Discipline and Punish: a Critical Review. This Is a Summary of Michel Foucault's Seminal Work on the History of Criminal Punishment and Social Discipline as It Transformed from Punitive to Correctional Models During the
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Discipline and Punish: a critical review
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This is a summary of Michel Foucault's seminal work on the history of criminal punishment and social discipline as it transformed from punitive to correctional models during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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Overview
The main ideas of Discipline and Punish can be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline and prison.
[edit]Torture
Foucault begins by contrasting two forms of penalty: the violent and chaotic public torture of Robert-François Damiens, who was convicted of attempted regicide in the mid-18th century, and the highly regimented daily schedule for inmates from an early 19th century prison (Mettray). These examples provide a picture of just how profound the changes in western penal systems were after less than a century.
Foucault wants the reader to consider what led to these changes. How did western culture shift so radically?
He believes that the question of the nature of these changes is best asked by assuming that they weren't used to create a more humanitarian penal system, nor to more exactly punish or rehabilitate, but as part of a continuing trajectory of subjection. Foucault wants to tie scientific knowledge and technological development to the development of the prison to prove this point. He defines a "micro-physics" of power, which is constituted by a power that is strategic and tactical rather than acquired, preserved or possessed. He explains that power and knowledge imply one another, as opposed to the common belief that knowledge exists independently of power relations (knowledge is always contextualized in a
Discipline and Punish: a critical review
-------------------------------------------------
This is a summary of Michel Foucault's seminal work on the history of criminal punishment and social discipline as it transformed from punitive to correctional models during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
Overview
The main ideas of Discipline and Punish can be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline and prison.
[edit]Torture
Foucault begins by contrasting two forms of penalty: the violent and chaotic public torture of Robert-François Damiens, who was convicted of attempted regicide in the mid-18th century, and the highly regimented daily schedule for inmates from an early 19th century prison (Mettray). These examples provide a picture of just how profound the changes in western penal systems were after less than a century.
Foucault wants the reader to consider what led to these changes. How did western culture shift so radically?
He believes that the question of the nature of these changes is best asked by assuming that they weren't used to create a more humanitarian penal system, nor to more exactly punish or rehabilitate, but as part of a continuing trajectory of subjection. Foucault wants to tie scientific knowledge and technological development to the development of the prison to prove this point. He defines a "micro-physics" of power, which is constituted by a power that is strategic and tactical rather than acquired, preserved or possessed. He explains that power and knowledge imply one another, as opposed to the common belief that knowledge exists independently of power relations (knowledge is always contextualized in a