The last characteristic of parrhesia... telling the truth is regarded as a duty.
— Michel FoucaultFearless Speech (2001) / 1. The Word Parrhesia
Use itGS4: truth-telling as moral duty; speaking truth to power.
Quotes / Thinkers / Michel Foucault
Thinker · 10 quotes
Michel Foucault quotes for UPSC
10 sourced quotes by Michel Foucault on justice & rule of law, power & corruption, integrity & honesty, governance & administration, democracy & freedom, with a use case for each in GS4, Essay and interviews.
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The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.
Use itGS2: penal reform as economy of power, not just cruelty.
Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
— Michel FoucaultDiscipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 228
Use itGS2/Essay on surveillance and disciplinary institutions in modern society.
It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes.
Use itGS2: justice must punish without glorying in it; reformative justice.
We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot 'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without.
— Michel FoucaultPart Four, Complete and austere institutions
Use itGS2/3: prison reform; alternatives to incarceration.
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
— Michel FoucaultDiscipline and Punish (1977)
Use itEssay: freedom and discipline arrived together in modernity; paradox of Enlightenment.
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
— Michel Foucault“Practicing criticism, or, is it really important to think?”, interview by Didier Eribon, May 30-31, 1981, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture,
Use itEssay intro: true critique questions unexamined assumptions behind practices.
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another.
— Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault, quoted in Subrata Chattopadhyay Banerjee - The Development of Aryan Invasion Theory in India, A Critique of Nineteenth-Cent
Use itEssay on knowledge and power; who controls information controls society.
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
— Michel FoucaultPart Three, Panopticism
Use itEssay on surveillance: visibility makes people self-police; panopticon.
Ion is... a parrhesiastes, i.e., the sort... so valuable to democracy or monarchy since he is courageous enough to explain either to the demos or to the king just what the short-comings of their life really are.
— Michel FoucaultFearless Speech (2001) / 2. Parrhesia in Euripides
Use itGS4/Essay: courageous advisers who tell rulers the truth are vital to democracy.