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In April 1966 Gallimard printed 3,500 copies of a dense history of the human sciences by a philosophy lecturer from Clermont-Ferrand. They sold out quickly, and by September the publisher had reprinted it three times; Le Nouvel Observateur reported 800 copies gone in five days that summer. The book was Les Mots et les choses, The Order of Things, and its author was Michel Foucault (1926–1984). He went on to write about prisons, hospitals and sexuality, always asking the same question: how did a way of thinking that now seems natural come into being? This guide covers his nine key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 key books · 1961–2018 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Michel Foucault’s best-known books are Discipline and Punish (1975), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976), The Order of Things (1966) and History of Madness (1961). Start with Discipline and Punish, which opens with a public execution in 1757 and ends with the modern prison. The four volumes of The History of Sexuality appeared between 1976 and 2018.
Where to Start with Michel Foucault
If you want his most read book
→ Discipline and Punish (1975) — the birth of the prison, from the scaffold to the Panopticon.
If you want his ideas on power and sex
→ The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976) — short, and the source of the “repressive hypothesis”.
If you want the book that made him famous
→ The Order of Things (1966) — the 1966 surprise bestseller.
If you want where it all began
→ History of Madness (1961) — madness and confinement since the Renaissance.
9 Michel Foucault Books, in Order
History of Madness
Foucault’s doctoral thesis, published in French as Folie et déraison, traces how Europe treated madness from the Renaissance to the asylum, including the “great confinement” of the poor, the idle and the mad in the seventeenth century. A shortened version appeared in English in 1965 as Madness and Civilization; the complete text was not translated until 2006.
The Birth of the Clinic
A short study of how clinical medicine took shape in France around the Revolution, when doctors began to read illness in the body by examination and autopsy. It introduces the idea of the medical “gaze”, a way of looking that, Foucault argues, made the patient an object of knowledge.
The Order of Things
Les Mots et les choses compares how knowledge was organised in three periods, from the Renaissance through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the nineteenth, when natural history, general grammar and the analysis of wealth gave way to biology, philology and economics. It opens with Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas and closes by predicting the disappearance of “man” as a figure of knowledge. It was a surprise bestseller in France.
The Archaeology of Knowledge
Foucault steps back from history to explain his method: how to study “discourse”, the rules that decide what can be said and counted as true in a given period, without relying on authors, intentions or the idea of steady progress. It is the most abstract of his books.
Discipline and Punish
Surveiller et punir opens with the public torture and execution of Robert-François Damiens, who tried to kill Louis XV, and sets it against the timetable of a nineteenth-century reformatory less than a century later. Foucault argues that the prison grew out of new techniques of discipline that also shaped schools, armies and factories, and uses Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, where inmates can never tell whether they are being watched, as the model.
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1
Foucault questions what he calls the “repressive hypothesis”, the belief that sex was silenced from the seventeenth century onwards. He argues instead that modern societies made people talk about sex constantly, in confession, medicine and psychiatry, and that this produced new forms of power over bodies and populations. It was a bestseller in France.
The Use of Pleasure
After an eight-year gap, the series turns back to classical Greece in the fourth century BCE: how free men were expected to govern their own pleasures through diet, household management and the love of boys. It was published in June 1984, weeks before his death.
The Care of the Self
The companion to volume two follows the same questions into the first two centuries CE, through Greek and Roman writers such as Artemidorus, the interpreter of dreams, and the Stoics. Marriage and the cultivation of the self take a larger place than in classical Greece.
Confessions of the Flesh
The volume on the early Church Fathers, which Foucault had put aside to write volumes two and three, deals with baptism, penance, virginity and marriage, and ends with Augustine. It was published by Gallimard in February 2018, despite his stated wish for no posthumous publications; the English translation followed in 2021.
In What Order to Read Michel Foucault
Foucault’s books do not build a single system, and each can be read alone. Publication order does show the shifts in his work: the 1960s books study knowledge (madness, medicine, the human sciences), the 1970s books study power, and the last books turn to ethics and how people shape themselves. The Archaeology of Knowledge explains the method of the first period and is easier once you have read one of the histories.
The History of Sexuality is best read in order of volume, but volume one is a separate, polemical book; volumes two to four are slower, close readings of ancient and early Christian texts.
A reading path
1. Discipline and Punish (1975)
2. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976)
3. History of Madness (1961)
4. The Order of Things (1966)
5. The Use of Pleasure (1984)
Everything Else Michel Foucault Published
Beyond the 9 key books: 9 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other books
4
4 books · 1954–1973
- 1954Mental Illness and Personalityhis first book, which he later disowned; revised in 1962
- 1963Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Rousselhis only book on a writer
- 1971The Order of Discoursehis inaugural lecture at the Collège de France
- 1973This Is Not a Pipea short essay on René Magritte
Edited dossiers
2
2 books · 1973–1978
- 1973I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother…a nineteenth-century murderer’s memoir, with essays by his seminar
- 1978Herculine Barbinthe memoirs of a nineteenth-century intersex person
Posthumous lecture courses (selection)
3
3 books · 1997–2004
- 1997“Society Must Be Defended”lectures of 1975–76
- 2004Security, Territory, Populationlectures of 1977–78
- 2004The Birth of Biopoliticslectures of 1978–79, on liberalism and neoliberalism
The years · 1926–2018
Quick facts about Michel Foucault
- Known for
- Michel Foucault is known for histories of madness, medicine, prisons and sexuality that show how knowledge and power shape what a society treats as normal.
- 1926
- Born in Poitiers, France
- 1984
- Dies in Paris, aged 57
- 2018
- Confessions of the Flesh published
- Born
- 15 October 1926, Poitiers, France
- Died
- 25 June 1984, Paris, of AIDS-related illness
- Education
- École Normale Supérieure; agrégation in philosophy, 1951
- Worked
- Uppsala, Warsaw, Hamburg, Clermont-Ferrand, Tunis and Vincennes
- Chair
- History of Systems of Thought, Collège de France, from 1970
- Activism
- Co-founded the Prisons Information Group (GIP) in 1971
- Partner
- Daniel Defert, who founded the AIDS charity AIDES after his death
The red mark is 1975: Discipline and Punish, his history of the prison.
How Michel Foucault Writes: Histories of the Present
Foucault wrote philosophy as history. Instead of asking what madness, illness or crime really are, he went to the archives — asylum records, medical treatises, prison regulations, confessors’ manuals — to show when and how those categories were formed. He called the approach “archaeology” in the 1960s and, after Nietzsche, “genealogy” in the 1970s.
His books often open with a striking scene that does the arguing for him: Velázquez’s Las Meninas in The Order of Things, the execution of Damiens in Discipline and Punish. From there he works through long sequences of examples. His central claim about power is that it is not only held by a ruler or the state and imposed from above, but works through everyday institutions and the knowledge they produce.
The work was tied to his politics. While writing Discipline and Punish he helped run the Prisons Information Group, which gathered prisoners’ own accounts of conditions in French jails. In the late books the style changes: plainer, slower, built on close reading of Greek, Roman and Christian texts on how to live.
Frequently asked questions about Michel Foucault’s books
How many books has Michel Foucault written?
About a dozen books of his own were published in his lifetime, plus two edited dossiers. Nine are the key books on this page, from History of Madness (1961) to Confessions of the Flesh (2018). After his death his lectures at the Collège de France were also published, in thirteen volumes.
What are Michel Foucault’s books in order?
History of Madness (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976), The Use of Pleasure (1984), The Care of the Self (1984) and Confessions of the Flesh (2018). Years are those of the first French editions.
Where should I start with Michel Foucault?
Discipline and Punish (1975). It has a clear story, from the public execution of Damiens in 1757 to the modern prison, and introduces his ideas about power and surveillance. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 is a shorter second step.
What is Michel Foucault’s most famous book?
Discipline and Punish is his most widely read book, known above all for its chapter on the Panopticon. The Order of Things (1966) was the book that made him famous in France.
Is Madness and Civilization the same book as History of Madness?
Yes and no. Madness and Civilization (English, 1965) is a translation of an abridged edition of Folie et déraison (1961). The complete book was published in English as History of Madness in 2006.
How many volumes of The History of Sexuality are there?
Four. Volume 1, The Will to Knowledge, appeared in 1976; volumes 2 and 3, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, in 1984; volume 4, Confessions of the Flesh, was published posthumously in 2018. The English translations are by Robert Hurley.
Was Foucault a structuralist?
He was often grouped with the structuralists after The Order of Things, alongside Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Barthes, but he repeatedly rejected the label. He is also often called a post-structuralist, a term he did not use for himself.
How did Michel Foucault die?
He died on 25 June 1984 at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, aged 57, of complications from AIDS. Volumes two and three of The History of Sexuality had been published that month.
What controversies surround Michel Foucault?
Three are often discussed. In 1978 he reported from Iran for Corriere della Sera and wrote sympathetically about the revolutionary movement, which drew heavy criticism. In May 1977 he signed an open letter asking the commission revising the French penal code to review the age of consent, and in 1978 he argued on France Culture that consent was not an adequate test. In 2021 the essayist Guy Sorman said that in 1969 he had seen Foucault pay young boys for sex in Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia; no independent corroboration has been published.
Footnotes
- Michel Foucault — Wikipedia
- The History of Sexuality — Wikipedia
- Discipline and Punish — Wikipedia
- 1966, the Year of Light — François Dosse, History of Anthropology Review
- Fourth volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality published — University of Warwick, 2018
- Reckoning with Foucault’s alleged sexual abuse of boys in Tunisia — Al Jazeera, 2021
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
— Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976), translated by Robert Hurley
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