discipline and punish by michel foucault

But prisons neither administer finite penalties nor curtail criminality: according to Foucault, their failure on both accounts is intentional. Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century’s most innovative thinkers and his work on Discipline and Punish was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever published. At the time of his death in 1984, he held a chair at France's most prestigious institutions, the College de France. Discipline and Punish states that penal institutions, apart from their symbolic importance, have the expressed goal of reducing crime through the imposition of defined sentences. He lecturerd in universities throughout the world served as director at the Institut Francais in Hamburg, Germany and at the Institut de Philosophi at the Faculte des Lettres in the University of Clermont-Ferrand, France and wrote frequently for French newspapers and reviews. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Discipline and Punish is a genuinely revolutionary audiobook, whose implications extend beyond the prison to the minute power relations.

In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.Ībout the Author Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926. This groundbreaking audiobook 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. About the Book In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.īook Synopsis A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (French: Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison) is a 1975 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Discipline and punish by michel foucault