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Foucault - The Key Ideas: Foucault and knowledge

By Paul Oliver

Foucault was not simply interested in the way knowledge in different subject areas accumulated throughout history, and changed during different historical periods, but in the mechanisms by which this happened. In particular, he was interested in the way in which one way of looking at the world changed into another.

He considered that history was very much connected with the nature of human thought at a specific period. According to Foucault, each historical period was characterized by a set of intellectual rules that helped to decide what would be regarded as valid knowledge at that time. He called these sets of intellectual rules ‘epistemes’.

Foucault thought that the ideology that was prevalent during a period in history greatly affected the lives of people and determined the way in which they thought about the world. Foucault tended to suggest that he did not want to change the way in which people thought about their surroundings, but to encourage them to think about the processes in society that affected them. He was sometimes described as a structuralist, but he preferred to avoid being associated with a particular school of thought.

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