By Michel Foucault
Power, punishment, and social control
Subject
Themes
In 1757, a man named Damiens was publicly tortured to death for attacking the king of France. His flesh was torn with red-hot pincers, molten lead was poured into the wounds, and six horses were required to quarter his body. Eighty years later, inmates at a Parisian juvenile prison followed a regimented timetable of work, meals, prayers, and sleep, with every hour accounted for. Between these two scenes, Western punishment underwent a transformation so profound that the very relationship between power, the body, and knowledge was fundamentally remade.
In 1757, a man named Damiens was publicly tortured to death for attacking the king of France. His flesh was torn with red-hot pincers, molten lead was poured into the wounds, and six horses were required to quarter his body. Eighty years later, inmates at a Parisian juvenile prison followed a…
Published in 1975, Discipline and Punish arrived at a moment when Western intellectual life was grappling with questions about institutional power, social control, and the legitimacy of state authority. The upheavals of 1968, the prison reform movements of the early 1970s, and growing scepticism…
Power and knowledge are not separate domains that occasionally intersect; they are fundamentally intertwined, each producing and sustaining the other. Every exercise of power generates a corresponding field of knowledge, and every body of knowledge enables and extends the reach of power. This…
A fundamental transformation in the nature of social regulation accompanies the rise of disciplinary power: the gradual displacement of the law by the norm as the primary instrument of governance. Under sovereign power, the law functioned as a prohibition backed by the threat of punishment. It drew…
The Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's 1787 design for an ideal prison, functions as far more than an architectural blueprint. It provides the diagram of a new form of power that defines modern society: a power that operates through permanent, individualised visibility rather than through spectacular,…
The transformation of punishment cannot be understood independently of the class dynamics that drove it. The shift from public torture to imprisonment, from sovereign spectacle to disciplinary enclosure, served specific interests and addressed specific anxieties rooted in the transition from a…
The entire trajectory traced through the analysis of punishment, from the scaffold to the prison, from torture to timetable, describes a fundamental shift in the technology of power. Sovereign power and disciplinary power represent not merely different methods of punishment but entirely different…
On 2 March 1757, Robert-François Damiens was condemned to death for attacking King Louis XV. The sentence prescribed an elaborate ritual of agony: his flesh was to be torn with red-hot pincers, molten lead and boiling oil poured into the wounds, and his body quartered by four horses. Eyewitness…
Under the French ordinance of 1670, criminal penalties formed a hierarchy of physical violence: death, judicial torture, penal servitude, flogging, public penance, and banishment. Capital punishment itself encompassed a bewildering variety of deaths, from hanging and burning to breaking on the wheel…
By 1789, the French chancellery could summarise a generation of protest in a single demand: let penalties be proportioned to offences, let death be reserved for murder alone, and let torture be abolished. Philosophers, jurists, and legislators had been making these arguments for decades. Beccaria's…
The art of punishing, reformers argued, must rest on a whole technology of representation. Like the gravitation of bodies, a secret force compels human beings towards their well-being; the task of the legislator is to establish obstacle-signs, carefully designed penalties whose very idea robs crime…
In the early seventeenth century, the ideal soldier was recognised from afar by natural signs: a lively manner, an erect head, broad shoulders, strong fingers, thick thighs, and slender legs. His body was a blazon of his strength and valour. He learned his profession largely through actual fighting,…
Three instruments make disciplinary power effective: hierarchical observation, normalising judgement, and the examination. Together they form the technical apparatus through which institutions train, classify, and control individuals. Hierarchical observation depends on the architecture and…
When plague appeared in a town at the end of the seventeenth century, the response was total segmentation. The town was sealed. Each street was placed under the authority of a syndic. Every inhabitant was ordered to remain indoors on pain of death. The syndic locked each house from the outside and…
The prison did not arrive with the new penal codes of the early nineteenth century. It predated them. Throughout the social body, procedures for distributing individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them, extracting from them the maximum in time and forces, training their bodies, and…
Almost from the moment of its establishment, the prison was denounced as a failure. It did not reduce crime. It produced recidivism. It created criminal communities. It condemned inmates' families to destitution. It released ex-prisoners into a regime of police surveillance that made legal…
The date chosen for the completion of the carceral system is not 1810, when the penal code was promulgated, nor 1844, when legislation establishing cellular internment was passed. It is 22 January 1840, the day the juvenile reformatory at Mettray officially opened. Or perhaps more precisely, the…
By Michel Foucault
Subject
Themes
In 1757, a man named Damiens was publicly tortured to death for attacking the king of France. His flesh was torn with red-hot pincers, molten lead was poured into the wounds, and six horses were required to quarter his body. Eighty years later, inmates at a Parisian juvenile prison followed a regimented timetable of work, meals, prayers, and sleep, with every hour accounted for. Between these two scenes, Western punishment underwent a transformation so profound that the very relationship between power, the body, and knowledge was fundamentally remade.