2003-08-18
... ? :: New Statesman - BooksThe ideas of Michel Foucault have now permeated so many academic disciplines, from international relations to 'queer theory', that it is easy to forget that Foucault's influence stems from a simple but penetrating insight, developed early in his career: that the history of western civilisation is also the history of what that civilisation despises and excludes. Foucault was far from being the first historian to realise this, or to construct a version of the past upon it. But he was a leading figure in the generation that, in the wake of the convulsions of May 1968, sought to change contemporary society by interrogating it as 'a construction'.
