The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self

The central argument is that imperial Rome (roughly the first two centuries CE) marked a decisive transition in the ethics of sexuality. Where the Greek volume analyzed self-mastery as a style of conduct, the Roman volume identifies a growing anxiety about sexual activity and its consequences, coupled with an intensified focus on the self's health and well-being. Foucault finds at the core of this transformation the principle of the 'care of the self': the self becomes an object of knowledge and a field of action, to be controlled, corrected, and purified . The Roman self is more solipsistic than the Greek—the issue is no longer the household or the city but how to employ sexuality to maximize one's own health and happiness . This preoccupation, Foucault suggests, becomes the basis for a Christian ethics of salvation.

Reception was sharply divided. A New York Times review called the book 'carefully constructed, exquisitely reasoned and internally cogent,' praising its depiction of imperial Rome's greater emphasis on conjugal affection . But the same review criticized Foucault for being 'oblivious of and irrelevant to the ordinary'—his analysis is based almost entirely on learned writings by physicians and philosophers (Artemidorus, Galen, Epictetus, Plutarch), with little attention to the lived experience of ordinary Romans . The review also noted that the book's arcane and 'bloodless' approach to sexuality was ironic given Foucault's earlier brilliance at exposing how the rational is rooted in domination . A related criticism concerns the absence of the 'boys' problem until the very end, where it is 'easily contained and compartmentalized' .

The care of the self (epimeleia heautou) is a set of practices through which individuals constitute themselves as ethical subjects—monitoring, correcting, and transforming their conduct to achieve a certain mode of being. Foucault's late work treats this not as quietist self-absorption but as potentially resistant to political power. As one scholarly analysis argues, the care of the self enables the individual to 'tell the truth' (parrhesia), a form of courageous speech that involves risk and constitutes an ethico-political stance . In the ancient world, caring for oneself was a precondition for governing others well. In the modern context, Foucault suggests that the relationship one has to oneself may be the only point of resistance to political power, making the care of the self an 'urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task' .

The Care of the Self was published in French in 1984, the year of Foucault's death, alongside The Use of Pleasure. The English translation by Robert Hurley appeared in 1986 from Pantheon Books in New York . Foucault wrote the volume while already dying, and it is widely agreed that the published text does not fully represent his original intentions for the project—which had begun as a six-volume history from the sixteenth century onward and was radically reoriented toward antiquity in the final years . Readers should treat the book as the work of a thinker revising his project under conditions of urgency, not as a completed systematic statement. The translation itself is widely respected; the New York Times called Hurley's rendering 'adequate' and suggested the book might be a better introduction to Foucault's late thought than any critical assessment .

The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the lecture course in which Foucault first elaborated the concepts of 'practices of the self' and the 'care of the self' in their Hellenistic and Roman contexts . The course, delivered at the Collège de France in 1981–82, argues that Hellenistic and early Roman culture placed much greater emphasis on taking care of oneself than on knowing oneself, the reverse of modern priorities . The Care of the Self is the published volume that develops these themes in sustained historical detail. Readers who find the book compressed or allusive should consult the lectures for the fuller argumentative context. Together they represent Foucault's 'ethical turn,' the shift from analyzing power and discipline to analyzing the practices through which subjects constitute themselves.

Foucault argues that Roman moral reflection intensified the focus on the self's well-being to a degree unprecedented in Greek thought. The Roman self is anxious about health, happiness, and the consequences of pleasure; it monitors itself through dream analysis, dietary regimen, and conjugal ethics . This heightened self-scrutiny, Foucault suggests, provided the groundwork for Christian ethics. The Roman concern with optimizing health and happiness is transformed into absolute rules about behavior to attain salvation . The unpublished fourth volume on early Christianity would have developed this thesis directly. The Care of the Self thus functions as the penultimate panel of a triptych: Greece establishes the problem of self-mastery, Rome intensifies the care of the self, and Christianity completes the turn toward a hermeneutics of desire and the confession of the soul.