The Sovereign vs. The People
One of the conflicts Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish is the power of the sovereign versus the power of the people. The sovereign is the ruler of a nation, usually a king. The people are everyone else in a country, or more generally, the society as a whole. Traditionally, the people are subject to the sovereign, or society conforms to the sovereign’s rules and dictates. But in modernity, Foucault thinks society starts to have more power than the king. Part of what this means is a shift from more monarchical societies to more democratic societies, where power belongs to citizens rather than to a king. This entails a shift in how crime is understood as well. It used to be that crime was thought of as a violation of the king; now it is a violation of the society as a whole, and the social norms that are supposed to organize it.
Sovereign Society vs. Society of Discipline
In a sovereign society, power is concentrated in the sovereign, usually the king of a nation. That means you can locate power, and it also means you can evade power: what the king doesn’t know won’t hurt him. But in the society of discipline, power belongs to the people or to society as a whole, and therefore power is everywhere. Instead of pleasing the king, you have to please everyone. This happens through conforming to social norms, or rules and expectations people have developed for how to act and behave. These norms “discipline” people, by training them to act properly.
Offender vs. Delinquent
Foucault makes a distinction between the “offender” and the “delinquent.” The “offender” is identified through the bad offense they’ve done. What matters is therefore the action they have done. In contrast, a delinquent is identified as a type of person, someone with a bad personality. Their offense is then seen as just a symptom of an underlying pathological condition. Foucault thinks there has been a shift when it comes to crime, from talking about offenders to talking about delinquents. In the past, we cared about people’s actions, but now we care about the whole person, or think their actions are part of an entire personality that needs to be reformed. That means justice aims to transform individuals as a whole, not just punish an action they have committed.
Negative vs. Positive Power
In the context of power, “positive” and “negative” do not mean good and bad. Instead, Foucault talks about power that adds something or takes something away: power that is primarily productive or primarily destructive. What interests him is how power than may seem primarily negative also has positive dimensions. For instance, punishment seems negative: it’s about taking something away from someone in order to repress bad behavior. It’s negative because its aim is to get rid of bad behavior. But punishment is also aimed at producing good behavior. For Foucault, disciplinary society aims to produce good citizens. This is the power of social norms, which produce behaviors in alignment with them.
Laws vs. Norms
For Foucault, the rise of a society of discipline, in which power is everywhere and trains people to act as if they’re always being watched, also marks the rise of social norms. In sovereign societies, rules are often written down in laws: don’t murder, for instance. In a disciplinary society, rules are often greater in number but also less explicit. You’re expected to behave in certain ways as a student in school but not all these ways are spelled out. You learn how to act properly in part by watching others, in part by seeing how your own actions are received by others. What matters here is the role of watching: norms are reinforced because we’re always watching others and imagining ourselves being watched by others, too. This is a kind of power, and it is the power of norms, which ask us to compare our behavior to the proper kind of behavior.
Power and Knowledge
A recurrent theme in Discipline and Punish, and indeed throughout Foucault’s works, is the intersection of power and knowledge. In this book, he is particularly interested in how the rise of a new kind of power, discipline, is tied to new kinds of knowledge. For instance, psychological science studies and classifies people and their “abnormal” behaviors, and this leads to new power relations in which people feel pressured to act “normal.” Foucault is also interested in how the exercise of discipline, or the training of individuals, works by treating the individual as a source of knowledge. The individual is constantly examined and studied in disciplinary society, and it is this condition of feeling constantly observed that also leads people to change their behavior or act in line with how they think society wants them to act.
Suspicions about “Progress”
A recurring theme in Discipline and Punish is that what may seem progressive from one perspective can be more repressive from another. The primary transformation Foucault describes is a case in point: the progress from torture to prison as the primary means of punishment. On the one hand, this seems an advance of human rights, giving us more “humane” punishment that seems more civilized than barbaric torture. But Foucault also points out that the prison is part of a larger system in which people think of themselves as constantly under surveillance. Power starts to be everywhere, and social norms shape people's behavior at all times. For Foucault, then, it is less useful to describe different societies as better than others, and more important to describe the nature of the difference. He wants to describe how power operates, without assuming that the operation of power today is “progress” over the past.
