Foucault and the State as a social system

Throughout Discipline and Punish, Foucault seems to argue that the primary agent of historical change is the state, its motive is power, and its primary method of exercising that power has been through concealing it. In tracing the evolution of punishment throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Foucault is primarily looking at how the state has entrenched its power, specifically through the power to punish.  He says that his work can be read as “a common history of power relations and object relations” (24). 

Foucault does not hold a simplistic definition of the state, however, and is not interested in looking at the state as a single actor (such as a king), a coalition of single, powerful actors (such as the political class), or an ideology (such as communism).  Rather, Foucault seems to define the state as a social system (and punishment as a “complex social function,” 23) in which all of society participates, rulers and ruled. In the modern state, the primary difference between the rulers and ruled is power: power to remain invisible and to observe. As the disciplinary power of the state becomes more invisible, it becomes more powerful. Foucault’s main argument throughout the book seems to be that by participating in disciplinary institutions such as schools, hospitals, and prisons--excercises of power that are invisible because they have become "normal"--we are all objects of the power of the state. Foucault asks, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (228)