he developed a passionate concern for victims of oppressive situations, but
especially those he considered ill-served by the main, Marxist, alternative to
Western social thought. Thus his efforts were concentrated on women,
homosexuals and victims of colonialism, rather than the working class, as in
Marxism. However, his principal interest from an early stage was in the
subjects of the criminal justice system, and the first of his books to have a major
impact on orthodox Western social science was a study of punishment,
especially of imprisonment. This main work, published in 1975, was not his
first important publication, but earlier ones which were subsequently to come
to be seen as important, were not taken up until his thought became well
recognized via the 1975 work. Other studies covered the social understanding
of insanity, and more generally the nature and role of medicine in modern
society. All of these have a common theme—the many ways in whichpower
andauthorityare established and enforced outside either the official activities
of the state, or the better recognized power systems of the capitalist economy. It
was the medical expert as wielder of power rather than as the bringer of care
and mercy which fascinated Foucault, just as he traced the establishment and
justification of prison from apparently benevolent motives. His doctrine can be
summarized in a phrase—knowledge is power, because it is the claim to
knowledge which gives authority to so many role bearers inside and outside
the state structure. At the same time, as a member of the postmodern school,
the very idea of knowledge and its claim to authority was, for Foucault, highly
contestable. Exactly how long-lasting his influence on political science will be
is hard to tell. While Foucault himself would not have regretted the difficulty
in systemizing his ideas, only that which can be systemized can have a wide-
ranging and long-lasting impact as an analytic tool to be used by routine social
science.
Fourth Republic
The French Fourth Republic came into being in 1946 after the newly-
liberated French electorate resoundingly rejected a continuation of theThird
Republic, which had been in abeyance since the German victory of 1940 and
the setting up of the collaborationistVichyregime. The Fourth Republic was
never popular, and never enjoyed the support of a clear majority of the
electorate. Designing a new republic after liberation in 1944 was not easy:
the first proposals for a new constitution were rejected in a referendum, and the
second draft, which became the Fourth Republic, actually differed very little
from the discredited Third Republic. Although this draft was given a majority
vote in a further referendum, nearly 30% of the electorate abstained (mainly
under orders from the Communist Party) and the final vote in favour was
Fourth Republic