At half a century’s distance, Foucault is the one French thinker whose legacy remains intact for his lucidity, polemical edge, and refusal of esoteric linguistic games.

This consummate French philosopher explores the lineage of psychiatry as an intertwined field of knowledge and form of power. For Foucault, moving beyond asylums, in the nineteenth and twentieth century armies called on psychiatry to assert the reality of military power and the functioning of military purposes. A similar relationship has taken place with the family in relation to nation-states and military establishments. The author provides many useful concepts to appreciate the psychiatrization of soldiers as shocked, exhausted, hysterical, neurotic, and traumatized, among other diagnostic categories. From this work, a significant value I gained is a historical understanding of how modern psychiatry developed in relation to armed forces and warfare.