The central human figure of Discipline and Punish, perhaps even the antagonist of the history, is Jeremy Bentham, who first theorized the Panopticon at great length. As Bentham describes in The Panopticon Papers, the ideas originally came to him from his brother. But Bentham went on to turn the idea into real architectural plans, though the building was never constructed. He offered measurements down to the diameter of the building (he suggested 100 feet) to the thickness of its walls (2.5 feet), and he clearly intended for this to be a building that was as efficient as possible (39).
Bentham was a wildly prolific writer in his lifetime (1748-1832). His complete works, currently being collected and published by University College London, are anticipated to reach 70 volumes. Among his other interests were the decriminalization of homosexuality and the equality of women. It may therefore be surprising that Bentham comes to figure, for Foucault, the rise of a new disciplinary type of power that enslaves everyone in social norms.
For this reason, more recent scholars have tried to defend Bentham from Foucault’s analysis. For David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, for instance, Bentham’s Panopticon strictly resists the idea of something like the state “tak[ing] over the very consciousness of its citizens” (1056). This is because Bentham thought you could have a consciousness apart from what you were doing in public: the aim was to make sure everyone behaved, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t have your own interior life apart from that. Frances Ferguson similarly argues that Bentham was trying to give value to actions—performing well in school—without having to judge or evaluate the “soul” that Foucault thinks is disciplinary power’s aim. From yet another angle, if Bentham was trying to create a system in which everyone behaved well, he was actually trying to create a society in which you didn’t need prisons at all. It is possible to think of Bentham as a prison abolitionist, much like Foucault himself.
Nonetheless, the importance for Foucault is the metaphorical meaning of Bentham’s Panopticon. Here, he departs from a traditional historian or biographer. It doesn’t matter what Bentham’s intentions were, just as it doesn’t matter that his building wasn’t actually built. Rather, it matters that Bentham could think of and desire this building, which has less to do with his own individuality, and more to do with the values and thinking of the society from which he comes. In Foucault’s discourse analysis, Bentham is a symptom of a wider trend of society coming to value social norms more than sovereign spectacles. The enduring legacy, for Foucault, is the images Bentham gives us of this transformation in society.
