Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France. His father was an eminent local surgeon who desired his son to follow in his career footsteps. After graduating from Saint-Stanislas school, he entered the prestigious lycée Henri-IV in Paris. In 1946 he was admitted to the École Normale Supérièure as the fourth highest ranked student. Studying philosophy with the distinguished Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Foucault emerged as a brilliant young thinker. He received his licence in Philosophy in 1948, in Psychology in 1950, and in 1952 was awarded a diploma in Pyschopathology.

From 1954 to 1958 he taught French at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, then spent a year at the University of Warsaw followed by a year at the University of Hamburg. In 1960, the year he returned to France as the head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Clermont-Ferrard, he published his landmark work Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Madness and Civilization). In this he argued that “madness' as we know it, and the scrupulous and troubled distinctions we make between it and “sanity,' is a hallmark invention of the Age of Reason. With this book he influenced the ‘anti-psychiatry' movemend. The book won him a Doctorat d'état.
In that same year, Foucault met Daniel Defert, a philosophy student ten years his junior. Foucault fell in love with him. Defert's political activism would exercise a major influence on Foucault's development.

Foucault's second major work, Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things), a comparative study of the development of economics, the natural sciences, and linguistics in the 18th and 19th centuries, appeared in 1966. A surprise bestseller in France, it made Foucault a household name—at least in intellectual circles. Especially notorious and much-quoted was his prediction, at the book's end, that “the subject,' a recent discursive formation made possible only in by fundamental changes in the arrangement of knowledge during the last 150 years, is nearing his end: soon he will be “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.' If Foucault's intellectual forebear Friedrich Nietzsche had proclaimed the death of God, Foucault had proclaimed the death of Man, or the Death of the Subject.

When Daniel Defert went to Tunisia to fulfill his volunteer service requirements, Foucault followed him, and spent 1966-1968 teaching there. The two returned to Paris - Foucault to head up the Philosophy Department at the University of Paris-VIII at Vincennes, Defert to teach sociology - just as the student revolts of May, 1968, unleashed their fury. Foucault was profoundly affected by the unrest. In that year he joined with other intellectuals in forming GIP, the Prison Information Group, an organization that sought to provide prisoners with a way to talk about prison concerns.

His study L'Archéologie du savoir (Archaeology of Knowledge) appeared in 1969. In 1970 he was elected to the College de France, the country's most eminent institution of research and learning, as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. In 1975 he published Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish: The Origin of the Prison), perhaps his most influential book. In this book he analyzed the way in which people were punished throughout the centuries. He claims that nowadays not the body of persons is punished, but the subject behind it.

He is seen as one of the most prominent speakers of postmodernism, a philosophical, historical and sociological movement that stoop up against the Enlightenment-ideal that human-beings can find truth. According to postmodernists ‘truth' does not exist.

During the last decade of his life he devoted himself to Histoire de la sexualité (The History of Sexuality), a monumental but unfinished project. Histoire de la sexualité 1 - La Volonté de savoir (Volume I: An Introduction) appeared to much controversy in 1976, and the second and third volumes, L'Usage des plaisirs (The Uses of Pleasure) and Le Souci de soi (The Care of the Self), came out shortly before his death in 1984.