Michel Foucalt

Foucault’s Theory

             Discipline and Punish (1975) is considered Foucault’s most important and lasting work because it represents his “decision to explicitly take up politics and social theory, areas that his earlier work addressed mainly by implication” (Shumway, 1989: 114).  This book shows how Foucault arrived at his major theme of power and domination.  Discipline and Punish lays out Foucault’s thoughts on how the elite in society dominate and control the rest of society.  Foucault believed no societal advancements have occurred since the Renaissance, only technology has grown, further enslaving the human spirit.  Foucault is almost an anarchist in his dislike of societal rules and their affect on the human spirit.  For Foucault there was no higher purpose than being your own unique person.  The ideas forced upon us by society do not allow this to happen (Maier-Katkin, 2000).  Even as a social philosopher, Foucault’s ideas about government’s role in oppressing people’s behavior and true identity have been related to why people commit crime (Burchell et al., 1991).   All of Foucault’s central ideas can be seen in this book.

            When reading Foucault’s works one immediately realizes his passion for history.  In Discipline and Punish, he details the history of the French penal system during the mid-18^th Century.  Foucault’s interpretation of historical events identifies the domination of the human spirit.  He theorizes as to why the penal system evolved into the system it is today and how it allows for the control of the masses in society.

The legal systems segregated the most dynamic of the lowest social class from the rest of society, then forced them together as a group of outcasts, thus rendering them politically harmless.  Foucault also stated by marking this group as criminals they are easier to supervise and keep disorganized by keeping the members flowing in and out of the prison system. 

“For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well introducing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous -and on occasion, usable- form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject”  (Foucault, 1975: 277).

            The ruling class placed a brand on the delinquent class posing them as a separate group from the normal lower class.  This allowed for the separation of the most dynamic group from the rest of the masses of oppressed, further restricting the likelihood the lowest class could affect social change.  “To this was added a patient attempt to impose a highly specific grid on the common perception of delinquents:  to present them as close by, everywhere and everywhere to be feared.”  (Foucault, 1975: 286).  The ruling class accomplished this through the media (newspapers and printed novels about crime).

            Foucault believed the dominant class used the delinquent class as a means of profiting themselves.

“Delinquency, controlled illegality, is an agent for the illegality of the dominant groups.  The setting up of prostitution networks in the nineteenth century is characteristic in this respect:  police checks and checks on the prostitutes’ health, their regular stay in prison, the large-scale organization in the prostitution milieu, its control by delinquent-informers, all this made it possible to canalize and to recover by a whole series of intermediaries the enormous profits from a sexual pleasure that an ever-more insistent everyday moralization condemned to semi-clandestineity and naturally made expensive; setting a price for pleasure, in creating a profit from repressed sexuality and in collecting this profit, the delinquent milieu was in complicity with a self-interested Puritanism: an illicit agent operating over illegal practices”  (Foucault, 1975: 279-280).