Discipline and Punish
€0,00
First published in French in 1975, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison traces the transformation of punishment from the brutal public spectacle of the eighteenth century to the quieter, more pervasive systems of discipline that shaped modern institutions. Opening with a harrowing account of a public execution, Foucault moves through the histories of prisons, schools, barracks and factories to examine how authority increasingly operates through observation, routine and the regulation of bodies. At the heart of the book is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, an architectural model of surveillance in which the possibility of being watched becomes a powerful means of control. For Foucault, the modern prison is not an isolated institution but part of a wider network of practices that train individuals to monitor and discipline themselves.
Combining historical inquiry with a radical critique of power, Discipline and Punish challenged familiar accounts of penal reform as a straightforward march towards greater humanity. Foucault instead asks how apparently progressive institutions produce new forms of conformity, classification and social control. Its influential ideas have travelled far beyond the history of punishment, shaping debates about education, policing, medicine, surveillance and the relationship between knowledge and authority. Demanding yet remarkably prescient, the book remains one of the defining works of twentieth-century philosophy and a compelling invitation to reconsider the invisible structures that govern everyday life.
From the book
“The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”
— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
On Discipline and Punish
“Foucault has found his appointed subject and has written his most forceful book.”
— Clifford Geertz, The New York Review of Books