Is Foucault the most cited person in the entire academic world?

With 1.42 million citations, I haven’t found anyone higher than him so far. Next in line is Bourdieu with 1.13 million.

It feels like no matter what the humanities and social sciences are studying, they're always throwing around Foucault's jargon… power/knowledge, panopticon, governmentality, discourse… but how many people have actually read his books seriously? A lot of them are just muddling through, using his terms to confuse rather than clarify.

People try to interpret everything through Foucault's works… ChatGPT can be a Foucauldian subject (D’Amato, 2024), interviews can be Foucauldian technology (Briggs, 2002), the body is no longer just the body, but a Foucauldian body (McNay, 1991). It feels like even yawning could be interpreted as an embodied practice of biopower. All I can say is, Foucault has really provided a livelihood for many scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

It reminds me of Baudrillard’s book back in the day critiquing Foucault, Forget Foucault. Fifty years have passed, and academia still can’t forget him.