The lives of Michel Foucault - David Macey

Foucault's work reached beyond the normal boundaries of philosophy; he wrote about madness, prisons, medicine, sex and language. He was many things - academic, political activist, child, lover of men.;Opening with an account of Foucault's death in 1985 from AIDS, this biography then returns to the provincial France of his childhood, and follows the transformation of a conservative doctor's son into the foremost radical philosopher of his generation, the force of his work enhanced by his actively homosexual lifestyle. A brief fling with communism left him with an abiding hatred of the Soviet Union.;After working on the history of psychiatry through the 1950s and '60s in Sweden, Poland and Tunisia, Foucault returned to France after the violence of May 1968 with a disturbing vision of modern society policed by mechanisms of power and control. He also lived his ideas, agitating for prison reform, homosexual liberation and the rights of mental patients.;David Macey's other works include "Lacan in Contexts", a study of the French psychoanalyst.