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NGHM liest | Michel Foucault: Surveiller et punir (1975).
How did the spectacle of torture become the quiet routine of the cell? Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, the fifth title on the NGHM reading list and an example from the field of social-theoretical foundations, answers this question with a counter-narrative: the abolition of public torture marks not a progress of humanity, but the transition to a new, far-reaching form of power — a power that no longer targets the body of the condemned, but the normalization of all bodies.
When the book appeared in February 1975 at Gallimard, Foucault was not merely an academic. On 8 February 1971, he had co-founded, together with Jean-Marie Domenach and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), an initiative intended to give prisoners a public voice. His lectures at the Collège de France, Théories et institutions pénales (1971/72) and La société punitive (1972/73), prepared the ground for the book’s theses. Surveiller et punir thus emerged at the intersection of political activism and academic research; the philosopher who wrote the genealogy of the prison was simultaneously organizing protest against conditions in French penal institutions. Foucault himself stated in the introduction: „Que les punitions en général et que les prisons relèvent d’une technologie politique du corps, c’est peut-être moins l’histoire qui me l’a enseigné que le présent.” [„That punishments in general and prisons in particular belong to a political technology of the body is something I have perhaps been taught less by history than by the present.”]
The text opens with a contrast that sustains its entire argument: the public execution of the royal assassin Damiens in 1757, described in meticulous detail in its cruelty, set against the sober daily routine of the juvenile penal colony of Mettray in the nineteenth century. Between the two lies no humanitarian reform. What changes is the address of power.
Foucault unfolds this thesis in four parts. The first analyzes torture as a ritual of sovereign power, the body of the condemned as a stage upon which the injured authority of the king is restored. The second reads Enlightenment penal reform not as humanization but as reorganization: efficiency in place of spectacle, calculation in place of ritual. In the third part, the analytical center of the book, Foucault develops the concepts that have inscribed his work into the canon of social theory: the ‘docile bodies’ shaped through drill and temporal ordering; hierarchical surveillance; normalizing sanction; and finally Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as an architectural model of a power that sees without being seen. The fourth part argues that the prison persists as an institution despite its programmatic failure — not although, but because it produces ‘delinquency’ as a useful category of social control. The ‘carceral’ that Foucault sketches at the close permeates wide areas of society: school, barracks, factory, clinic.
The reception began immediately. In 1977, the historian Jacques Léonard sparked a debate with his contribution „L’historien et le philosophe” (Annales historiques de la Révolution française 228, 1977, pp. 163–181), in which the methodological differences between historical and philosophical work on the subject of the prison became visible. The impetus had already been given by Maurice Agulhon, then president of the Société d’histoire de la Révolution de 1848, at the society’s annual meeting in 1976, when he proposed supplementing a lecture by Michelle Perrot with a table ronde involving Foucault. This table ronde took place on 20 May 1978, with Foucault, Léonard, Agulhon, Perrot, Arlette Farge, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Revel, and further participants. The complete dossier — Léonard’s essay, Foucault’s reply „La poussière et le nuage,” Perrot’s lecture, the minutes of the table ronde, and an afterword by Agulhon — was published in 1980 by Seuil under the title L’Impossible Prison. Perrot, who situated Foucault’s prison research within a „cycle carcéral,” was among the most productive mediators of the work. Hayden White reviewed the book in June 1977 in the American Historical Review; Clifford Geertz wrote his own review on 26 January 1978 in the New York Review of Books under the title „Stir Crazy.” In the Anglophone world, the English translation of 1977 (Alan Sheridan, Pantheon/Allen Lane) exerted a decisive influence on Critical Criminology, Surveillance Studies, and governmentality research.
Criticism, however, remained equally substantial. In The Cultivation of Hatred (1993), Peter Gay accused Foucault and the ‘social control’ school influenced by him of overestimating the motive of political control and underestimating factors such as democratic reforms, authentic idealism, and the sheer uncertainty or incompetence of those in power. David Garland summarized the numerous objections at a more abstract level in Punishment and Modern Society (1990): Surveiller et punir offers a consistent explanation in terms of power, often even where other historians would take additional factors into account. C. Fred Alford objected that Foucault conflates the discourse about prisons with actual practice: the illustrations in the book show plans of ideal prisons that were never built. From a Marxist-informed perspective, it was argued that the focus on the disciplinary society neglects economic structures; Nancy Fraser asked in „Foucault on Modern Power” (1981, reprinted 1989) whether Foucault does not tacitly presuppose liberal values such as freedom that his own analysis is unable to ground.
It is precisely in this tension that the book’s productivity lies. Concepts such as ‘disciplinary power,’ ‘panopticism,’ and ‘docile bodies’ have become standard vocabulary far beyond the history of criminal law — in educational research, organizational sociology, and architectural theory. The fundamental insight that power does not operate merely repressively but also productively generates subjects, knowledge, and institutions remains a central analytical tool. At the same time, critics such as Petra Gehring caution against a premature transfer of the panopticism model to algorithmic surveillance: the digital control society operates according to different principles than Bentham’s architectural utopia.
Those who have taken seriously Carr’s question from the first post in this series — who actually decides what counts as a ‘historical fact’ — will find in Foucault a radical extension of that inquiry: not only the selection of facts, but also the orders of knowledge themselves, the categories through which societies distinguish, classify, and normalize, are products of relations of power. Later in this series, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past will apply this question to historiography itself, asking at which points in the historiographical process silence is produced. Foucault’s own procedure reads in retrospect like a guide to doing so: the rendering visible of the patterns concealed within the familiar.
Students at Osnabrück will find Foucault’s Surveiller et punir in the B-Magazin under the shelfmark 4145-385 2 (OPAC).
Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, Paris: Gallimard 1975.
This post is part of the series NGHM reads, in which the 65 titles of the NGHM reading list are presented. The list can be explored as a knowledge graph.