Michel Foucault (1926-84). Celebrated French thinker and activist who challenged people's assumptions about care of the mentally ill, gay rights, prisons, the police and welfare.
'He is a brilliant writer.' - Maurice Cranston 'A necessary guide to Foucault's often difficult ideas ... and to his overall historical ambition, which is to define the 'soil' out of which contemporary events in a given period grow.' - Times Literary Supplement 'Next to Sartre's - Search for a Method and in direct opposition to it, Foucault's work is the most noteworthy effort at a theory of history in the last 50 years.'