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Author: Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University
Original article: https://theconversation.com/a-dark-masterpiece-foucaults-discipline-and-punish-at-50-246245
2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the French publication of Michel Foucault’s dark masterpiece, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
A book of vast historical scope, written with lyrical intensity, it is one of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th century and remains unsettlingly prescient today.
As the subtitle suggests, the book at one level charts a history of the modern prison system. It was written when Foucault was involved in the Maoist organisation Group d’Information des Prisons, following a wave of French prison revolts in the early 70s.
What most struck Foucault about these revolts, he writes, was that they were protests not only against the cruelty of the guards. They were “also revolts against model prisons, tranquillisers, isolation, the medical and educational services”.
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The seeming paradox here, that the inmates were also protesting seemingly progressive elements of “model” prisons like education programs, frames the argument of Foucault’s monumental book.
More than just a history of prisons, Discipline and Punish shows how modern forms of knowledge are generated by new kinds of power relations. These shape people’s lives, behaviours, and “subjectivity”, he argues, in ways even more far-reaching than royal, feudal, and religious powers once did.
Knowledge and power
Foucault had made his name with his 1960 work on the history of the modern human sciences, The Order of Things. By the 1970s, he was deploying German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche’s method of “genealogy”.
This approach aimed to uncover, through historical studies, how modern forms of knowledge about human beings – from criminology and sociology to psychology – are not produced in isolation from sociopolitical phenomena. These “human sciences”, Foucault came to argue, are engendered in, and by, the practices of social institutions like military barracks, asylums, hospitals, prisons, and schools.
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The forms of power which operate in these institutions have eluded previous political analyses, Foucault claimed. For they are not only wielded by the police, judges, political leaders, managers, or captains of industry. Nor do they necessarily overtly prohibit forms of conduct deemed unacceptable by authorities.
Rather, these forms of power operate invisibly, as soon as we enter many public buildings: in the organisation of classrooms, the architecture of prisons, even the planning of cities and the schedules that structure our workdays. And they shape people’s everyday behaviours, expectations and self-understandings from the ground up.
Discipline and Punish hence poses a radical challenge to widespread modern understandings of power and society. It especially challenges the “humanistic” idea that advances in knowledge and technology always enhance human freedoms.
“The man described for us by modern humanism, whom we are invited to free,” Foucault declares, “is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself.”
Contrasts
Discipline and Punish starts with a dramatic contrast. We open with the spectacular 1757 punishment, under the monarchy of Louis XV, of a convicted parricide known as Damiens: publicly led in front of the Church of Paris, then subjected to the most brutal physical torture. Damiens’ lacerated body was quartered by four horses, then its stump burnt at stake before leering crowds.
Foucault next shifts abruptly to the exacting list of rules “for the house of young prisoners in Paris,” just 80 years later. These rules replace bodily torture with the rigid, nonviolent disciplining of prisoners’ behaviours. Nothing here is left to chance or choice: even micro-details such as when and how the prisoners wash, undress, pray, and prepare for sleep. Their every movement, even their recreation, is subject to scheduling, calculation, and discipline.
There could scarcely be a greater contrast between these two forms of punishment. “We have … a public execution and a timetable”, Foucault drily states. At issue are two ways in which power has operated in European societies.
In the ancien régime, punishment was an almost carnivalesque public event. There was no science to its exaction, no deep interest in the condemned individuals’ wider life or motivations, and no ambition to rehabilitate the guilty – at least in this life.
In modern penitentiaries, we have the regimentation of prisoners’ behaviours, behind closed doors. Every action is ideally observable, but only by their wardens, not by the public.
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The bodies of the prisoners remain untouched, unless they become violent. But this is because it is now their inner identity or “soul”, as Foucault puts it, that the institution is targeting.
The aim is the prisoners’ correction, cure, or “normalisation”. Thus, their actions, motives, histories, psychologies and social backgrounds, become available as objects of knowledge. Each prisoner becomes a “case” for “assessment” and “examination” by welfare workers and social scientists.
This new form of power enables classifications, divisions, and rankings of inmates that were previously inconceivable, with targeted modulations of treatment and rehabilitation.
“Power produces knowledge” in the modern prison system, Discipline and Punish contends. And “power and knowledge directly imply one another”.
Panopticism
The paradigmatic form of this “power-knowledge” is the model prison or “panopticon” imagined by 19th century utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham.
This prison, ideally, should be circular. In the centre is a watch tower, from which its occupant can see in all directions. Around this surveillance hub are the inmates’ cells. In contrast to a medieval dungeon, this makes them permanently visible to the “enlightened” scrutiny of their keepers.
This design works because the prisoners know they are always observable – even if there is no one actually watching in the central tower. Prisoners are prompted to internalise the gaze of their keepers and to “watch themselves”, lest they err.
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The whole scheme maximises efficiency, getting the prisoners to regulate their behaviour with the least manpower or expenditure of force. It also unobtrusively extends the reach of power inside the very minds of the inmates.
What makes Bentham’s “model prison” so significant for Foucault is how its principle of operation, “panopticism”, has been increasingly applied elsewhere. His book examines other examples of this “disciplinary power” in schools, workshops, factories, and military facilities.
More recently, arguably, the principles of panopticism have shaped open plan offices, call centres and public buildings, even sports arenas. They can be seen too in the proliferation of surveillance cameras in our suburbs and cities. Then there is the internet and social media, where each mouse click can be recorded, collated, and sold as predictive behavioral data.
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Previous analyses of power, Foucault concludes:
are not adequate to describe, at the very centre of the carceral city, the formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, ‘sciences’, that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual.
Invoking Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s work on the Soviet gulags, Foucault describes the disciplines developed in modern prisons as engendering a “carceral archipelago” in modern societies.
Resignation rather than hope?
A revolutionary work like Discipline and Punish was bound to provoke criticism, alongside adulation and emulation.
Foucault has been charged with mixing empirical insights into modern power with “normative confusions”, meaning that it is unclear where he stands in relation to the forms of power he critiques. The reader is clearly intended to feel outrage, as we read Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary power rendering subjects “docile”. Yet this outrage seems to rely on intuitions about human dignity of which Foucault was deeply sceptical.
By presenting disciplinary power as ubiquitous in modern societies, critics argue, Foucault has overstretched his revolutionary insights. His position contentiously collapses the differences between modern, democratic and openly authoritarian societies.
Moreover, any prospects of resistance to disciplinary power – or even analyses that would identify spaces of relative social or political freedom – seem doomed in advance.
Foucault arguably did not clarify the situation by saying modern power produces its own resistances, and everything is dangerous. These obscure statements seem to license resignation, rather than hope.
What is clear is that Discipline and Punish, at 50, has lost none of its provocative power. Nor, any of its relevance. Our ceaseless technological and social transformations continue to engender new means of surveillance, potentials for illiberal abuse, and pressures towards conformity. We ignore these at our own individual and collective risk.
The book remains the inescapable starting point, and work of reference, for understanding these evolving forms of peril and power.