Discipline and Punish

Introduction

Published by Gallimard in 1975 with the subtitle “The Birth of the Prison”, the book opens with two documents: the public execution of the would-be regicide Damiens in Paris in 1757, and the daily timetable of a Paris house for young prisoners drawn up some eighty years later. Foucault asks why imprisonment became the normal punishment within a few decades. His answer is a history of disciplinary power – techniques of surveillance, examination and drill developed in armies, schools, hospitals and workshops, which produce “docile bodies” and measure individuals against norms. The book grew out of Foucault’s work with the Prison Information Group (GIP) in the early 1970s and is read in criminology, sociology and history as well as philosophy.

Connections

Builds on

• On the Genealogy of Morality1887 · Friedrich Nietzsche

Criticizes

• Panopticon1791 · Jeremy Bentham

Taken up in

• Orientalism1978 · Edward Said

Criticized in

• State, Power, Socialism1978 · Nicos Poulantzas
• The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity1985 · Jürgen Habermas
• The Burnout Society2010 · Byung-Chul Han

More works by Michel Foucault

• 1961History of Madness (Madness and Civilization)
• 1966The Order of Things
• 1976The Will to Knowledge (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)
• 1984What Is Enlightenment?