CIAO DATE: 03/02

Critical Review

Summer–Fall 1999 (Vol.13 Nos.3–4)

Foucault on the Prison: Torturing History to Punish Capitalism

By Karl von Schriltz

Abstract

Michel Foucault has been an academic cause célèbre for some time, spawning untold thesis papers and dissertations illuminating oppression's invisible fingerprints on history, literature, gender, and government. Yet for all his centrality in American higher education, Foucault's books are not studied so much for their substantive content as for their underlying insights into the forces shaping society. This paper confronts this paradox through a critique of the apotheosis of Foucaultian analysis, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Discipline and Punish can be understood as a masterful harnessing of leftist assumptions about capitalism to reconfigure history. The extent to which Foucault distorts history to support his thesis, however, seriously undermines the practical relevance of his brand of social science.