The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge

A short book that opened a projected history of sexuality and became one of Foucault's most read works. It begins by challenging the repressive hypothesis: the common view that since the seventeenth century the West has silenced sex, and that liberation means speaking about it. Foucault argues the opposite. Modern societies have produced an explosion of talk about sex, through confession, medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy and demography. The West developed a science of sexuality rather than an art of pleasure, and in doing so created new identities: the nineteenth-century homosexual, for example, became a type of person rather than someone who had committed certain acts. Power, on this view, is not only prohibition from above but a productive network present everywhere, always met by resistance. The final part introduces biopower: from the eighteenth century, states shift from the sovereign right to take life to managing the life of bodies and populations.

It reshaped the study of sexuality and identity, launched the idea of biopolitics, and remains the clearest short entry into Foucault's view of power.