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Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 365.643
EAN: 9780679752554
ISBN: 0679752552
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: April 25, 1995
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: April 25, 1995
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Obscurantist? Esotericist? Obfuscatory?
The historical exegeses are largely superfluous and distract from the points of argumentation.
There are many elaborate dilations of the main propositions which do little more than meander towards the next one(s), as opposed to elucidating their logical-historical connection.
Foucault gives political manifesto content-length propositions that are reasonably insightful, in a basically historical-novelistic theory fiction format. "We are less Greek than we think." --Foucault ... Read More
Rating:  - Excellent and thought-provoking.
Other reviews have done a nice job of explaining the textual benefits of the book, so let me explain its practical benefit. I'll keep this short and sweet. This is an excellent text to trot out during a sociology or other social science class when you want to egomanically dominate the conversation for a bit. It provides such food for thought that you can really wax poetic on the power of punishment over the body and soul of the individual. I say this with all seriousness. So few people read philosophical ... Read More
Rating: - Knowledge, power, and domination
By examining the rise of prison systems in Western culture, Foucault demonstrates the ways modern nation-states exert their power to dominate their citizens. This is a great book for anyone interested in power formations as well as continental theory.
Rating:  - Well researched, controversial book
This is one of Michel Foucault's most accessible books (though still pretty heavy going). If in Madness and Civilization, Foucault analyzed the birth of insane asylums and in The Birth of the Clinic the birth of the hospital, in Discipline and Punish, it's the turn of the prisons. The book starts with a gruesome description of the public drawing and quartering of failed regicide Damiens in 1757. Then he goes on to quote a benign prison system of the 1830s. What changed between the two dates? While other authors ... Read More
Rating: - Big brother is watching you
What is whispered in secret may be shouted from the rooftops, but what is done in secret will be watched.
In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault develops the idea of the transition of God's omniscience into the state's omniscience, and points to interesting nodes along the way: the invention of the table and the Panopticon being the most compelling and far-reaching.
Foucault's thesis of The Panopticon being a physical result of the Protestant conception of the community replacing the ... Read More
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