Panopticon

Introduction

Bentham wrote the letters on the Panopticon in 1787 while visiting his brother Samuel, an engineer in Russian service at Krichev, who had planned a similar building for a workshop; they were published in 1791 with long postscripts. The design is a circular building with cells along the outer wall and an inspection lodge in the centre, from which a hidden inspector can see every inmate. Bentham suggested it for prisons, workhouses, hospitals and schools and spent about twenty years trying to have a national penitentiary built; Parliament finally abandoned the plan. Michel Foucault made the Panopticon an image of modern disciplinary power in “Discipline and Punish” (1975).

Connections

Criticized in

• Discipline and Punish1975 · Michel Foucault

More works by Jeremy Bentham

• 1789An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation