This dissertation reinterprets Michel Foucault as a thinker of political coalition. Because he valued difference and rejected totalising schemes, Foucault’s post-structuralist political thought is usually associated with particularity and social fragmentation. I show that this is a very partial framing. Across the 1970s, he searched for ways to knit localised campaigns into a joined-up politics at the general level. By drawing out the generalised systems of power which subtended modern societies, Foucault remade the political world to reveal that the dispersed and apparently unrelated campaigns of students, feminists, psychiatric patients and others were facing common targets.

This argument rests on research into Foucault’s new archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, containing more than ninety boxes of reading notes, manuscript drafts and journals. These materials enable us to get behind his published writings, establishing what he was writing and reading privately as he crafted his lectures and books. I combine this archival research with a close reconstruction of Foucault’s intellectual and political contexts in the 1970s. I draw on Maoist newspapers, feminist journals, anti-psychiatric pamphlets, philosophical texts, news reports and other sources to establish the debates into which his work intervened. Taken together, these materials help us build up a picture of what Foucault was trying to do in his complex and ambiguous texts.

The upshot is to reveal that the construction and maintenance of coalitions among France’s burgeoning new social movements was one of his abiding priorities throughout the 1970s. Across five chapters, I trace the emergence and transformation of Foucault’s coalitional project, beginning among left-populist attempts to construct a revolutionary ‘people’ in the aftermath of 1968 and culminating in his defence of a ‘generalised’ politics of social-movement coalitions in his late lectures on governmentality. This dissertation confirms the value of taking a contextualist, historical approach to post-structuralist thought.