#19: Michel Foucault
By the time Michel Foucault came along, many people still spoke of power as if it belonged mainly to kings, governments, or police. Foucault complicated that picture. Born in Poitiers, France, in 1926, he became one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century by examining how institutions shape what people experience as normal, true, healthy, sane, or deviant. Prisons, clinics, schools, asylums, bureaucracies: these were not, for him, neutral places that simply managed reality.
