Oksala identifies the different interpretations of freedom in Foucault's philosophy and examines its three major divisions.

This edition of a 1995 book (Sage Publications) contains a new introduction by the series editor and a new preface. Readers familiar with Foucault's work will appreciate the difficulty in critically studying its arresting paradoxical nature. Dumm (political science, Amherst College) negotiates the problem by creating a thematic framework--the idea of being "free" in a modern Western capitalist democracy--and examining it through a Foucaultian lens. He focuses on the politics of freedom, negative freedom, the disciplinary society, ethics, seduction, governments, and provides an enlightening companion to Foucault's postmodern philosophy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Michel Foucault was a twentieth-century philosopher of extraordinary talent, a political activist, social theorist, cultural critic and creative historian. He shaped the ways we think today about such controversial issues as power, sexuality, madness and criminality. Johanna Oksala explores the conceptual tools that Foucault gave us for constructing new forms of thinking as well as for smashing old certainties. She offers a lucid account of him as a thinker whose persistent aim was to challenge the self-evidence and seeming inevitability of our current experiences, practices and institutions by showing their historical development and, therefore, contingency. Extracts are taken from the whole range of Foucault's writings - his books, essays, lectures and interviews - including the major works History of Madness,The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.

Against the prevailing interpretations which disqualify a Foucauldian approach from the discourse of freedom, this study offers a novel concept of political freedom and posits freedom as the primary axiological motif of Foucault's writing. Based on a new interpretation of the relation of Foucault's approach to the problematic of sovereignty, Sergei Prozorov both reconstructs ontology of freedom in Foucault's textual corpus and outlines the modalities of its practice in the contemporary terrain of global governance. The book critically engages with the acclaimed post-Foucauldian theories of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, thereby restoring the controversial notion of the sovereign subject to the critical discourse on global politics. As a study in political thought, this book will be suitable for students and scholars interested in the problematic of political freedom, philosophy and global governance.

Powers of Freedom, first published in 1999, offers a compelling approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways. Nikolas Rose sets out the key characteristics of this approach to political power and analyses the government of conduct. He analyses the role of expertise, the politics of numbers, technologies of economic management and the political uses of space. He illuminates the relation of this approach to contemporary theories of 'risk society' and 'the sociology of governance'. He argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources. He also seeks some rapprochement between analyses of government and the concerns of critical sociology, cultural studies and Marxism, to establish a basis for the critique of power and its exercise. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory, sociology, social policy and cultural studies.

Michel Foucault was one of the twentieth century's most influential and provocative thinkers. His work on freedom, subjectivity, and power is now central to thinking across an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, history, education, psychology, politics, anthropology, sociology, and criminology. "Michel Foucault: Key Concepts" explores Foucault's central ideas, such as disciplinary power, biopower, bodies, spirituality, and practices of the self. Each essay focuses on a specific concept, analyzing its meaning and uses across Foucault's work, highlighting its connection to other concepts, and emphasizing its potential applications. Together, the chapters provide the main co-ordinates to map Foucault's work. But more than a guide to the work, "Michel Foucault: Key Concepts" introduces readers to Foucault's thinking, equipping them with a set of tools that can facilitate and enhance further study.

In Foucault’s Discipline, John S. Ransom extracts a distinctive vision of the political world—and oppositional possibilities within it—from the welter of disparate topics and projects Michel Foucault pursued over his lifetime. Uniquely, Ransom presents Foucault as a political theorist in the tradition of Weber and Nietzsche, and specifically examines Foucault’s work in relation to the political tradition of liberalism and the Frankfurt School. By concentrating primarily on Discipline and Punish and the later Foucauldian texts, Ransom provides a fresh interpretation of this controversial philosopher’s perspectives on concepts such as freedom, right, truth, and power. Foucault’s Discipline demonstrates how Foucault’s valorization of descriptive critique over prescriptive plans of action can be applied to the decisively altered political landscape of the end of this millennium. By reconstructing the philosopher’s arguments concerning the significance of disciplinary institutions, biopower, subjectivity, and forms of resistance in modern society, Ransom shows how Foucault has provided a different way of looking at and responding to contemporary models of government—in short, a new depiction of the political world.

This book focuses on Michel Foucault's late work on rights in order to address broader questions about the politics of rights in the contemporary era. As several commentators have observed, something quite remarkable happens in this late work. In his early career, Foucault had been a great critic of the liberal discourse of rights. Suddenly, from about 1976 onward, he makes increasing appeals to rights in his philosophical writings, political statements, interviews, and journalism. He not only defends their importance; he argues for rights new and as-yet-unrecognized. Does Foucault simply revise his former positions and endorse a liberal politics of rights? Ben Golder proposes an answer to this puzzle, which is that Foucault approaches rights in a spirit of creative and critical appropriation. He uses rights strategically for a range of political purposes that cannot be reduced to a simple endorsement of political liberalism. Golder develops this interpretation of Foucault's work while analyzing its shortcomings and relating it to the approaches taken by a series of current thinkers also engaged in considering the place of rights in contemporary politics, including Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Jacques Rancière.

Speaking of Freedom analyzes the development of ideas concerning freedom and politics in contemporary French thought from existentialism to deconstruction, in relation to several of the most prominent post-World War II revolutionary struggles and the liberation discourses they inspired.

This work provides an introduction to the work of Michel Foucault. It offers an assessment of all of Foucault's work, including his final writings on governmentality and the self. McNay argues that the later work initiates an important shift in his intellectual concerns which alters any retrospective reading of his writings as a whole. Throughout, McNay is concerned to assess the normative and political implications of Foucault's social criticism. She goes beyond the level of many commentators to look at the values from which Foucault's work springs and reveals the implicit assumptions underlying his social critique. The author also provides an account and assessment of recent literature on Foucault, including that of Habermas and Taylor. She discusses Foucault's position in the modernity/postmodernity debate, his own ambivalence to Enlightenment thought and his place in recent developments in feminist and cultural theory.