Happy Birthday, Michel Foucault

Foucault would be 82 today. It is hard not to regret all the pages he never got to write, but I also think his early departure lucked the rest of us into a special task — to keep revising his work in relation to the world of today, without him doing all the thinking for us. I can’t really come up with another recent writer whose work has been as influential and as reviled. I’m still amazed when sociologists dismiss his work (and those who use him) as “trendy” –  forty years plus seems a bit long for a trend, no? But as Charles Tilly pointed out, the chances are good that work with the greatest impact on a field will likely receive the strongest opposition (h/t to WITW for reminding us of this).

In Foucault’s own words:

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ”politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas… that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.