ABSTRACT
Reflecting on the relation between power, knowledge and truth in societies, Michel Foucault argued that:
Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true … [Truth] is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption (circulating through apparatuses of education and information whose extent is relatively broad in the social body, notwithstanding certain strict limitations); it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media), lastly, it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation (‘ideological’ struggles).
(Foucault 1980, pp. 131–2)