Reviewing Discipline and Punish

Reviewing Michel Foucault's Classic Work

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault seeks to examine the historical role that discipline and punishment played in the Western world (particularly in France) from roughly the Middle Ages until his present day (the book was published in 1975). In analyzing these ideas, Foucault uncovers the sinister historical roll that the state has played in individuals’ lives, and how the evolution of the role of discipline and punishment in controlling individuals led to the state’s developing self-consciousness. As Foucault traces this history of state reaction to individual actions through the evolving concept of criminality, he reveals that the state had to slowly leave the concepts of individual morality behind as it strove towards unlimited power.

Thus, Discipline and Punish is most useful as a study of state power, and as a snapshot view of how that power evolved during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern eras in France. One of the most striking achievements of this work is Foucault’s vision of power seeping further and further into the lives of individuals. The state’s power began as something separate from individual’s lives, which mostly existed in public spaces where it was ritualized as a testament to the power of “The Prince” (a concept Foucault borrows from Machiavelli). But as the state transitioned towards democracy and capitalism, the state’s power moved inwards, controlling more and more of individuals’ lives, behaviors, and thoughts. As this happened, the power of the state became more invisible, which allowed it to exercise endless power without getting pushback from individuals. Of course, this was only possible to a certain point, under conditions of unlimited consumption and growth, which would naturally stop as humanity and the state ran into the boundaries on growth imposed by the planet. Hence the growing discontent, particularly around the manifestations of state control symbolized by the police and prison systems, which we can observe in the modern world. The culmination of this idea of deepening power is the panopticon, which allows the state to run perfectly efficiently and makes each individual their own supervisor, thus removing the responsibility for discipline and punishment from the state. This is a perfectly efficient system which only relies on the *minor* assumption that individuals will submit at all times to the arbitrary whims of the state’s needs.

Foucault’s work condemns some of the core pillars of bourgeois democracy: the system of justice, and individual rights or freedoms. These creations, articulated most clearly in the United States’ Constitution of 1787-89, the United States’ Bill of Rights of 1791, and the French National Constituent Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, are supposedly in place to protect individuals against the tyranny of state oppression, and enable individuals (read: white men) to pursue happiness without constraint. Of course, these are fantasies created and perpetuated by liberal bourgeois thinkers to justify the existence of a state which places no limits on the growth of capital. In reviewing the evolution of discipline and punishment as they existed (and still exist today) under these modern political economic organizations, Foucault shows that the purported pillars of bourgeois democracy are actually ways for the state to make its power become invisible while sinking ever further into individuals’ lives. In the process of becoming self-conscious, and therefore realizing that its power was and would always be entirely arbitrary and amoral, the state needed a way to hide its power from individuals. The state consequently identified the judicial process and personal freedoms as a way to present its authority as a gift, and something for which individuals should feel gratitude.

Like most other well-known philosophers both of Foucault’s time and from earlier eras (including most Marxist, Anarchist, and Leftist philosophers), Discipline and Punish is limited because Foucault only considers the history of discipline and punishment in a Western context (to his credit, Foucault readily concedes this at the outset of his work and states that he wanted to focus narrowly on the historical facts of one country). Foucault could have made more generalized observations about discipline and punishment, and their relationship to the evolution of state power, if he had included considerations of other nations, particularly colonized nations. What did systems of discipline and punishment look like in non-western nations prior to their colonization? And subsequently, how did systems of discipline and punishment change in a given non-western nation once it was colonized?

One would suspect that the state did not feel the need to treat its colonized subjects with the same caution that it treated its internal citizens. For most of history, western imperial powers have wielded significant control over non-western nations, so they did not need to worry about the revolt of individuals from non-western nations to the same extent that they needed to worry about domestic political turmoil. Citizens within the imperial powers were positioned closer to the heart of power, so they were more easily able to exert pressure. Following the logic that Foucault reveals in Discipline and Punish, this would mean that the western nations would not need to give the same rights and freedoms, nor follow the same judicial process, in these colonized nations. The reader is unable to judge this for themselves based on Foucault’s work, since he only considers the history of France.

Discipline and Punish only considers the history of France from roughly the end of Medieval times until the present. This work could be productively extended to consider all available human history, in all regions, and would thus be able to not only tell us more about the history of state power viewed through the lens of ideas of coercion, but could also tell us how to more effectively identify and resist these ideas as they are reified in the now entirely globalized neoliberal world. (As an aside, it would also be interesting to continue this analysis to the present day, as national boundaries become less and less meaningful in a more globalized world under capitalism. We see the ideas of individual rights and freedoms appearing in more non-western countries as these countries are brought into the industrialized capitalist world. Of course, these ideas are also increasingly meaningless as capitalism reaches its late stages).