synopsis:

This book is a genealogy of the modern soul and the power to judge. Its main theme is the claim that power is not a clear thing: it is a strategy, or a game not consciously played by individuals but one that operates within the machinery of society. Power affects everyone, from the prisoner to the prison guard, but no one individual can "control" it. It starts with a historical analysis of the ways in which people were punished: first they were tortured in public, then they were sent to prison, out of the public. Not the body is punished nowadays, but the soul ‘behind it'.

This book follows some general rules: to regard punishment as a complex social function; to regard punishment as a political tactic; to see whether the history of penal law and of the human sciences are linked; to try to find in changes in penal techniques a political technology of the body and a general history of changing power relations. We need to situate punishment within systems of production and the political economy of the body. Historians have yet to consider the body as a subject of political power or power relations. The body is subjected to a body of knowledge; this is the political technology of the body. Power is a strategy, and we need to decipher it in a system of relations that can be called political anatomy. Power is not a property but a strategy evident in the relations between people. Power relations operate and exist through people. They go right down into society. We need to realize that power and knowledge are related. We should think of the body politic as a series of routes and weapons by which power operates.

Of the four straightforward rules for this investigation, the fourth is the most interesting. The techniques applied to the prisoner and our attitudes to him show the ways in which power operates in society. The knowledge possessed by prison warders and psychiatrists creates a certain "technology of power." Foucault's metaphors are drawn from science and industry, but he is also clear that economic and social circumstances are important. The reference to systems of production (the means of making and creating products and capital) is from Marx.

on this book:

'Discipline and Punish' is considered Foucault's most important and lasting work because it represents his decision to explicitly take up politics and social theory, areas that his earlier work addressed mainly by implication. This book shows how Foucault arrived at his major theme of power and domination. He is almost an anarchist in his dislike of societal rules and their affect on the human spirit. For Foucault there was no higher purpose than being your own unique person. The ideas forced upon us by society do not allow this to happen. this shows the strong influence of nietzsche on foucault.

Even as a social philosopher, Foucault's ideas about government's role in oppressing people's behavior and true identity have been related to why people commit crime.