Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault; Alan SheridanReview by: Jan GoldsteinThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Mar., 1979), pp. 116-118Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877879 .

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116 Book Reviews

nor the student. That is not to say that the book does not offer some thoughtful and occasionally stimulating glances at five extraordinarily cre- ative theorists and writers as they strive to come to terms with the basic element of violence in the human condition.

PETER PARET Stanford University

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. By Michel Foucault. Trans- lated by Alan Sheridan.

New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Pp. ix+333. $10.95.

Discipline and Punish belongs to no recognizable genre and is perhaps best described as a speculative essay. Densely packed with insights, cluttered with neologisms, and punctuated by imaginative leaps, it is not easy to read and is even harder to summarize. But no one familiar with Foucault's work would expect any less.

Foucault's immediate subject is, as his subtitle indicates, "The Birth of the Prison," or the shift in the mode of criminal punishment from the gory public tortures and executions of the Old Regime to the apparently gentle detentions of the modern period. According to Foucault, the change oc- curred in two stages. First, as is well known, the Enlightenment philosophes condemned torture for its "atrocity" and mounted a campaign for the reform and codification of the penal law. In the course of pleading for leniency, they expressed a preference for a colorful diversity of "analogi- cal" punishments, each tailored to the particularity of the crime. Far from their minds was the second stage, the monotonous insistence upon impris- onment, varied only by duration, for all offenders. Nonetheless, this second stage-or, as Foucault calls it, "this conjuring trick" (p. 116)-was accom- plished with remarkable speed after the promulgation of the new codes: "almost instantaneously" in some places, within twenty years in others.

It is in explaining the "conjuring trick" that Foucault exercises his greatest ingenuity and puts forth his most global assertions. Part III, entitled "Discipline," is devoted to this task; it is the core of the book, linking Foucault's treatment of the prison to his earlier studies of the insane asylum (in Madness and Civilization) and the hospital (in Birth of the Clinic) and going even further to embrace the whole institutional structure of modern society. At the end of Part III, the reader is supposed not only to under- stand why imprisonment became the form of punishment par excellence, but also to cease to find it "surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons" (p. 228).

The basic contention of Part III is that bourgeois liberalism, for all the egalitarianism of its parliaments and law courts, has a necessary "dark side": the "asymmetry" of the so-called disciplinary mechanisms (p. 222). These disciplinary mechanisms, of which imprisonment is one, make bourgeois liberalism viable. Omnipresent but inconspicuous, they are the forms of restraint which underlie and sustain the myth of bourgeois political freedom.

What are the disciplinary mechanisms? Foucault enumerates their essen- tial structural qualities: placement of individuals in an enclosed and par- titioned space; ranking them; regulating their daily activities by means of a

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Book Reviews 117

timetable; extracting the maximum activity from each moment, with a long-range goal in view. Obviously, the maintenance of discipline is a form of exercise of power (in Foucault's jargon, "micro-power," as opposed to national systems of "super-power"), and Foucault regards it as the typically modern form. It operates not by brute force, as did its monarchical pre- decessor, but by means of "the gaze." It is the perpetual "visibility" of the modern individual which constitutes his subjection, and the prison, school, factory, and barracks-all loci of discipline-are all designed to enhance this "visibility. "

That is only part of the story. Discipline is, like all modes of power, also a mode of knowledge. The symbiosis of pouvoir and savoir is one of Foucault's central themes, and he intends it in its most extreme sense. "Power produces knowledge" (p. 27), and "power . . . produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth" (p. 194). In the case of power in its disciplinary mode, the most notable epistemological production was the ordinary individual, "the everyday individuality of everybody." The gaze of discipline focused upon persons in their partitioned "cells," kept detailed written records of their behavior, administered periodic exam- inations to them, endowed each with a biography. Whereas in feudal society the wielders of power have the most nuanced individuality, in modem disciplinary society individuality increases with powerlessness. A child is more "known" than an adult, a hospitalized patient or imprisoned criminal more "known" than a healthy or law-abiding citizen living in his own domicile (p. 193). Having once produced individuals, the disciplinary mode went on to create ""sciences of man" -psychology, psychiatry, clinical medicine, pedagogy, criminology. These flowers of Enlightenment thought which have "so delighted our 'humanity' for over a century have their technical matrix in the petty, malicious minutiae of the disciplines and their investigations" (p. 226). Whether these sciences are discredited by their intimate connection with discipline is unclear: Foucault seems to evaluate them somewhat positively when he depicts their emergence as an "epis- temological 'thaw' " (p. 187). But Foucault leaves no doubt as to his evaluation of discipline itself. Its extension is "insidious" (p. 176); it ultimately yields a "carceral archipelago" (p. 297).

Foucault has given a dazzling performance, a full-scale reinterpretation of the Enlightenment and its, legacy which doubles as a passionate critique of present-day society. The usual criteria of historical scholarship cannot be used to assess it, for although Discipline and Punish bears many of the marks of history-its preoccupation with origins ("birth of the prison"), its roughly chronological organization-it is more like metahistory. The analysis is highly abstract, as befits its vast scope, and Foucault never marshals the concrete and specific evidence that historians crave. He attempts, for example, to account for the emergence of the disciplines by noting that the quarantine of plague-stricken towns by seventeenth-century magistrates was the "model" which "gave rise to" them (pp. 197-98). But nowhere does he try to locate the flesh-and-blood authors and promoters of the disciplines, to identify them with a social or economic group, to discern their motives. Foucault's is a history without significant actors, a history filled with disembodied sinister forces. And, in the terms he has established in this book, such a history, or metahistory, may be the most appropriate for the modern period. For Foucault stresses the fundamental "anonymity" of the

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118 Book Reviews

disciplinary mode of power. Although the job of surveillance devolves upon specific individuals, they are organized in a vast machine-like network, the supervisors themselves supervised, so that "it is the apparatus as a whole that produces 'power' " (p. 177). After all, the corollary of the individuality of the powerless in modern society is that power itself is faceless.

Most readers will find Foucault's vision intriguing; some will find it emotionally persuasive; others will ponder its political implications. But the historian is confronted with the special problem of whether and how to assimilate the contributions of Foucault's singular brand of history into the more conventional practice of the craft.

JAN GOLDSTEIN

University of Chicago

Plagues and Peoples. By William H. McNeill. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1976. Pp. 369. $10.00.

Professor McNeill is one of those scholars who make others appear myopic. In Plagues and Peoples, he sets himself no less a task than to delineate the influence of infectious disease on the entire sojourn of man on earth. He feels, and rightly so, that the effect of disease has been too much neglected. Past historians have not appreciated, in particular, the difference between the effect of a familiar disease in a previously infected population and the devastating result of the introduction of a new infection in a population without immunity.

This concept is central to McNeill's reconstruction of how mankind established isolated disease pools which gradually coalesced into a world community of infectious disease. He traces man's rise in Africa, where he was the victim of an exquisite assortment of parasites which have hampered man's career on that continent ever since. As man left the tropical forests, however, he was able greatly to increase his numbers in relatively more disease-free areas. Early hunters were rather healthy, and it was only as men developed agriculture and urban settlements that disease once again became a major force. For example, schistosomiasis chronically debilitated peasants in areas dependent upon irrigation. These passive farmers fell more easily victim to more vigorous conquerors. This balance between infectious disease (microparasitism) and man's exploitation of man (macroparasitism) is another of McNeill's major themes throughout the work.

Early civilizations enjoyed courses largely determined by their patterns of infectious disease. Cities were too unhealthy to replace their own popula- tions and so had to rely on influxes of healthy rustics until around 1900. At the same time, civilized societies had a potent weapon for conquest in the devastating diseases which they could spread to virgin populations. This was a major factor in the spread of civilization. Indeed, differing patterns of disease among subpopulations of India led directly to the caste system, since contact with other groups could be mortally dangerous. India's high level of endemic disease also favored unstable political structures and transcendental religion.

Northern China and the Mediterranean basin were comparatively disease free. Rome and China were able to establish stable and powerful empires.

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