Discipline and Punish

I picked this up not for any class, just because I kept seeing it referenced in other stuff I was reading, and the opening chapter alone justified buying it. Foucault opens with the actual public execution of Damiens, a man who tried to kill Louis XV, torn apart limb by limb by horses in front of a crowd, described in enough clinical detail that it reads closer to horror than history. I wasn’t ready for that as an opening move from a philosophy book, comma comma, but it works, it sets the stakes immediately.

The actual argument is the slow part, and I won’t pretend it isn’t dense, there were stretches where I had to reread a paragraph three times to get what he was actually claiming about the shift from punishing the body to disciplining it instead. But the payoff is worth the slog. Once he gets into how surveillance and structure get baked into institutions, I kept mentally substituting my own old school for whatever example he was using, and it fit disturbingly well every time, hallway monitoring, bell schedules, the whole architecture of it.

One thing I’ll push back on, there’s a real complaint out there that Foucault plays a little loose with the historical record to make his case land cleaner than the actual history supports. I’m not a historian so I can’t fully adjudicate that, but it’s worth knowing going in that this reads better as a framework for thinking than as a strict history text.

Four stars. Dense, occasionally frustrating, but I haven’t stopped noticing “discipline” everywhere since I finished it.