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One such break in the mid-17th century finally ended the Middle Ages' emphasis on the resemblances among all God's creations (Shakespeare: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin") and began the Age of Reason's passion for differentiation. Another "discontinuity," shortly after the French Revolution, ushered in the modern age's passionate belief in evolutionary progress, both social and scientific. According to Foucault a third break may be occurring now, but he offers no clear definition of it, and no explanation of how or why such breaks occur.
"M. Foucault," wrote one irritated colleague, "races through three centuries at full speed, like a barbarian horseman. He sets fire to the steppe without caution."
It was the French student rebellion of 1968 that pushed Foucault's thinking in a political direction. "I ask myself," he later told an interviewer, "what else I was talking about, in Madness and Civilization, if not power." Knowledge is power, Foucault now came to believe, or more specifically, "power and knowledge directly imply one another." So if each historic age developed new forms of knowing itself, new forms of defining life, then each age was really exercising new forms of power.
Military and police power were only the most obvious forms. As Foucault sees it, every accumulation of social knowledge, every kind of inspection, categorization and judgment is an exercise of power. Doctors, teachers, priests all take part in that exercise of power, but, most important, the modern citizen is trained to exercise state power over his fellow citizens and himself. "A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains," Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish, "but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chains of their own ideas . . . The link is all the stronger in that we do not know what it is made of." And this chain of a man's own ideas, this accumulation of examinations, inspections, definitions and regulations, this intellectual prison is the man himself, Foucault believes. There is no basic human nature underneath, awaiting liberation.
Foucault traces the origins of his bleak views ("I cannot experience pleasure," he told an interviewer) to a childhood under the Nazi Occupation. Says he: "I have very early memories of an absolutely threatening world, which could crush us. To have lived as an adolescent in a situation that had to end, that had to lead to another world, for better or worse, was to have the impression of spending one's entire childhood in the night, waiting for dawn. That prospect of another world marked the people of my generation, and we have carried with us, perhaps to excess, a dream of Apocalypse."