The overall intent of Foucault’s work is to highlight how both what we take to be knowledge and the concepts through which we understand ourselves – such as ‘reason’, ‘normality’, ‘sexuality’ – are contingent, mutable and ‘ahistorical’. That is, they do not evolve along some ‘path of progress’ or represent a sustained development, but rather change in response to the needs of authority to control and regulate the behaviour of the individual.
