"Olssen ! brings Foucault to life and sheds new light on understanding his work...Educationalists and scholars across the disciplines will welcome this interpretation of Foucault." Michael A. Peters, University of Glasgow "Olssen distills in brilliant and succinct language the core of Foucault's most important insights. This is a book that every student should read in order to understand how to link theory to practice, and educational thought to legacy and work of one of Europe's great thinkers." Henry Giroux, McMaster University Michel Foucault is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and his works are some of the most difficult to grasp. Mark Olssen offers an accessible overview of Foucault's thought, putting into context the relevance of Foucault's ideas. Olssen adds important new insights to Foucault scholarship by bringing to light the influences of other thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Habermas, and others on Foucault's development as a thinker, and their influence on the deep historical materialist strand that grounds and uniquely characterizes so much of Foucault's thought.