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“... many of the most important works of 20th-century social theory, from Max Weber to Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault: guilt and innocence are rarely as easily distinguishable as we might like them to be. This is what it means for a problem to be systemic. Bad things don’t happen simply because bad people intend them; and good people often play an integral ...”

“... or the developing interest in economics, as informatively discussed by Albert Hirschmann and Michel Foucault. It is as if, in the best of all possible worlds. Ritter had interesting notions about music and speech, as did Vico, as did Sterne, and Tieck, as finally did Schumann. It is very hard to doubt a community of interest here, but Rosen’s ...”

“... scientific future pointed to by Pasteur and his like. But that was before the Frankfurt School, Michel Foucault, the environmental and antinuclear movements, the ‘linguistic turn’ and the new academic field of ‘science studies’ (carried out largely by sociologists, anthropologists, historians and literary critics). Thanks to them it is much ...”

“... guilt,’ Trombley writes. The comment has the fashionable aura of R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault, but although he makes vague gestures at all three, Trombley does not seem to comprehend the implications of their arguments. For what follows from his comparison of madness and crime is the conclusion that Virginia Woolf should be considered ...”

“... of reality’ are much in vogue at present. In a quite different tradition, that encouraged by Michel Foucault, one reads of an ‘historical a priori’ (an idea adapted from Mauss), which could perfectly well characterise part of Fleck’s notion of a thought-style. Douglas is, however, quite unusual. Although she writes in a context of this kind of ...”

“... or the floating signifier could keep it warm. It is not unknown for followers of Michel Foucault to celebrate the anarchic force of madness while voting Liberal Democrat. You can back Tony Blair and Pierre Bourdieu with equal enthusiasm. In the era of Bolshevism, by contrast, theory had at times to hobble hard to keep abreast of what was ...”

“... of enemies and circumstances. In a notorious recent attack, Camille Paglia substituted the name of Michel Foucault for Catiline. And in the closing days of the Second World War a disconsolate lover (Walter Prude), separated by the demands of military service from his new wife (Agnes de Mille, choreographer of Rodeo, Oklahoma! and Gentlemen Prefer ...”

“... traditional histories of psychiatry are Whiggish, anti-psychiatry histories (particularly that of Michel Foucault) are often relentlessly pessimistic: while the former insist upon our developing grasp of psychiatric conditions, the latter see only our developing conditioning by the therapeutic state. Anne Digby’s monograph on the history of the York ...”

“... The British Empire – like every other empire there has ever been – scarcely needed Michel Foucault to tell it that assembling knowledge might enhance power. The men who mapped the Empire, who photographed and named its various peoples, plants and animals, who imprisoned hitherto free-floating local dialects between the covers of ...”

“... John Fiske, whose essay ‘Opening the Hallway’ upbraids the maestro for coming down too hard on Michel Foucault. Hall has been engaged for some time in a precarious balancing-act between socialism and Post-Modernism, class and race, epistemic realism and epistemic constructivism, and one name presiding over this trade-off in our times has been that of ...”

“... feel visible to the prison guards at all times whether or not they were actually being watched. As Michel Foucault noted, the panopticon was a disciplinary tool, which sought to bolster the moral conscience of the prisoner to the point at which he was policing his own behaviour, and could be released back into society as a good and rational ...”

“... as a standard-bearer for the so-called ‘new novel’ alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008), Michel Butor (1926-2016) and Claude Simon (1913-2005). I am not sure that many people read any of them for pleasure these days. (In my more cynical moments, I don’t think anyone read them with much pleasure back then either.) We took for granted that the ‘new ...”

“... be taken upon the testimony of the patient.’ Things changed, thanks to the emergence of what Michel Foucault dubbed the new ‘clinical gaze’. The traditional bedside question – ‘What is the matter?’ – gave way to the modern: ‘Show me where it hurts.’ Diagnosis switched from subjective symptoms to objective signs – and power shifted ...”

“... points out that the two historians who have done most to encourage this view are Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. In The Civilising Process, first published in 1939, Elias argued that a rising European bourgeoisie sought to discipline itself by a complex regulation of bodily impulses and gestures which amounted to a restructuring of personality. ...”

“... on écrit l’Histoire, was first published in 1971 and recently reissued with a postscript on Michel Foucault.4 I am unable here to resist the temptation to tell the story of a French friend, an economist, who upon hearing my enthusiasm for Veyne, commented in roughly the following terms: ‘My friend, I used to trust your judgment, but when I see ...”