Coercion and Distortion: Two Theories of Docility in Foucault and Arendt Anonymous College

That level of destructive power and coercion that sovereign mechanisms can bring to bear is awe-inspiring is indisputable, and fixation on and discomfort with this fact permeates the work of both Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Each of these two writers finds troublesome power dynamics and methods of control within the liberal order—in the hospitals, schools, and military institutions examined by Foucault as in Nazi Germany we see the development of an extra-legal system of punishment and the evolution of a complicated system of rank that subtly increases state power while simultaneously becoming a system of punishment in its own right. In each work, what is made to appear to be the march of progress— shooting to nice, painless gassing, public disembowelment to orderly, well-administrated prisons—is actually a simple process of sewing the threads of power relations so tightly into the fabric of life that they become imperceptible to the untrained eye. Arendt and Foucault, however, differ slightly as to exactly how these subtle forces work upon the individual because they have divergent understandings of the precise nature of discipline and punishment. In the contrast between Arendt's example-oriented conception of punishment...