Task+1

Paradoxical in life as well in his philosophical system, Michel Foucault is certainly one of the most important thinkers who lived in the twentieth century. The maverick philosopher was born in 1926 to a wealthy family headed by a surgeon. He received the best education that was available in France at that time. His admission to the prestigious //École Normale Supérieure// was a first step towards a glowing career in humanities. Despite the fact that study load there was so large that Foucault fell to depression, he was a brilliant student, earning two licenses, one in psychology and another in philosophy. Furthermore, it is from these early times that Foucault combined a unique capacity to study and work with an impulse to live a lifestyle of alcohol, drugs and intense sexual activity. An open but undeclared homosexual in an epoch that it could offend most people, Foucault didn’t fit the traditional academic archetype of De Gaulle’s France.
 * Foucault**

**Institutional Economics** The true contender to the Marginalist school of economics when it was born, in the late nineteenth century, Institutional economics is nowadays one of the most fruitful heterodox approaches to the "dismal science". Possibly, the fertile scientific soil that Institutional Economics offers for economists and for social scientists broadly is due to its holistic methodology and theorizing. Despite the fact that their philosophical roots were in the pragmatist American thought, institutionalists are open to interdisciplinary discourse, to verbal theorizing, instead of the highly complex mathematical formalism of orthodox economics, and inclined to think about economic facts from a critical perspective. This openness makes Institutional Economics a fine terrain for new ideas and for promoting pluralism in economics. Thus, studying Institutional Economics is a good way to overcome the lack of interdisciplinary studies in economics and to acquire a more eclectic mode of thinking about real issues in economics.