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Rating: 
Summary: Intelligent, but SO boring
Review: I find Foucault's work REALLY interesting, and I enjoyed the prequel to this book (Power/Knowledge). But unless you are a grad student looking for material to incorporate into some rigorous research, this book is just downright boring. The Foucault Effect professionalizes Foucault: the contributors appropriate his general methodological approach and use it to generate rigorous studies of political economy and government. The work by Foucault presented in this book is needlessly wordy and obscure, and yet it lacks the brilliant iconoclasm that characterizes most of Foucault's other work. Here, Foucault performs such banal tasks as explaining how he separates one discipline from another in his analysis, and it's just not particularly interesting.Some of the stuff about liberalism, capitalism, and normality is fairly intelligent, but all of the work here is just "scholarship." It's well-researched, it's detailed, but it's not courageous or groundbreaking. In The Foucault Effect, Foucault is colonized by the professionalism of academic "research," and tamed. The Foucault Effect is a book that celebrates the efficacy of criticism, and yet its critiques are for the most part about as interesting as a journal on organic chemistry. Academic researchers ought to buy it. People who are just interested in Foucault shouldn't.
Rating: 
Summary: Foucault and clarity
Review: This is a key text for any of us wrestling with the epistemological change which Foucault created in his own, earlier writing. The work on "governmentality",for example, expanded here into intelligible and practical context allows each researcher to use Foucault's vision to generate the methodological tools which he had deliberately avoided.Castel's analysis of 'normal' by itself makes this book worth owning because it is both a guide to Foucault's own philosophical progress and a set of practical extensions of his unrolling vision. Buy it!
Rating:
Summary: Foucault and clarity
Review: This is a key text for any of us wrestling with the epistemological change which Foucault created in his own, earlier writing. The work on "governmentality",for example, expanded here into intelligible and practical context allows each researcher to use Foucault's vision to generate the methodological tools which he had deliberately avoided.Castel's analysis of 'normal' by itself makes this book worth owning because it is both a guide to Foucault's own philosophical progress and a set of practical extensions of his unrolling vision. Buy it!
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