ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault was a significant figure in French philosophical debates on reason, language, knowledge, and power. In order to understand Foucault’s general ideas and methods, it is important to have some knowledge of the French intellectual context in which he functioned. Foucault has also been labeled a postmodernist thinker even if this also was a label he resisted. In Foucault’s early work in the 1950s and 60s, he focuses on modern science, and in particular, the sciences that have the human being as their object. The medical profession has traditionally explained the medical science as a shift from superstition to objective truth when it comes to illness and the body. Foucault bases his concept of panoptic power on Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a Panopticon, a prison where the inmates were under constant surveillance. The Panopticon was never built, but its architecture served as the model on which British, American, Australian, Norwegian, and other prisons were built.
