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Title: Discipline & Punish : The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0-679-75255-2 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 25 April, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (24 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Grisly...
Comment: Michel Foucault is a rather difficult individual to pigeonhole as belonging to one or another scholarly discipline. Is he a philosopher? Well, yes, but there is much more to his work than philosophical inquiry. Is he a psychologist? I suppose that could be argued. Is he a historian? Sort of, but then again his works contain so much philosophy....and round & round we go. So, probably the best thing to do is not attempt to confine Foucault to any one genre of scholarship.
The present book showcases all of Foucault's interwoven, cross-disciplinary talents. F takes us on a tour of the history of punishment in France & Britain over the course of the past 250 years. Surprisingly enough, our modern day image of huge prisons simply did not exist before that period.
The book grapples with the struggle of society to remain humane in a facet of life that is inherently inhumane: the treatment of our criminals. In doing so, F adopts the methodology utilized by Nietzsche in his "On The Geneology Of Morals."
We begin with the most grotesque executions of a few hundred years ago & witness how the paradigm shift went from vengeance to reform re: our handling of criminals. F notes how the primary goal of the prison became one of making the prisoner paranoid that he was being watched, which would (hopefully) instill within him the understanding that he could not get away with violating rules (both inside the prison & also once he was released back into society).
This is an extraordinary book that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in the judicial system, the history of the prison, or anyone who just has a curiousity about the social & political forces which decide the manner in which we mete out punishment to our malefactors. A great read.
Rating: 4
Summary: The coercive foundations of modern disciplinary society
Comment: "Discipline and Punish", a key text in the Foucaldian canon, is an ambitious, though at times imprecise, attempt to trace the ideological bases of the modern punitive apparati consolidated by the Enlightenment. His most important formulation is the recognition that curative or educative punishment is not dissimilar to judicial punishment, which treats crime as a sin against the social order. Curative discipline, Foucault contends, takes crime as a sin against the wrongdoer and is thus the obverse of penal coercion. He compares prisons, factories, schools, barracks and hospitals in their fundamental coercive underpinnings, a feature which is best illustrated by the Panopticon, Bentham's version of the model prison, which was designed to enforce total surveillance of the punished. As opposed to the view that the Enlightenment saw to the triumph of science, reason, progress and order, Foucault considers it as contributing to increased suffering and repression through social control. The corollary of Foucault's argument is that the West has achieved no progress in the past two centuries, a conclusion which is plain false. Reason, as understood by Foucault, is a technology of power with science as its tool; its area of domination human bodies and their actions, as demonstrated by disciplinary surveillance. The will to power, as knowledge, is expressed to consolidate the position of the bourgeois society, and the concentration of coercion, the prevalent quality inherent in modern culture. This is by far an eloquent and absorbing treatise.
Rating: 4
Summary: Power, Discipline and Institutions in Modernity
Comment: I've read this book three times: First time was in undergraduate, second time was in law school, third time was last week. I can honestly say that my understanding of this work has grown with each reading, but that growth in comprehension has come more from my reading of other books either discussing or related to Discipline and Punish.
Specifically, I would recommend Jurgen Habermas's critique of Foucault, although I now forget which book of his contains his critique. I would also recommend Goffman's "Asylums" and Sykes "The Society of the Prison" as works which can illuminate Foucault's oft dense prose.
Foucault's main thesis is that the transistion of society into modernity has resulted in institutions which are increasingly devoted to the control of the "inmate's" time. The instituions use this control of time to develop discipline. Discipline is then used to both reinforce the strength of the instituion and also to expand the reach of institution's into the community.
As other reviewers have noted, this book isn't really about Prisons. Rather, the development of the modern prison represents the pinnacle of the relationship between power and discipline. Foucault leads up to his discussion of the prison by examining developments in other instituions: the work shop, the school and the barracks.
I really would encourage admirers of this work to read Goffman's "Asylums". The two books overlap to a considerable degree, but they both complement one another.
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Title: The History of Sexuality : An Introduction by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0679724699 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 14 April, 1990 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault ISBN: 067972110X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 28 November, 1988 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault ISBN: 039473954X Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 November, 1980 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Archeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0394711068 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 September, 1982 List Price(USD): $13.60 |
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Title: The Order of Things : An Archaeology of Human Sciences by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0679753354 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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