Michel Foucault
1926-1984 · Postmodernism · Household name
Foucault was a French historian of thought who studied how power runs through modern life. The exam, the timetable, the case file: he showed that power now measures and sorts people until they watch themselves, in place of a sovereign who forbids and punishes. Knowledge and power grow together, he argued, and the categories that describe you, patient, delinquent, deviant, help make you.
Signature
The position Foucault is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Truth
- leans Subjective
- Language
- Social Construction
Positions on the 9 axes the sources answer
- Universals
- leans Nominalism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Constructed (25 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Order
- leans Horizontal (75 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Multiplicity (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence (25 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Subjective (25 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Polity
- leans Liberalism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Illiberalism to Liberalism)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (25 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
11 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Foucault refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Other
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Freedom / Beauty
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Genealogical
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Conceptual Mediation / Symbolic Forms
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Power-Knowledge
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Virtue
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Social Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Other
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Might Makes Right
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Social Construction
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Law
- Other
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Human Nature
- Socially Constructed
What is human nature?