{(1) Michel Foucault (2) Moralizing and Administration}[9th April 1991]

[Redbook9:54-55][19910409:0923f]{(1) Michel Foucault (2) Moralizing and Administration}[9th April 1991]

19910409.0923

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[A cutting in the ms, which is not reproduced in the ts, from the Times Literary Supplement dated March 15 1991, p7, headed ‘Suitable cases for treatment[:] Moral attitudes to crime and punishment in Victorian England’, by Gertrude Himmelfarb, sub-headed ‘Martin J Wiener RECONSTRUCTING THE CRIMINAL CULTURE, LAW AND POLICY IN ENGLAND 1830-1914 381pp. Cambridge University Press. £30. 0 521 35045 X’, includes the following text with ms marginal notes:]

‘[Michel] Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”, published in 1975,* is a dazzling performance. Shorn of the pyrotechnics, the thesis is simple: all the reforms that we have come to think of as rational, progressive and humanitarian are in fact authoritarian devices for the more effective exercises of social control and social power. Purporting to be solutions to the problem of crime, they are themselves the problem. The main reform – imprisonment, especially rehabilitative imprisonment – is more coercive than flogging, deportation, or hanging, because it is more intrusive, more guilt-inducing; the prisoner suffers the ultimate ignominy of becoming a party to his own punishment. It is also more coercive because he is completely under the control of the authorities and can be reformed – literally, re-formed – so as to conform (these plays upon words are typical of this kind of analysis) to one socially acceptable norm, a norm that has no inherent validity and serves only to subdue, dominate and regiment the individual. The prison, moreover, is symbolic of all social institutions, which are structures reflecting the power relations in society. In effect, all of society is a prison and all individuals, in one or another aspect of their lives, are prisoners.

**‘This free-floating thesis readily adapts itself to any set of facts.*** If a prisoner is treated harshly, that is obviously evidence of the stringent social control to which he is being subjected; and if he is treated leniently, that is evidence of an even more oppressive, because insidious, form of social control. It is a thesis that can neither be proved nor disproved. Indeed “facts” as such are suspect (the word, in this lexicon, bears implicit or explicit quotation marks), for they themselves are coercive “constructs” from which the historian must free himself.’

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*2048C2048

64R~1976

**Rff

***[NB!]

****[Times Literary Supplement 15/03/1991:7]

#[How very French....]

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