"Foucault, Michel" -- 3,500 word article for the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION. Edited by Marcel Danesi. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. May, 2013. 752 Pages. (original) (raw)

A French interdisciplinary academic, Michel Foucault was a leading late twentieth century intellectual and for the last fifteen years of his life professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious Collège de France. Foucault reconstructed the systems of the periodspecific practices of past disciplines whose objects of analysis or manipulation were particular aspects of the human being. He had one foot in the historical archive, piecing together aspects of past disciplines, and the other in the present, putting in perspective various features of what we have become. Playing original and radical reconstructions of the past against apparently indispensable presuppositions of the present, Foucault generated very controversial critical "histories of the present," and contributed to the political advocacy of marginalized groups. His work resulted in a considerable following throughout the arts and social sciences, but also considerable criticism. While the young Foucault was being educated, which included studying at the celebrated École normale supérieure, the French intellectual world experienced the zenith of phenomenology and existentialism, the central figure of which was Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), philosopher, author, and critic of bourgeois conformism, oppression, and capitalism. Sartre, who quit the academy and became an internationally recognized public intellectual, argued that humans are essentially free to choose what they will be-"man is nothing but what he makes of himself." This radical account of human agency amounted to a philosophical humanism in which each individual is and ought to be fully responsible for his or her life. Eventually, Sartre would weave into his humanism the threads of Marxism, according to which