Audiobook13 hours
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Written by Michel Foucault
Narrated by Simon Prebble
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a man condemned of attempting to assassinate the King of France was drawn and quartered in a grisly spectacle that suggested an unmediated duel between the violence of the criminal and the violence of the state. This groundbreaking book by Michel Foucault, the most influential philosopher since Sartre, compels us to reevaluate our assumptions about all the ensuing reforms in the penal institutions of the West. For as Foucault examines innovations that range from the abolition of torture to the institution of forced labor and the appearance of the modern penitentiary, he suggests that punishment has shifted its focus from the prisoner's body to his soul-and that our very concern with rehabilitation encourages and refines criminal activity.
Lucidly reasoned and deftly marshaling a vast body of research, Discipline and Punish is a genuinely revolutionary book, whose implications extend beyond the prison to the minute power relations of our society.
Lucidly reasoned and deftly marshaling a vast body of research, Discipline and Punish is a genuinely revolutionary book, whose implications extend beyond the prison to the minute power relations of our society.
Author
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was a philosopher and historian of ideas. He was, and continues to be, one of the most influential thinkers of the last century.
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Reviews for Discipline & Punish
Rating: 4.357142857142857 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
28 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Foucault relates developments in prisons and punishment with larger trends in culture and civilization. He argues that ancient regime punishment of the body evolved into punishment of the mind or spirit. He relates these changes to capitalism.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's Foucault! It's about power. This time he explores the ideas of power through looking at the hisotry of discipline--usually state but sometimes civil. The relationship of the individual to the society and the government/soverign is explored form the age of toruture on.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Interesting to see how penal/educational/employment systems which seem obvious now developed. Although I think this happened in a more haphazard, unplanned way than what the author proposes.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prison is the symbol of a certain idea of society and of the mechanics of power inside it.From the excessive and bloody justice of the ancien régime to a disciplinary society in which ongoing examinations take place every time and the judges-controllers are a lot more than we think.Foucault gives to the prison also a political contingence but tells us also that soon or later it will not be necessary anymore, for the widening of punish/reward connections with the consequent fainting of punishments' intensity will make detrimental to mantain structures for the total submission and recostruction of individuals such as jails.The only problem of this intelligent and challenging book is that Foucault seems shy to share his opinion on the issue; nearly as if he's afraid of 'abuse' of his power and influence over the reader.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The few chapters I read for school were interesting. Might come back to read the whole book sometime.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5not the easiest read, I grant you, but indispensible history (both social and as a business) of "corrections"
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Indeholder "The body of the condemned", "The spectacle of the scaffold"."The body of the condemned" handler om ???"The spectacle of the scaffold" handler om ???Foucault's syn på fængsling og henrettelse.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Foucault is a historian, at least a his-story-ian. and this is an interesting story. take the soul out of the prisoner, the atrocities of the execution, the discipline and punishment pre 1847 when peasants enjoyed the spectacle of watching a man have his limb's ripped apart for killing another man. this is good writing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I must say that "Discipline and Punish" is a difficult book to review. It is excellent, and it is deep. The book starts with the description of a prisoner being tortured and killed. The final stages of the torture, and the execution used to take place in the public sphere. We may be squeamish today, but we cannot state that torture has disappeared from the world. It has just disappeared from the public eye. From there, he moves on to the concept of punishment, and the various theories that prevailed. And, of course, the practices. For me, the most interesting chapters were those that pertained to discipline, the panopticon, and delinquency. I don't think that 'the birth of the prison' is a good subtitle. This book is much deeper than that. It revolves around the concept of power (initially with the king), punishment, society's attitudes towards this, discipline and society; and finally, the Panopticon. This concept was centuries ahead of its time. In many ways, society is living in a Panopticon today.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It’s easy to understand why Foucault was such an influential theorist; his explanation of the use of information collection and standardization to work on the body, in places from prisons to hospitals to armies to schools, offers a powerful theoretical apparatus with lots of applications across countries, times, and situations. That said, if you’ve read summaries elsewhere, it’s not clear to me that you need to read this book (cf. Bowling Alone). One very striking thing to me, since I also just finished Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, was how much these two books described the exact same thing: the extension of categorization, surveillance, and manipulation to poor people, who gain “identity” by being classified and recorded. By contrast, rich people gain identity (and even acclaim) by being above the law—that’s not Foucault’s focus, but he mentions it. Thus the modern army and modern capitalism go hand in hand.