Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, and social theorist whose work on power, knowledge, and discourse profoundly influenced the humanities and social sciences worldwide. His early works—Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), and The Order of Things (1966)—examined how Western societies have defined and categorized madness, illness, and knowledge, revealing these categories to be historical constructions rather than natural truths. His most influential work, Discipline and Punish (1975), traced the transformation of punishment from public spectacle to institutional surveillance, using Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor for modern society in which power operates through constant observation and normalization. His three-volume History of Sexuality challenged the assumption that modern society simply repressed sexuality, arguing instead that discourse about sex proliferated as a mechanism of social control. Foucault's concept of "power/knowledge" showed how what counts as truth is inseparable from the power relations that produce and sustain it.