Reading List

Authors Like Michel Foucault

Discipline and Punish (1975) opens with the sentence passed in Paris on 2 March 1757 on Robert-François Damiens, who had stabbed Louis XV, and the torture that followed. A few pages later Michel Foucault sets beside it a set of rules for young prisoners drawn up some eighty years later: drum-rolls, work, prayer, lessons, bed. The book asks how punishment moved from the body to the soul, and how the prison's methods spread to schools, barracks and hospitals. Foucault was born in Poitiers on 15 October 1926, held a chair in the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France from 1970, and died in Paris in 1984. His centenary this October was marked in France with a Pléiade anthology and new editions of his books. The ten writers below share his question: how institutions, experts and everyday habits shape who we think we are.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Philosophy · Power · Institutions · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

The closest matches to Michel Foucault are Erving Goffman, whose Asylums came out in 1961, the same year as Foucault's history of madness; Ian Hacking, who studied how psychiatric categories shape the people they describe; and Edward Said, who used Foucault's idea of discourse in Orientalism. Further down are the two thinkers who argued with him most usefully, and where to start with Foucault himself.

10 authors like Michel Foucault

01
Inside the total institution

Erving Goffman

Canadian-American · The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963)

Goffman was a sociologist, born in Alberta in 1922, who taught at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania and died in 1982. Asylums grew out of a year of fieldwork at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, and introduced the idea of the ‘total institution’, where every part of a person's day is managed. The Presentation of Self treats everyday life as a performance.

Goffman and Foucault looked at the same buildings, the asylum and the prison, in the same years: Goffman from inside the ward, Foucault from the archive. Suits readers who want Foucault's subject with fieldwork instead of philosophy.

— Lisanne
02
How labels make people

Ian Hacking

Canadian · Rewriting the Soul (1995), Mad Travelers (1998), The Social Construction of What? (1999)

Hacking was a philosopher, born in Vancouver in 1936, who taught at the University of Toronto and held a chair in the philosophy and history of scientific concepts at the Collège de France from 2000 to 2006. He died in 2023. Rewriting the Soul traces how multiple personality became a diagnosis, and Mad Travelers follows a nineteenth-century epidemic of compulsive wandering.

Hacking studied what he called ‘historical ontology’, openly building on Foucault: how new kinds of person come into being and change the people they describe. He is clearer and more careful with evidence; an ideal bridge for readers who find Foucault hard going.

— Lisanne
03
Discourse and empire

Edward Said

Palestinian-American · Orientalism (1978), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Out of Place (1999)

Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, taught literature at Columbia University for four decades and died in 2003. Orientalism argues that Western scholarship, art and politics built an image of ‘the Orient’ that served colonial power. Out of Place is his memoir of a childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo.

In the introduction to Orientalism Said writes that he has found Foucault's notion of a discourse useful, and the book applies it to how the West wrote about the Middle East. Suits readers who want to see Foucault's ideas used on politics and empire.

— Lisanne
04
The genealogy Foucault inherited

Friedrich Nietzsche

German · Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Nietzsche was a classical philologist turned philosopher who stopped working after a mental collapse in 1889 and died in 1900. On the Genealogy of Morality argues that values such as guilt and pity have a history rooted in power and resentment. After his death his sister Elisabeth controlled his papers and later tied his name to the Nazis, a distortion scholars have since corrected.

Foucault called his own method genealogy after Nietzsche and wrote the essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1971). The Genealogy is where the idea that our moral feelings have a history begins.

— Lisanne

Every book by Friedrich Nietzsche →

05
Reading the culture around you

Roland Barthes

French · Mythologies (1957), A Lover's Discourse (1977), Camera Lucida (1980)

Barthes was a literary critic and essayist who was elected to the Collège de France in 1976 with Foucault's support. Mythologies reads wrestling, soap powder and striptease as signs of everyday ideology; Camera Lucida, written after his mother's death, is a short book on photography and grief. He died in 1980 after being hit by a van in Paris.

Barthes and Foucault were colleagues working on a shared question: how ordinary language and images carry power. Barthes is more personal and more readable; suits readers who want Foucault's critical eye turned on everyday life.

— Lisanne
06
How we talk about illness

Susan Sontag

American · On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Sontag was an essayist, novelist and critic who died in New York in 2004. She wrote Illness as Metaphor after her own treatment for cancer, to show how myths about tuberculosis and cancer blame the sick. In 2000 passages in her novel In America were found to have been taken from other books without attribution; Sontag defended it as a novelist's use of historical sources.

Illness as Metaphor does for disease what The Birth of the Clinic does for medicine: it shows how ways of seeing and speaking shape the patient's experience. Sontag is more direct and less theoretical; suits readers who want the insight in plain essay form.

— Lisanne

Every book by Susan Sontag →

07
Gender as something we do

Judith Butler

American · Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies That Matter (1993), Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024)

Butler is a philosopher who taught for decades at the University of California, Berkeley. Gender Trouble argues that gender is not a fixed fact but is produced by repeated acts, and became a founding text of queer theory. In March 2024 Butler drew wide criticism for calling the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 ‘armed resistance’ rather than terrorism at a public event near Paris.

Gender Trouble takes the argument of Foucault's History of Sexuality, that sexuality is produced by power rather than simply repressed by it, and applies it to gender. Suits readers who want to see how Foucault shaped feminist and queer thought.

— Lisanne
08
The history Foucault left out

Silvia Federici

Italian-American · Wages Against Housework (1975), Caliban and the Witch (2004)

Federici is a feminist scholar and activist who co-founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign in 1972. Caliban and the Witch argues that the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were part of the rise of capitalism, used to discipline women's bodies, sexuality and labour.

Federici argues with Foucault directly: she says his history of the disciplined body leaves out the witch hunts and what was done to women's bodies in the same period. She tells the history of power from the side Foucault did not.

— Lisanne
09
Foucault's sharpest critic

Jürgen Habermas

German · The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985)

Habermas was the leading German philosopher of the post-war era; he died in March 2026, aged 96. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere traces how coffee houses, salons and newspapers created a space for public reasoning. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity includes two lectures criticising Foucault.

Habermas complicates Foucault. He argued that if all knowledge is shaped by power, Foucault is left with no ground from which to criticise anything, and he defended reason and open debate as worth saving. The strongest case against Foucault, made by a contemporary.

— Lisanne
10
Discipline becomes self-exploitation

Byung-Chul Han

South Korean-German · The Burnout Society (2010), Psychopolitics (2014)

Han was born in Seoul in 1959, moved to Germany as a young man and taught philosophy at the Berlin University of the Arts. His short books on burnout, transparency and smartphones have been translated widely, and he won the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 2025.

Han argues that Foucault's disciplinary society, built on prohibition and surveillance, has given way to an achievement society in which people exploit themselves. Suits readers who want Foucault's questions brought to the smartphone and the burnout era.

— Lisanne

Every book by Byung-Chul Han →

Where to start if you loved Michel Foucault

If you loved Discipline and Punish, read Erving Goffman.

Asylums: life inside the total institution, seen from the ward rather than the archive.

If you loved Foucault on madness, read Ian Hacking.

Mad Travelers: how a psychiatric diagnosis appeared, spread and vanished.

If you loved The History of Sexuality, read Judith Butler.

Gender Trouble applies its argument to gender.

If you want the argument against him, read Silvia Federici.

Caliban and the Witch: a history of the body that puts women back in.

If you want to go back to Foucault himself, start with Discipline and Punish (1975).

Then the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), the shortest way into his later thinking.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Michel Foucault

Who writes like Michel Foucault?

Erving Goffman, Ian Hacking and Edward Said are the closest: Goffman studied the same institutions, Hacking the same psychiatric categories, and Said applied Foucault's idea of discourse to empire. Silvia Federici and Jürgen Habermas are the best critics to read alongside him.

Which Michel Foucault book should I read first?

Discipline and Punish (1975) is the most readable and opens with a famous scene of public execution. The first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) is short and makes a good second book.

What should I read after Discipline and Punish?

Erving Goffman's Asylums (1961) for life inside institutions, and Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics (2014) for the argument that power now works through self-optimisation rather than surveillance.

Is there a new Michel Foucault book?

Yes, in French. Gallimard published Les Hermaphrodites, a previously unpublished text connected to his history of sexuality, in 2025, and a Pléiade anthology of his shorter writings was scheduled for his centenary on 15 October 2026.

What is the allegation against Michel Foucault?

In 2021 the French writer Guy Sorman said that while visiting Foucault in Tunisia in the late 1960s he saw him paying young boys for sex, describing them as eight to ten years old. Foucault died in 1984, and the account has not been independently corroborated.

Sources

List last reviewed 30 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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