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Another widely influential contributor to contemporary sociological theory was Michel Foucault (also excerpted here). He was a classmate and friend of Bourdieu’s, and they shared both an enduring focus on unequal power and the perspective sometimes called “poststructuralism.” The label is potentially misleading for both produced classic works of structuralist analysis. But both also sought to move beyond more or less static approaches, integrating attention to enduring patterns in social and cultural structure with a focus on change and the dynamics of individual action.

Foucault focused on the relationship of power to knowledge, on the relationship of both power and transformations of knowledge to the constitution of modern individuals, and on the development of new techniques of governance and administration – what he called governmentality – that work through positive means more than negative applications of force.

In an early study, Foucault examined the social construction of “madness” and its relationship to shifting ideas of correct knowledge and development of institutions of confinement and eventually psychiatric treatment.¹⁴ He continued with The Birth of the Clinic, which included an examination of how the “medical gaze” objectified the body and then more general studies in the formation of kinds of knowledge – different “knowledges” – in distinct historical epochs.¹⁵ These studies came together to shape Foucault’s two most important projects.

Discipline and Punish is Foucault’s account of how modernity reshaped law enforcement and with it helped to make the modern person. An older logic of punishment had used dramatic public executions and other physical punishments to make moral examples of criminals. There was no expectation of rehabilitating them, though they might seek to save their souls by confessing their crimes. By contrast, the modern era developed prisons to take prisoners out of the public gaze (as asylums had done with the mad – now called mentally ill). In place of punishment, there was a new emphasis on surveillance. This constant monitoring was evident in the very design of prisons and used in an effort to remake prisoners. By some standards this was more “humane,” but it was also a new extreme in social control. All of modern society was reshaped by surveillance, Foucault suggested, including policing but also social work and the collection of all kinds of statistics. This was complemented by governmentality, as citizens were given incentives – sometimes subtle and even hidden – to conform to social norms or government policies. Above all, citizens were made into the agents of their own self-discipline.¹⁶

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault again noted a modern disciplinary regime. Governing sexuality became an important religious concern, producing a new regime of internalization of responsibility combined with confession. This required constituting a “truth” of sexuality. This involved not just a classification of the morally acceptable and unacceptable but development of the ideas of “normality” and deviance. In addition, sexuality was essentially as something basic to who one is by contrast to sexual practices as some things one does. Along with the idea of normality, ideals of “performance” were deployed both in hostility toward homosexuals and other “deviants,” and in anxieties to conform to expectations, the proliferation of “self-help” and “how-to” books and comparisons of each individual’s own experience to that in movies or literature.¹⁷ This was part of the constitution of the modern individual by disciplinary power.

Individualism ideologically presented the self as the fount of freedom, but in fact it was an effect of disciplinary practices. Deployed not only in prisons but also in clinics, schools, workplaces, and even through shopping, these made individuals the agents of self-discipline on behalf of social norms. But, modern states do not rely only on these regimes of disciplinary power. They also use what Foucault called “Biopower.” Here, the object of attention is not the individual as such, but whole populations in which individuals are sorted by statistics on everything from birth to life expectancy to public health and processes such as sex and conception, migration, aging, and death are all managed.