Routledge Library Editions: Michel Foucault – serie

First published in 1990, this book was the first to explore Foucault's work in relation to education, arguing that schools, like prisons and asylums, are institutions of moral and social regulation, complex technologies of disciplinary control where power and knowledge are crucial. Original and challenging, the essays assess the relevance of Foucault's work to educational practice, and show how the application of Foucauldian analysis to education enables us to see the politics of educational reform in a new light.

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas.This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject to ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation.

Providing a detailed and in depth analysis of one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century, this Routledge Library Edition brings together some of the most significant and insightful scholarship on Michel Foucault published in the past quarter of a century. These five volumes, first published between 1984 and 1991, offer an extremely valuable study of this influential figure, covering a wide variety of themes, which range from Foucault's views on education and society through to his thoughts on ethics sexuality, Marxism and power. Not only does the collection offer a detailed analysis of Foucault's social and philosophical theories, it also seeks to assess the continuing influence and significance of Foucault in the decade immediately following his death in 1984.

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas.This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject to ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation.

First published in 1990, this book was the first to explore Foucault's work in relation to education, arguing that schools, like prisons and asylums, are institutions of moral and social regulation, complex technologies of disciplinary control where power and knowledge are crucial. Original and challenging, the essays assess the relevance of Foucault's work to educational practice, and show how the application of Foucauldian analysis to education enables us to see the politics of educational reform in a new light.

In this work, originally released in 1983, Barry Smart examines the relevance of Foucault's work for developing an understanding of those issues which lie beyond the limits of Marxist theory and analysis - issues such as 'individualising' forms of power, power-knowledge relations, the rise of 'the social', and the associated socialisation of politics. He argues that there exist clear and substantial differences between Foucault's genealogical analysis and that of Marxist theory. Smart thus presents Foucault's work as a new form of critical theory, whose object is a critical analysis of rationalities, and of how relations of power are rationalised.

In this reissused work, first published in 1991, John Rajchman isolates the question of ethics in the work of Foucault and Lacan and explores its ramifications and implications for the present day. He demonstrates that the question of ethics was at once the most difficult and the most intimate question for these two authors, offering a complex point of intersection between them. As such, he argues that it belongs to the great tradition that is concerned with the passion or eros of philosophy and of its "will to truth".Truth and Eros suggests a way of reading Foucault and Lacan as philosophers who re-eroticised the activity of thought in our time, opeing new and different spaces for thought and action - new types of subjectivity.

In this reissused work, first published in 1991, John Rajchman isolates the question of ethics in the work of Foucault and Lacan and explores its ramifications and implications for the present day. He demonstrates that the question of ethics was at once the most difficult and the most intimate question for these two authors, offering a complex point of intersection between them. As such, he argues that it belongs to the great tradition that is concerned with the passion or eros of philosophy and of its "will to truth".Truth and Eros suggests a way of reading Foucault and Lacan as philosophers who re-eroticised the activity of thought in our time, opeing new and different spaces for thought and action - new types of subjectivity.