Foucault Response

I enjoyed reading Foucault’s book, Discipline & Punish.  Like Bloch, Foucault wrote about the establishment of law and the relationship between governments and the people.  It also struck a very familiar tone, as I studied criminal justice for my undergraduate major.  The book focused heavily on Eighteenth Century Europe which is another favored topic for me.  He used mostly primary sources, but his citation method was sporadic.  However, the book was challenging to read.  To me Foucault’s style was to over-emphasize and over-explain his points.

Regarding the first of the prompt questions, I believe that the agent of change in Discipline & Punish is the sovereign ruling over the people during the various periods covered in the book, be it feudal lords, monarchs, politicians, reformers, the bourgeois, or even the people themselves.  For it was the people through the use of popular uprisings that policy makers were forced to abandon the system of using public executions as punitive measures.  Ultimately, however, the motivation to initiate the change came from a quest for power.  According to Foucault, the progression from a punishment of the body to that of the mind was essentially a coercive means of forcing offenders to conform.  So, it would appear that Foucault’s interest laid more in what motivated the change.      

The feudal system described in Bloch’s, Feudal Society, Vol. 1, described a system of government where interdependence was the rule.  The feudal lord provided food and security for his serfs and the serfs worked his fields and served him militarily in return.  The fall of the collective interdependent feudal system was ushered in by the rise of the individual.  In theory, the feudal lord showed benevolence by providing for the serfs.  This concept of benevolence is apparent in the early periods covered in Discipline & Punish, where “benevolent” magistrates rarely sentenced offenders to death in capital cases.  Moreover, as the concept of the individual became a social norm, where the people were more apt to resist the “benevolent” gestures of the ruling class.  Foucault argued that the ruling class thereby gave way to the political class, who then focused their attention on conformity of the individual through education and rehabilitation.  The focus of state sponsored punitive action changed from deterrence to correction.

Foucault viewed individuality as a means for the political class to exert control.  Since public executions had little deterrent effect and often resulted in massive and uncontrollable instances of civil disobedience, the political class devised ways to continue to maintain control.  Instead of breaking the body, they turned to breaking the mind through discipline.  The transformation of the mind could only be achieved through the individual, not the collective who could easily transition to a state of mob rules if agitated.  The Marxist perspective existed in Foucault’s book in limited instances, as the mob in the latter days of public executions and in the collective organization of inmates in prisons.