José Guilherme Merquior  

"Author José Guilherme Merquior, writing in Foucault (1985), suggested that Foucault's views about sexual repression are preferable to those of Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and their followers in that they have "the advantage of descriptive, if not explanatory, realism", and that Foucault is supported by "the latest historiographic research on bourgeois sex". Merquior considered the second two volumes of The History of Sexuality to be of higher scholarly quality than the first, and found Foucault to be "original and insightful" in his discussion of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and other Stoics in The Care of the Self. However, he noted that the details of Foucault's views are open to question, and suggested that Foucault's discussion of Greek pederasty is less illuminating than that of Kenneth Dover, despite Foucault's references to Dover's Greek Homosexuality (1978).