Discipline and Punish

A history of punishment in France and Europe, subtitled The Birth of the Prison, that becomes an analysis of modern power. It opens with the public torture and execution of the would-be regicide Damiens in 1757, set against a prison timetable from some eighty years later. Foucault asks how, in that short time, punishment moved from spectacle on the body to the quiet correction of the soul. His answer is the rise of discipline: techniques developed in armies, schools, hospitals and workshops to produce docile bodies through drills, timetables and the control of space. Discipline works through hierarchical observation, normalising judgement and the examination. Its emblem is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a prison in which inmates can always be seen but never see the watcher, so that they come to police themselves. Power and knowledge, Foucault argues, produce each other. Historians have questioned his evidence and chronology, and critics ask what standard his critique rests on.

It is the classic account of surveillance and disciplinary power, and readers still use it to think about prisons, schools, workplaces and data-driven monitoring.