Compare And Contrast Mills And Foucault On Liberty
Different Perspectives on Normalization
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and J.S. Mill’s On Liberty both attend to the idea of the individual, similarly, yet quite differently. Mill believes that society thoroughly conditions minds so that every decision or action made by a person is heavily influenced by society. To Mill, genuine choices make individuality, as well as being spontaneous. According to Mill, as humankind has gone further and further into civil society, the less likely it is to produce true individuals because the further conditioned people become. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, believes that this heavy conditioning of society has created the individual. As society has transitioned from punishing its people, to training …show more content…
He begins with the historical evolution of legal punishment, and how in the 18th century, society only punished the body. The body was the only thing society knew how to punish, and they believed that it showed the truth of the crime. However, recent regimes of punishment have introduced punishing the soul, rather than the body. Rather than physically punishing someone, society puts them in prison or jail, and believes their “soul’ can be rehabilitated. Society created the soul, which “inhibits him [or her] and brings [the individual] into existence” (Foucault 13). By punishing the soul, judgement of the soul has been created, therefore creating judgement of the individual. At the end of the eighteenth century, rather than taking revenge on the individual and making them pay their debt to society, the individual is punished, critiqued, and examined.Foucault goes on to say that prisons represent other institutions that judge such as schools and hospitals. They are fixed spaces in which time is spent where people are given examinations and are judged. A norm is established, and society is given the “right” path to follow. Through judgement in hospitals, schools and prisons, we are creating a norm, and creating the right path to follow for
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and J.S. Mill’s On Liberty both attend to the idea of the individual, similarly, yet quite differently. Mill believes that society thoroughly conditions minds so that every decision or action made by a person is heavily influenced by society. To Mill, genuine choices make individuality, as well as being spontaneous. According to Mill, as humankind has gone further and further into civil society, the less likely it is to produce true individuals because the further conditioned people become. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, believes that this heavy conditioning of society has created the individual. As society has transitioned from punishing its people, to training …show more content…
He begins with the historical evolution of legal punishment, and how in the 18th century, society only punished the body. The body was the only thing society knew how to punish, and they believed that it showed the truth of the crime. However, recent regimes of punishment have introduced punishing the soul, rather than the body. Rather than physically punishing someone, society puts them in prison or jail, and believes their “soul’ can be rehabilitated. Society created the soul, which “inhibits him [or her] and brings [the individual] into existence” (Foucault 13). By punishing the soul, judgement of the soul has been created, therefore creating judgement of the individual. At the end of the eighteenth century, rather than taking revenge on the individual and making them pay their debt to society, the individual is punished, critiqued, and examined.Foucault goes on to say that prisons represent other institutions that judge such as schools and hospitals. They are fixed spaces in which time is spent where people are given examinations and are judged. A norm is established, and society is given the “right” path to follow. Through judgement in hospitals, schools and prisons, we are creating a norm, and creating the right path to follow for