come to be seen as taken-for-granted within the history of European culture.
Among his earlier works one was concerned with the history of madness
during the Classical age, and another with the birth of a discourse of clinical
medicine during the late eighteenth century. In the 1960s he wrote on the
human sciences and the nature of knowledge. In the 1970s he presented a
history of the prison and of new modes of discipline as they occurred in the
nineteenth century. Later in the 1970s he wrote on the history of sexuality
to oppose the idea that sexuality reveals some "deep truth" about the self
and to expose the fallacy of the view that the human sciences are concerned
with uncovering rather than constructing the objects of their domain. In an
important sense Foucault's work seeks to uncover not the development of
rationality, but the ways new forms of control and power are legitimated by
complex discourses that stake a claim to rationality and that are embedded
in diverse institutional sites.

Foucault's lasting contribution is as an historian and a philosopher of
science, though not of the sort who can be neatly labeled in terms of dis-
ciplinary home, but rather a scholar who defies neat intellectual classification
and who rejects the institutional basis of disciplinary affiliation. Although
his works can be considered histories by virtue of their objects and temporal
reference, the objectives and conceptual and theoretical resources are drawn
from philosophy. According to Clare O'Farrell ( 1989: 3), a stronger case
can be made to consider Foucault's writings as philosophies rather than as
histories. There is, she says, a "constancy of philosophical quest" which
underpins the historical shifts in emphasis and reinterpretations he makes of
his work. While I would agree with O'Farrell on this point, I would argue
further that the mix of historical and theoretical concerns means they are
not straightforwardly philosophical treatises either. If his work has a coher-
ence, the best designation, in my view, is as a sociologist of knowledge in
the traditions of Marx, Durkheim, and Mannheim. The sociology of knowl-
edge seeks to relate patterns of thought to social situations and thereby
reveal how knowledge is a product of social structures and social interaction.
Foucault's approach fits such a designation as revealed in the illumination
as to how the human sciences as forms of power-knowledge have been im-
plicated with social structures, and in the repeated effort on Foucault's part
to expose the individualist, and especially bio-medical roots of modern
knowledge as expressions of power-knowledge.

To present an account of Foucault's life can only be undertaken against
the background that Foucault's own attitude to texts on or about the self
mirrored Nietzsche ( 1983: 97) distaste for "all the learned dust of biog-
raphy." There is an important sense, however, in which each of Foucault's
books must be seen as part of his biography and related to changes within
his life. In their important book Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics ( 1982). Dreyfus and Rabinow distinguish four stages in Fou-

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