Michel Foucault Lectures at the College de France – serie

Picador is proud to publish the sixth volume in Foucault's prestigious, groundbreaking series of lectures at the Collège de France from 1970 to 1984 The Birth of Biopolitics continues to pursue the themes of Foucault's lectures from Security, Territory, Population. Having shown how eighteenth-century political economy marks the birth of a new governmental rationality--seeking maximum effectiveness by governing less and in accordance with the naturalness of the phenomena to be governed--Michel Foucault undertakes a detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality. In a direct and conversational tone, this book raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics.

An examination of the relation between war and politics, by one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkersFrom 1971 until 1984 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures ranging freely and conversationally over the range of his research. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern.

This lecture, given by Michel Foucault at the College de France, launches an inquiry into the notion of parresia and continues his rereading of ancient philosophy. Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of the truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy. The figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates' rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited here.

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered in a series of lectures from 1970 to 1984 at the College de France. Here, Foucault continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditions based on courage and conviction. His death, on June 25th, 1984, tempts us to detect the philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the themes of life and death.