If one poses, for a science such as theoretical physics or organic chemistry, the problem of its relations with the political and economic structure of society, doesn't one pose a problem which is too complicated? Isn't the threshold of possible explanation placed too high? If, on the other hand, one takes a knowledge [savoir] such as psychiatry, won't the question be much easier to resolve, since psychiatry has a low epistemological profile, and since psychiatric practice is tied to a whole series of institutions, immediate economic exigencies and urgent political pressures for social regulation? Cannot the interrelation of effects of knowledge and power be more securely grasped in the case of a science as ‘doubtful’ as psychiatry? It is this same question that I wanted to pose, in The Birth of the Clinic apropos of medicine: it certainly has a much stronger scientific structure than psychiatry, but it is also very deeply involved in the social structures.