Discipline And Punish By Foucault

In Discipline and Punish (1979), Michel Foucault introduces two ideas of punishment, Monarchial and Disciplinary, as a means of creating and maintaining power. Monarchial punishment refers to torturous practices used prior to the Enlightenment, while Disciplinary punishment refers to the incarceration of offenders and their subjection to the power of prison guards. This transition occurred in order to create an economically efficient method of punishment where a large group could be monitored by a single person. Foucault argues that torture and execution were used to express power, not to prevent crime. In reality, public executions revealed that the sovereign’s power depended on the people. Methods of execution were intended to be public spectacles which established order through fear. Yet,
Foucault found that public execution was non-economical. Foucault believed that executions were applied non-uniformly and haphazardly (Discipline and Punish). Combining this with the chaos that ensued, Foucault found that the political cost of executions was too high. Execution, was the antithesis of of the concerns of the modern state: order. Thus, the general method of punishment had to be reformed to allow for greater stability. The reformation that occurred gave birth to a Disciplinary society which Foucault links to modern society using Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon to demonstrate the impact that constant surveillance has not only on the individual, but has on society as a whole. Constant surveillance, according to Foucault, created a self-policing society. Foucault breaks down people to the idea of “bodies”, who, when under the